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1844 - 1916 • American • Painter/Sculptor • Realist
"I was born in Philadelphia July 15th, 1844. I had many instructors, the principal ones Gerome, Dumont (Sculptor), Bonnat. I taught in the Academy from the opening of the schools until I was turned out, a period much longer than I should have permitted myself to remain there. My honors are misunderstanding, persecution, & neglect, enhanced because unsought." - Thomas Eakins
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Eakins spent his life there, except for approximately four years of study in Europe that began in 1866. In Paris he studied under the artists he lists above, and when he traveled to Spain he was strongly affected by VELAZQUEZ and RIBERA, whose work he called "Big Painting." There are two strains that characterized his work when Eakins returned home. One is a pervasive gloom: His mother was mentally ill and confined to the house for two years before she died. Eakins helped care for her, and the family's agony is evident in paintings he made at the time of his sisters (e.g., Home Scene, c. 1871). The other characteristic of that era's work was a seemingly compulsive study of detail, especially seen in several pictures of rowers (e.g., Max Schmitt in a Single Scull/The Champion Single Sculls, 1871). Eakins measured, plotted grids, took photographs, and even sculpted figures that he then placed on the grids. In one picture he graphed ripples in the water, giving each ripple three surfaces, and figured out how the light would be reflected by each surface. He was meticulous in accuracy of PERSPECTIVE light, and color. Truthfulness to nature was his creed. It also led to the "misunderstanding, persecution, & neglect" that he wore like a stigma. Insisting that artists need a thorough understanding of the human body, he studied anatomy, performed dissections at a medical school, and wanted his students to dissect also. He insisted that both male and female students paint nude models. His gesture of removing a model's loincloth to show a muscle, and numerous other indiscretions, led to his dismissal, in 1886, from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he had served as director. Ten years earlier he had suffered a blow when the painting that is now considered his masterpiece, The Gross Clinic (1875), was rejected for the Centennial Art Exhibition because of its harsh truth; the surgical procedure, and especially the bloody hand of the surgeon-heroicized as a Christ-like figure-was too much for the sensibility of the judges. The painting was hung in the medical exhibition instead. During his later years Eakins painted a series of portraits of people he knew-usually not commissioned-and they reveal a contemplative, disconsolate sadness.
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