The son of a prominent Philadelphia calligrapher, Eakins was an excellent student at a local high school renowned for its drawing classes. In 1864 he paid the standard $24 fee to avoid being drafted into the Union Army during the Civil War and, two years later, sailed for France to study with the big-time academic painters. There his instructors taught him to painstakingly research costumes, obtain exactly the right props and do study after study before committing to a large canvas–all of which became part of his obsessively workmanlike method when he returned, for life, to Philadelphia in 1870.
Rowing was a hugely popular professional sport in late-19th-century America, and nowhere was the competition fiercer than on the Schuylkill River that runs through the City of Brotherly Love. It’s only natural that Eakins’s most famous series of pictures are of scullers. In “The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake Boat” (1873), Eakins displays all his considerable talents. The figures are incisively drawn and daringly modeled with a flinty, dramatic light. The tight, horizontal composition serves as a perfect template for two inventive ways of rendering water. And the whole picture is knitted together with Eakins’s characteristically subtle, restrained color. (Check out the way he cleverly plots the deep space with red and blue flags.)
Eakins was also adept at the grand commemorative canvas. “The Gross Clinic” (1875)–with its spotlighted surgeon and poised, bloody scalpel–is probably the closest thing we’ll ever have to an American Rembrandt. The same year Eakins painted Dr. Gross he began using a camera; by the 1880s he was laboriously taking dozens of photographs to fine-tune the gestures and solidify the design in his pictures. Although Eakins made no bones about using photography with his students, he tried to keep it secret from potential clients. As PMA Eakins researcher Douglass Paschall says, the painter “was reticent to leave the evidence of too close a connection, lest his audience feel he was not sufficiently creative.”
His teaching career was rudely interrupted when Eakins was fired from the academy. His offense? Removing the loincloth from a male model in a class with female students. The sacking was the result, in part, of a spiteful brother-in-law and a small circle of colleagues who didn’t like Eakins, or his common sense. As Eakins said in his own defense, “Should men make only the statues of men to be looked at by men, while the statues of women should be made by women to be looked at by women only?”
Five years later the academy wanted Eakins back, but rehiring him as a teacher would have been too humiliating, so they began letting him into their shows again. And academy-connected patrons funneled him portrait commissions. By this time, Eakins’s fascination with photography as a painter’s tool had faded and he proved himself fully capable of doing without it. You have only to look at his 1902 “Self-Portrait” to see the veracity with which he could paint from life. But you can also see, in the gaze of its gently grizzled author, a quiet affirmation of that typically American attitude: whatever it takes.
