Modern Age
Thomas Eakins (1844–1916)
American Realism painter.
Thomas Eakins was the most uncompromising American realist of the late nineteenth century, a painter of surgeons, rowers, and naked swimmers who treated the body as a problem in knowledge. Born in Philadelphia in 1844, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy and then in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme, returning in 1870 convinced that American subjects and anatomical truth mattered more than Salon polish.
'Max Schmitt in a Single Scull' (1871) announced his theme: modern sport painted with the patience of a scientist. 'The Gross Clinic' (1875), a bloody teaching operation under gaslight, shocked the Centennial jury and remained controversial for decades. 'Swimming' (1884–85), his students and himself at a swimming hole, was painted with the aid of photographs and remains one of the frankest American nudes of the century. Dismissed in 1886 from the Pennsylvania Academy over his use of the nude in mixed classes, he taught and painted on, increasingly isolated.
He died in Philadelphia in 1916. Lloyd Goodrich's two-volume monograph is still the foundational modern account of his method, his teaching, and the scandals that shaped his reputation.
The words the record keeps using: uncompromising, anatomical, tonal, clinical, frank, intellectual.
At a glance
- Lived 1844–1916
- Origin American
- Worked in Paris, Philadelphia
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Realism
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Chiaroscuro, Linear perspective, En plein air painting
Works in the archive
- Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, 1871 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
The champion sculler Max Schmitt rests on the Schuylkill, oars trailed, looking toward us; Eakins paints himself in a second scull farther upriver. An early manifesto of his realism: modern sport, measured space, and… - The Gross Clinic, 1875 (Philadelphia Museum of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (jointly owned))
Dr. Samuel D. Gross lectures over an open thigh in a Jefferson Medical College amphitheater, his bloody hand holding a scalpel, assistants restraining the patient, a recoiling woman at left. Rejected from the… - Swimming (The Swimming Hole), 1884 (Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth)
Eakins's students — and the painter himself, swimming at lower right — bathe at a creek hole, bodies arranged along a stone pier in a pyramid of nudes. Painted with the aid of photographs, it is among the frankest…
What was said
Goodrich presents Eakins's aim as knowledge of the body and of modern professional action — surgery, rowing, teaching — painted without idealization, claiming for Philadelphia the seriousness of history painting.
Eakins taught from the live nude and used photographs in preparing Swimming; the frankness of that practice, and his insistence on it in mixed classes, led to his 1886 dismissal from the Pennsylvania Academy.
The Gross Clinic was refused a place among the Centennial's fine arts and hung with the medical exhibits; its blood and unidealized surgery were treated as an offense to taste, a reception Goodrich and later writers take as the founding scandal of Eakins's public career.
Lineage
Passed on to Robert Henri
What would Thomas make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Thomas Eakins", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Thomas · Keep a life moment the way Thomas would · Pictures made after Thomas