Just looking at the paintings, you wonder what all the fuss has been about. They seem the epitome of late 19th century American academic art. Boys skinny-dipping at a swimming hole. Sparkling midday scenes of rowers in racing sculls. No-nonsense portraits of flinty middle-age women and meditative men in three-piece suits.
“Max Schmitt in a Single Scull” by Thomas Eakins.
And yet, Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) has managed, one way or another, to stir up controversy for more than a century. His painting “The Gross Clinic,” which depicts Philadelphia’s leading surgeon, Dr. Samuel Gross, operating in an amphitheater, caused a furor when it was first exhibited because Eakins dared to depict the surgeon with blood on his hands.
Later, he was fired from his teaching job for removing the loincloth of a male model in the presence of female students.
And now, even in death, recent revelations that he used photographs to make some of his paintings has scholars debating Eakins once again. The issue has come to the fore with the large retrospective of his work that opens at the Metropolitan Museum on Tuesday.
The degree to which 19th century artists made use of photographs — and the larger question of whether artists in previous centuries used lenses, mirrors, and devices such as the camera obscura — has become an inflammatory subject in art scholarship. The problem has been proving it.
Eakins, hailed by an 1882 critic as “the greatest draftsman in America,” is the first important artist to have been “caught” in this way. Scholars now say that, in certain works, he projected a photograph onto a canvas and traced it. The evidence came to light in a cache of Eakins materials that surfaced in 1985 and is being publicly acknowledged for the first time in this show, which opened last fall in Philadelphia.
In defense of Eakins, scholars have argued that 1) what he did surreptitiously is now an accepted practice among photorealists and others; 2) Eakins was by no means covering up a deficiency in drawing; and 3) even if he did use it as a shortcut, he did it only from about 1870 to 1886.
In fact, the use of photographs fits the exhibit’s image of a zealously scientific artist who seemed to believe that art was an accumulation of descriptive fact. The son of a Philadelphia writing master and teacher of calligraphy, Eakins had a passion for exactitude in art. He loved working out perspective problems and attending lectures and demonstrations at a medical college to learn more about anatomy.
“The Gross Clinic” was inspired by Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp.” Eakins’ painting has the additional drama of depicting surgery on a living patient. The noble surgeon, his luminous head at the apex of a compositional triangle, was probably the most heroic of Eakins’ portraits of people engaged in their work.
The fascination with photography comes across in his paintings of rowers on Philadelphia’s Schuylkill river, such as “The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull),” and in other outdoor scenes of fishermen, nude bathers, and baseball players.
Whether or not he built these paintings on a photographic foundation, they all have a certain “optical look” — harshness of contrast, for example — characteristic of photographs.
J.A.D. Ingres summed up the dilemma the camera posed for 19th century artists when he said, “What a wonderful thing photography is — but one dares not say that aloud.” One group —the French impressionists and post-impressionists —decided that painting had to construct a new reality to retain its power, and turned away from photography.
The academic realists tried to meld the two. Eakins, ever the scientist, was fascinated, for example, with Edward Muybridge’s sequential photographs of people and animals in motion. He used such studies to paint a picture of four horses pulling a carriage. Although he probably succeeded in accurately depicting the horses’ gaits, the overly labored forest of legs looks more clumsy than naturalistic.
But whatever the fascination with photography, no artist would admit to using projection and tracing, Eakins included. His own transgressions — if that’s what they are — are confined to a single gallery in a large show of about 150 works. The 1881 painting “Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River” is shown to bear an uncanny resemblance to an Eakins photograph, “Shad Fishermen Setting the Net at Gloucester, New Jersey.” In other paintings, such as “Mending the Net,” also from 1881, the composition was built up from a half-dozen or more separate photographs.
Using infrared reflectography, scholars have detected tracing lines beneath layers of pigment and have been able to match them to the photographic prints and glass plates owned by Eakins.
For whatever reason, Eakins seems to have stopped the practice around 1886, the same year he turned away from outdoor scenes and began to focus on portraiture. Perhaps he had tired of the optical look or had learned, as in the case of the horse’s legs, that photographic reality didn’t always work as art. But the turn toward portraiture made sense, in that Eakins had always seemed most comfortable in that genre. Even his painting of his rowing friend, Max Schmitt, was a portrait, even though the head is no bigger than a penny.
In portraiture, Eakins eliminated a lot of problems that had previously vexed him. Whereas before he had had trouble resolving the relationship between figure and landscape— the figures often popped out —now, he had only to put a single figure against a dark, almost monochromatic background. He generally made the portraits life-size, so there were no problems of scale and size relationships to deal with. Photographs of his portrait subjects were sometimes used for reference, but the temptation that existed with multifigure outdoor scenes — capturing 15 figures with a single click of the camera — didn’t exist.
He continued to indulge his obsessive desire for accuracy, however. He compelled his subjects to return again and again for sittings. In “The Concert Singer,” Eakins required family friend Weda Cook to sit 80 times, each time singing the same melody so that he could study the action of her vocal chords. He even went so far as to carve the actual notes in the frame of the picture.
When he painted the controversial anthropologist and ethnographer Frank Hamilton Cushing, who lived among the Zuni Indians for four years, Eakins replicated a Zuni altar in the studio, built a fire on a brick base to create a smoky atmosphere, and painted the eccentric Cushing in his odd costume of buckskin, silver, turquoise ornaments, and head sash.
Eakins became the rarest of portrait painters — one who didn’t flatter. He rarely worked for commissions. Instead, he invited interesting people to sit for him, painted them the way he wanted to, and, often as not, ended up keeping the painting.
So, in the end, Eakins’ fanatical insistence on adherence to reality —which had been his earlier undoing—paid off for him. In looking for what was really there, he found character.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
2002
