Thomas Eakins
1844 - 1916
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was a painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. Misunderstood and ignored in his lifetime, his posthumous reputation places him as "the strongest, most profound realist in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century American art". He was an innovating teacher, and an uncompromising realist. He was also the most neglected major painter of his era in the United States.
Eakins was born and lived most of his life in Philadelphia. He was the first child of Caroline Cowperthwait Eakins, and Benjamin Eakins, a writing master and calligraphy teacher of Scots-Irish ancestry.
After graduating from Central High School, he studied drawing and anatomy at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and attended courses in anatomy and dissection at Jefferson Medical College. His scientific interest in the human body led him to consider becoming a surgeon. Eakins then studied art in Europe from 1866 to 1870, notably in Paris with Jean-Léon Gérôme. While studying at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he had taken interest in the new Impressionist movement. He wasn't impressed by what he perceived as the classical pretensions of the French Academy.
For the length of his professional career, Eakins worked exactingly from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia. He painted several hundred portraits. Eakins produced a number of large paintings which brought the portrait out of the drawing room and into the offices, streets, parks, rivers, arenas, and surgical amphitheaters of his city. These active outdoor venues allowed him to paint the subject which most inspired him.
An important part of Eakins' life was his work as a teacher. As an instructor he was a highly influential presence in American art. Eakins also took a keen interest in the new technologies of motion photography, a field in which he is now seen as an innovator. Late in life Eakins did experience some recognition. In 1902 he was made a National Academician.
In the year after his death Eakins was honored with a memorial retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 1917-18 the Pennsylvania Academy followed suit.
Eakins's attitude toward realism in painting, and his desire to explore the heart of American life proved influential. He taught hundreds of students, among them his future wife Susan Macdowell, African-American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Thomas Anshutz, who taught, in turn, Robert Henri, George Luks, John Sloan, and Everett Shinn, future members of the Ashcan School, and artistic heirs to Eakins' philosophy. Today he is regarded as one of the most important American artists of any period.
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