John Biglin in a Single Scull

~Not all of the figure painters drawn to the water-color exhibition around 1874 were equally involved in illustration, or equally committed to the narrative-based, English tradition seen in the work of Edwin Austin Abbey and John La Farge, introduced in the previous chapter. Winslow Homer, raised as an illustrator, would quit the business in 1874; Thomas Eakins, an...

With the end of the Civil War in 1865, Americans struggled to find stability after nearly five years of violence and social discord. For Winslow Homer, an artist whose career had been established during the war, the peacetime transition was particularly challenging. In A Game of Croquet, Homer discovered a worthy subject from the world of popular culture, a source previously untapped by American artists...

“I hope you have been boating,” Eakins wrote to his sister Caroline from Paris, “Our Schuylkill is so beautiful at this season.” Thomas Eakins to Caroline Eakins, October 8,1866. PAFA. Eakins loved rowing. He had learned to row long before he went to Europe and was an enthusiastic and knowledgeable oarsman...

On Independence Day, 1870, Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (1844–1916) returned to his native Philadelphia after three and a half years of rigorous artistic training in Europe (fig. 1). The date was auspicious: bristling with ambition, fearless and passionate, the twenty-six-year-old was eager to begin life as a professional artist in his own land.