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Thomas Eakins
Thomas Eakins' scenes of rowing, sailing, and boxing as well as his deeply moving portraits are renowned for their vibrant realism and dramatic intensity. This beautiful and insightful book, published in conjunction with a major exhibition on the life and career of Eakins - the first in twenty years - presents a fresh perspective on the artist and his remarkable accomplishments.
Lavishly illustrated with more than 250 of Eakins's most significant paintings, watercolors, drawings, photographs, and sculpture, the book features essays by prominent scholars who place his art in the context of the history and culture of late nineteenth-century Philadelphia, where he lived.
Lavishly illustrated with more than 250 of Eakins's most significant paintings, watercolors, drawings, photographs, and sculpture, the book features essays by prominent scholars who place his art in the context of the history and culture of late nineteenth-century Philadelphia, where he lived.
- GenresArt
488 pages, Hardcover
First published September 10, 2001
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May 2, 2019
Thomas Eakins was one of the most important American artists of the late nineteenth century as much for the influence he exterted on the generation of artists that followed him, particularly those belonging to the Ashcan School, as for the quality of his own work. Almost singlehandedly he turned the predominant style of American painting from the romantic views of the Hudson River School to that of an uncompromising realism. Early on, his 1875 oil on canvast The Gross Clinic broke new ground in depicting in graphic detail an actual surgery conducted in a hospital's operating theater. So disturbing was the content that the painting was "hidden" at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition by placing it, not with other artworks, but on the premises of the U.S. Army Post Hospital located elsewhere on the Exhibition grounds. Eakins was also the first to introduce sporting events as an acceptable theme for serious painting, not only in his famous rowing and sailing paintings but also in his depictions of baseball games and boxing prizefights. His work with the latter antedated George Bellows's well known fight paintings by decades.
Several years ago, I reviewed here an art book entitled Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art by William Innes Homer that not only contained excellent analyses of the painter's works but also included a satisfying biography of the man himself. More recently I read another large format art book devoted to the same subject, this one entitled entitled simply Thomas Eakins, that was published as a catalog to accompany an exhibit held in 2001 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It's a very handsome volume with meticulous reproductions of many of the artist's most important paintings as well as a selection of his photographs and preparatory drawings. Nevertheless, the book falls short in many important respects.
Edited by Darrel Sewell, the book is divided into sections according to the decades in which the artist was active, i.e., the 1870's through the 1900's. Each section contains two or three essays of varying quality followed by an analysis by Marc Simpson of the most noteworthy works created in that decade as well as biographical information pertaining to that same period. Unfortunately, this arrangement results in a haphazard presentation of material that can be extremely frustrating to the reader.
The best essays are those that deal with purely technical matters. "Photographs and the Making of Paintings" by Mark Tucker and Nica Gutman deals, as the title would suggest, with the uses to which Eakins put his photography in the creation of his paintings. This was a subject on which the artist himself was highly reticent. After his death his widow, Susan Macdowell Eakins, continued to insist that photography had played only a peripheral role in her late husband's working methods. It was only with the 1985 discovery of the photographs in the Charles Bregler Collection that the true extent to which Eakins made use of photography finally came to light. It's now known that Eakins projected his glass negatives onto canvas prior to painting the identical subject. Even so, the artist did not paint directly on the projected image but rather used it to indicate the correct placement of pictorial elements. Tucker and Gutman illustrate their fascinating findings with numerous examples from Eakins's oeuvre.
"The Pursuit of 'True Tones', again by Tucker and Gutman, is another extremely useful essay that attempts to show the damage done to many of Eakins's paintings by overzealous cleaning and restoration efforts in the years following the artist's death. Through many examples, some shown on a microscopic level, it becomes clear that Eakins intended a far darker finish to certain paintings than can now be seen. In an attempt to brighten the paintings, restorers went too far and removed Eakins's own finishing touches meant to subdue the overall tone. In some cases, important detail was lost.
Other essasy are not so successful as those mentioned above. One of the oddest is "Images of Fairmount Park in Philadelphia" by Elizabeth Milroy. While Eakins did use portions of the park as background scenery in a handful of his paintings, this hardly justifies a full length history of the planning and development of the park through the years. The essay may be of use to those readers planning a visit to Philadelphia, but to others it must seem largely irrelevant in the context of Eakins's career.
Perhaps the book's greatest deficiency is the failure to include a coherent biography of the artist. As mentioned above, Marc Simpson does provide some details of Eakins's life, but these are random and sometimes deliberately evasive. Nowhere, for example, does Simpson mention anything of the scandal surrounding the suicide of Eakins's 23 year old niece Ella Crowell in 1897, a tragedy for which the woman's family blamed Eakins and subsequently banned him from their home. Simpson does mention the artist's interaction with such figures as the photographer Eadweard Muybridge and the poet Walt Whitman but in insufficient detail to be truly satisfying. For fuller descriptions of these matters, the reader would do far better with William Innes Homer's book mentioned above.
Several years ago, I reviewed here an art book entitled Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art by William Innes Homer that not only contained excellent analyses of the painter's works but also included a satisfying biography of the man himself. More recently I read another large format art book devoted to the same subject, this one entitled entitled simply Thomas Eakins, that was published as a catalog to accompany an exhibit held in 2001 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It's a very handsome volume with meticulous reproductions of many of the artist's most important paintings as well as a selection of his photographs and preparatory drawings. Nevertheless, the book falls short in many important respects.
Edited by Darrel Sewell, the book is divided into sections according to the decades in which the artist was active, i.e., the 1870's through the 1900's. Each section contains two or three essays of varying quality followed by an analysis by Marc Simpson of the most noteworthy works created in that decade as well as biographical information pertaining to that same period. Unfortunately, this arrangement results in a haphazard presentation of material that can be extremely frustrating to the reader.
The best essays are those that deal with purely technical matters. "Photographs and the Making of Paintings" by Mark Tucker and Nica Gutman deals, as the title would suggest, with the uses to which Eakins put his photography in the creation of his paintings. This was a subject on which the artist himself was highly reticent. After his death his widow, Susan Macdowell Eakins, continued to insist that photography had played only a peripheral role in her late husband's working methods. It was only with the 1985 discovery of the photographs in the Charles Bregler Collection that the true extent to which Eakins made use of photography finally came to light. It's now known that Eakins projected his glass negatives onto canvas prior to painting the identical subject. Even so, the artist did not paint directly on the projected image but rather used it to indicate the correct placement of pictorial elements. Tucker and Gutman illustrate their fascinating findings with numerous examples from Eakins's oeuvre.
"The Pursuit of 'True Tones', again by Tucker and Gutman, is another extremely useful essay that attempts to show the damage done to many of Eakins's paintings by overzealous cleaning and restoration efforts in the years following the artist's death. Through many examples, some shown on a microscopic level, it becomes clear that Eakins intended a far darker finish to certain paintings than can now be seen. In an attempt to brighten the paintings, restorers went too far and removed Eakins's own finishing touches meant to subdue the overall tone. In some cases, important detail was lost.
Other essasy are not so successful as those mentioned above. One of the oddest is "Images of Fairmount Park in Philadelphia" by Elizabeth Milroy. While Eakins did use portions of the park as background scenery in a handful of his paintings, this hardly justifies a full length history of the planning and development of the park through the years. The essay may be of use to those readers planning a visit to Philadelphia, but to others it must seem largely irrelevant in the context of Eakins's career.
Perhaps the book's greatest deficiency is the failure to include a coherent biography of the artist. As mentioned above, Marc Simpson does provide some details of Eakins's life, but these are random and sometimes deliberately evasive. Nowhere, for example, does Simpson mention anything of the scandal surrounding the suicide of Eakins's 23 year old niece Ella Crowell in 1897, a tragedy for which the woman's family blamed Eakins and subsequently banned him from their home. Simpson does mention the artist's interaction with such figures as the photographer Eadweard Muybridge and the poet Walt Whitman but in insufficient detail to be truly satisfying. For fuller descriptions of these matters, the reader would do far better with William Innes Homer's book mentioned above.
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