Thomas Eakins

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916)

Having arrived in Paris in fall 1866, Thomas Eakins was among the first aspiring young American artists who traveled to France to study art in the post-Civil War period. He returned to Philadelphia in 1870 and the following year sent the remarkable “Champion Single Sculls” (1871; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) to an exhibition at Philadelphia's Union League. In 1875 two of his oils were shown at the Paris Salon, and in 1876 he sent five pictures to the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, including “William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill” (1876-77; Philadelphia Museum of Art) and the notorious “Gross Clinic” (1875; Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia). Eakins was also a talented photographer and who often used photographs as preparative studies for his paintings and sculptures; during the mid-1880s he participated in Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering Animal Locomotion project at the University of Pennsylvania. Eakins was an innovative teacher as well. As director of schools at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1879 to 1886, he implemented a progressive curriculum combining life drawing and painting with scientific subjects, such as mathmatical perspective and gross anatomy. Although Eakins's works were greatly admired by fellow artists during his lifetime--ten of his canvases were showcased at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago--critics and would-be patrons often were discomfited by his brooding, incisive naturalism and the sense of detachment conveyed in his dark tonalities and calculated drawing style. Eakins's independent spirit and disdain for convention marked his professional career. It was not until after his death in 1916 that he was recognized as one of this country's greatest artists.

“Sewing (Old Woman Sewing, Old Lady Sewing)”; verso: “(Studio Interior)”, ca. 1879

Oil on panel, 14 1/2 x 10 3/8 in. (36.8 x 26.4 cm)

Harriet Russell Stanley Fund (1942.16)

“Sewing” depicts an elderly woman seated in three-quarter profile in a dark shallow space. Light hits her head, upper body, and hands as she stitches a piece of white fabric, conveying what one contemporary writer called an "atmosphere of quiet concentration and simplicity." (1) This mood is characteristic of the interior scenes Eakins produced during the 1870s, many of which, such as “Home Scene” (ca. 1870-71; Brooklyn Museum of Art), feature female relatives or close family friends. These pictures represent a contemplative feminine counterpart to Eakins's active masculine rowing and hunting pictures of the same period.

In his catalogue of Eakins's works, Lloyd Goodrich lists the New Britain panel as a sketch for a watercolor, now lost, entitled “A Quiet Moment”. He identifies the sitter in both as a Mrs. King, who also posed for the figure of the seated chaperone in the foreground of “William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River” and for the figures in “Knitting and Spinning”, reliefs Eakins designed for the James P. Scott residence in the early 1880s.(2) The New Britain panel also closely resembles the watercolor “Seventy Years Ago” (1877; Art Museum, Princeton University). (3) In several of these compositions, Eakins dressed his models in historical costumes, perhaps intending, as the latter title indicates and as in the “William Rush”, to evoke an earlier time in American history, probably in response to the upsurge of nostalgic interest in the colonial period spurred by the Centennial Exhibition of 1876.(4)

EM

Bibliography:

Lloyd Goodrich, “Thomas Eakins: His Life and Work” (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1933); Lloyd Goodrich, “Thomas Eakins”, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1982); Elizabeth Johns, “Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983); John Wilmerding, ed., “Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) and the Heart of American Life”, exhib. cat. (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1993); Susan Danly, Cheryl Leibold, et al., “Eakins and the Photograph: Works by Thomas Eakins and His Circle in the Collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts” (Washington, D.C., and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); Kathleen A. Foster, et al., “Thomas Eakins Rediscovered”: “Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts” (New Haven: Yale University Press; Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1997).

Notes:

1. Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer, "Water-Color Exhibition at Philadelphia" in The American Architect and Building News 11 (April 22, 1882): 184.

2. Goodrich, Thomas Eakins, 1933, cat. nos. 131, 132, 106, 109, pp. 170-72.

3. Ibid., cat no. 114, p. 171.

4. Homer, Thomas Eakins, 1992, pp. 98-99.