The Exhumation of the Mastodon

~GEOLOGY REIGNED through much of the nineteenth century as America’s most “fashionable” science. Between 1820 and 1870, men and women across the country avidly pursued an interest in the field. They pushed their way into crowded lecture halls to hear talks by prominent geologists; they bought geological textbooks, and they scoured the...

Sometime between 1883 and 1885, a colleague photographed Thomas Eakins unclothed and holding aloft a naked female student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (fig. 1). In recent decades, this image has been tendered as the most tangible proof of the artist’s indiscretions. Although the scene undoubtedly is worthy of critique, it also is worth noting that Eakins hardly was the first indiscreet Philadelphian. More than a century before that shutter snapped, Charles Willson Peale sketched …