American Realism. Gerry Souter

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      Thomas Eakins was a brilliant artist, but a failed human being. He brought the realism skills of the European salon painter to the American scene, but left behind the scattered detritus of a rather cruel and sordid lifestyle. He had a gift for technique and capturing emotion on canvas, but some of the emotions he captured were the result of his reclusive and demanding personality. On the one hand, his contemporary cronies and colleagues thought him a fine fellow, if a bit overbearing and driven. The personal side of his relationships with women and relatives and many of the people he painted was littered with sorrow, suicides and madness. Despite the dualism of his nature, he emerges as one of the most influential and important American Realist artists of his era.

      Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (pronounced “Ache-ins”) was born on 25 July 1844 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which eventually became his sole base of operations. He was a painter, photographer and sculptor. His parents were his Dutch-English mother, Caroline Cowperthwait and Benjamin Eakins of Scots-Irish ancestry. His father was the son of a weaver and took up calligraphy and the art of fine copperplate writing. He moved from Valley Forge to Philadelphia to pursue that trade. Thomas was their first child and by the age of twelve he admired the exactitude and precision required to produce calligraphic script and printing. This early exposure to careful planning and diagramming images stayed with him and became an important part of his creative method.

      His love of the physical sports he later painted, rowing, ice skating, swimming, wrestling, sailing, and gymnastics also began in his youth. His academic life started in Philadelphia’s Central High School, the finest school in the area for applied sciences and both practical and fine art. Eakins maintained his consistency by settling into mechanical drawing. In his late teens, he shifted to the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts to study drawing and anatomy and then expanded his anatomical studies at the Jefferson Medical College from 1864–65. Though he started out following his father into calligraphy and becoming a ‘writing master’, his studies in anatomy had motivated him towards medicine and surgery. The quality of his drawing, however, earned him a trip to Paris to join the classes of the classic salon academician and ‘Orientalist’ painter, Jean-Léon Gérôme.

      A superb technician, Gérôme was one of three painters allowed by the Emperor Napoleon to open a Paris atelier with sixteen selected students under the reorganised École de Paris in 1864. At that time, in order to exhibit at the salons where patrons made their purchases, membership of either the École or Salon de Paris was mandatory. Gérôme was an ‘historical genre’ painter given to the romance of historical anecdotal works and costumed models that were more mannequins for the costumes and props than character studies. The fold of a silk dressing gown on a bare-breasted young lady, or the realistic curl of smoke from an exotic hookah pipe, were as prized for commercial success as the emotional content of the picture’s theme. The training in these effects as well as the chemical properties of the paints and endless drawing from plaster casts was rigorous.

      Eakins eventually moved on to the atelier of Léon Bonnat, whose pupils also included Gustave Caillebotte, Georges Braque, Aloysius O’Kelly, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Bonnat had a love for the anatomical precision of da Vinci and Ingres, which resulted in works of exceptional craft and technique, but lacking in imagination. Eakins made the most of his own anatomical studies in Bonnat’s classes. His Paris schooling also included classes at L’École des Beaux-Arts, which having had its ties to the French government cut in 1863 offered painting, sculpture and architecture to a broad, more diverse cross-section of artists. Some of those who had classes there included Géricault, Degas, Delacroix, Fragonard, Ingres, Monet, Moreau, Renoir, Seurat and Sisley.

      Thomas Eakins, Starting Out After Rail, 1874.

      Oil on canvas, 61.6 × 50.5 cm.

      Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, The Hayden Collection – Charles Henry Hayden Fund.

      Thomas Eakins, John Biglin in a Single Scull, c. 1873–1874.

      Oil on canvas, 61.9 × 40.6 cm.

      Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

      Eakins chose to ignore the radical Impressionists, but he also turned away from the ponderous French academicians such as Gérôme and Bonnat. In a letter to his father in 1868 that predicted some of his future difficulties, he wrote:

      “She [the female nude] is the most beautiful thing there is in the world except a naked man, but I never yet saw a study of one exhibited… It would be a godsend to see a fine man model painted in the studio with the bare walls, alongside of the smiling smirking goddesses of waxy complexion amidst the delicious arsenic green trees and gentle wax flowers & purling streams running melodious up and down the hills, especially up. I hate affectation.”[10]

      Truth and beauty – in the form of the nude – became almost inseparable to him as he learned to render flesh and anatomy with great precision. This proclivity for wedding the two concepts raised its head a number of times in socially unacceptable (in nineteenth-century terms) events during his career.

      From Paris, he travelled to Germany, Switzerland and Italy, ending up in Spain to study the realism of Velázquez and Jusepe de Ribera in the Prado. While there he tried his hand at a large canvas, A Street Scene in Seville. The painting of three street performers displays at once Eakins’ independence of mind by depicting two of the performers playing the horn and drum sitting in the shade of a scarred stucco wall while the young girl dancer stands forward in the sun on the brick street. The sun strikes her white dress and barely glances off her accompanists. His use of light and shadow gives the picture a captured immediacy of a quick photographic visualisation – another prediction of things to come.

      His tour of Europe and subsequent studies seemed to fix his artist style in amber as he tossed aside the works of the Old Masters in a letter to his sister Frances: “I went next to see the picture galleries. There must have been half a mile of them, and I walked all the way from one end to the other, and I never in my life saw such funny old pictures. I’m sure my taste has much improved, and to show, I’ll make a point never to look hereafter on American Art except with disdain.”[11]

      Having already dismissed the Impressionists Monet, Degas, Seurat and Renoir and the growing ‘modern’ movement, all that were left were the academicians: Gustave Doré, Ernest Messonier, Thomas Couture and his teachers, Gérôme and Bonnat. From them he had amassed an impressive arsenal of flashy techniques and a definite aversion to their commercial success with historic and romantic anecdotes. Style wise, he had gleaned from Velázquez a love of the Baroque.

      This seventeenth-century art form had dealt primarily with religious works, but populist paintings using ordinary people – much like the Russian icons showing plain villagers engaging in traditional religious ceremonies – appeared from the likes of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Diego Velázquez. Eakins might have seen Dinner at Emmaus СКАЧАТЬ