Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) An American Realist

For the past thirty years or so, studies devoted to American art (and now this exhibition) have constantly underlined the importance of Thomas Eakins in the history of American painting.
Born in Philadelphia, Eakins started his artistic training in the early 1860s. At that time, American painting was dominated by landscape, in particular the Hudson School, considered to be the first typically national form of artistic expression.
Eakins enrolled in 1862 in the evening drawing class of the Pennsylvania Academy where, after copying antique masters, he was admitted to the nude class to draw live models. At the same time, he studied anatomy at the Jefferson Medical College, and even considered becoming a surgeon.

Focusing on the human body, the alliance of science and representation sealed definitively the vision of the world Eakins was from then on to explore.
In order to pursue further an academic training, Eakins left for Paris in September 1866 and stayed there for four years, thus becoming one of the first American artists to come and complete his artistic initiation in the heart of "old" Europe. Admitted to Gerôme's workshop at the École des Beaux-Arts, Eakins perfected his study on life nude modelling, his deeper knowledge of anatomy, and above all his technique as a painter. He also attended the sculptor Dumont's classes and those given by Léon Bonnat in his private workshop. No doubt encouraged by Bonnat's passion for Velasquez and Ribera, Eakins ended his stay in Europe with a six-month tour in Spain, a required pilgrimage for all the proponents of realism in the 1860s.

On his return to Philadelphia in 1870, voluntarily keeping clear of hackneyed historical subjects, Eakins found his inspiration in the immediate experience of his daily life. He started with an impressive series devoted to rowing races and regattas. These variations on characters in space allowed him to reconcile his passion for sport and his study of the body in motion with his knowledge of perspective and natural light.

But his first public coup was his participation to the 1876 Centennial Art Exhibition, where the crude realism of The Gross Clinic was a scandal and provoked the work's exclusion from the official presentation.
He resumed work on the same theme thirteen years later with The Agnew Clinic, a naturalistic and completely dramatised representation of the surgical act, promoted to the place of subject and modern performance. Eakins repeated the same approach at the end of the 1890s with a stunning series devoted to boxing.

Eakins also taught at the Pennsylvania Academy, where he proved to be an ambitious reformer, replacing the study of antique sculpture by that of the live model and promoting an immediate practice of painting. He also set up classes on perspective and an important programme of anatomy and dissection. Within a few years, Eakins had successfully given shape to his vision of a modern artistic training, centred on the study of the nude, and giving a prominent part to photography. If he had already made use of photographs to design his paintings in the 1870s, he did not buy his first camera before 1880.

This purchase prompted a period of intensive research, unparalleled at the time, on the potentials of photography as a tool for artistic study. Thus several paintings like Mending the Net, The Bath or Cowboys in the Badlands were directly conceived by means of preparatory photographic studies.

Eakins also tackled the study of movement, demonstrating in 1883 to the members of the Photographic Society in Philadelphia the working of an instantaneous shutter of his design. He took to making his own experiments in this matter during the summer 1885. But his innovative teaching experiments caused a scandal when, during an anatomy class attended by women, the artist took off the loincloth of a male model. The incident led him to resign from the Academy in 1886. Unsettled, Eakins was plunged into a serious depression from which he only recovered after 1892, during a stay in Dakota that inspired a few paintings and photographs about the American West.

The last part of his career was mostly devoted to portraits. But there again, Eakins's approach differed from common practice as he reserved the right to choose his models. His predilection for the world of thought, research and creation does not come as a surprise. Doctors, scientists, ethnologists, prelates, musicians and artists make up this personal pantheon, from which The Thinker (Portrait of Louis N. Kenton), 1900, may be singled out for the scope of ambitions the artist displays in it.
Kenton embodies the modern man, in his physical and intellectual dimensions. This single work sums up the contemporary representation of the emerging American middle class distancing itself from the European tradition. For Eakins, this form of aesthetic and moral self-portrait was certainly a turning point in his work, in which America could at last identify itself.