Naked series: African-American male, poses 1–7

THOMAS EAKINS grew up with photography. He was born five years after Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s 1839 announcement of its invention, four years after Robert Cornelius opened Philadelphia’s first commercial daguerreotype studio, and a bare month after the first installment of William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature...

Thomas Eakins’ artistic methods never have been the subject of much debate. The artist created preparatory drawings, photographic studies, oil sketches, and modellos that survive in preparation for finished works, and he wrote a lengthy manuscript on perspective that carefully explains his approach to the formulation of pictorial space. The surfaces of his finished works rarely hide the marks of brushes, palette knives, carving tools, pencil, or wash. In addition to the self-evident process in …