The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull)

GLAD TO BE home after such a long apprenticeship, Eakins began his career with scenes of activities that he had missed in Paris—the outdoor pursuits of rowing, hunting and sailing with his father and close friends, and the indoor pleasures...

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.

When Charles Willson Peale painted Exhumation of the Mastodon, he intended it as a backdrop for the bones of the beast, installed in his encyclopedic museum. Both the painting and the bones were impressive and tangible evidence of the artist’s accomplishments and legacy. Eakins created several works with that same impulse, but the three that stand out most prominently in his career are The Gross Clinic, painted expressly for the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia; Swimming (1885), …