American Realism. Gerry Souter

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      Eakins retuned to Philadelphia and opened a studio on Mount Vernon Street. The location was only a short distance from the three-storey brick home his father had built at 1729 Mount Vernon Street, a tall narrow, deep building that housed a warren of rooms and curiously-placed stairways that became symbolic of the lives that were lived out beneath its roof. Allowing for brief sojourns, the structure became his anchor, refuge and claustrophobic dominion for the rest of his life. The house had a constantly shifting population including friends, cousins, nieces and nephews, wives and husbands, servants and babies. The world was kept out behind closed shutters summer and winter. Heat came from fireplaces and there was no plumbing, so water for all uses had to come from a hand pump in the back yard. Walls were painted in dark chocolate shades and decoration followed the usual chaotic Victorian pattern of overstuffed pieces, drapes and brasses needing a good polish. The air was musty, warm and rank with the smells of bodies, bedclothes, cooking, gas from lighting fixtures, wood ash and the lingering piquant scent from under-bed porcelain ‘thunder-jugs’ used in the night rather than make a trip over cold floors to the privy. Add to this a small zoo of animals: Bobby the monkey, dogs and at least one cat, all scampering and thrashing up and down stairs, in and out of rooms with their human internee counterparts.[13]

      Eakins began his assault on fame right away with his painting Max Schmitt on a Single Scull – a man bare to the waist sitting at the oars in long narrow racing scull boat on a bend of the Schuylkill River. He looks back at the viewer as though a photographer had just hollered across, “Smile!” He is down river from a Roman-style stone-arched lift-bridge. Sports intrigued the artist and he went on to explore rowing with a series of paintings on the subject. True to his academic roots, Eakins produced a number of perspective plans, studies and sketches prior to execution of the oil. The final picture had the feeling of not being seen as a piece, but assembled from many different observations. This practice became an immutable standard. He went beyond the empty detail-saturated decorations of the academic realists to the application of their skills plus his own knowledge derived from meticulous observation. In exercising this conglomeration of observations and details, he did what good writers attempt – he edited out what was unimportant. As Ernest Hemingway once said of his craft, “What you leave out is as important as what goes on the page.”

      A watercolour titled The Sculler became his first sale in 1874 and critics who saw his assembled rowers were unanimous in their praise. His friend and fellow painter Earl Shinn introduced Eakins to the public in the magazine Nation in 1874 when he wrote: “Some remarkably original and studious boating scenes were shown by Thomas Eakins, a new exhibitor, of whom we learn that he is a realist, an anatomist and mathematician; that his perspectives, even of waves and ripples, are protracted according to strict science…”

      That same year also heralded his engagement to Katherin Crowell, the sister of Will Crowell, who was married to Eakins’ sister, Frances. The ‘engagement’ lasted from 1874 to 1879 and Eakins felt no obligation to consummate the relationship. It is suggested that the young woman was pressed upon him by his father, the family patriarch. In any case, she died of meningitis in 1879 leaving Eakins free to select and marry an up-and-coming artist, Susan McDowell, in 1884.[14] She eventually gave up her art career to clean house for Eakins and the live-in menagerie. His idea of marriage, it turned out, was not a love match, but the need for a healthy woman to breed and bear his children.

      The year following his engagement to Katherin Crowell, he painted the work that is today considered the pinnacle of his career, The Gross Clinic. It is a large oil showing the removal of a dead piece of bone from an anaesthetised man by a number of doctors in dark suits with blood on their white shirt cuffs in the operating theatre presided over by Doctor Samuel Gross. In the background, the wife of the man under the knife cowers in horror with her face away from the action and her hands in claw-like reaction. By today’s standards it is a mild enough scene, but in Victorian Philadelphia, those red gobbets of blood on the surgeon’s fingers and the scalpel blade caused revulsion. Dr. Gross, a dignified gentleman, is spotlighted with a deeply shaded face, his glowing dome of a forehead surrounded by a frizz of unruly grey hair, his mouth an unfeeling slit dragged down at the corners. Today, the painting is riveting and dynamic as well as heaped with Freudian pronouncements concerning Eakins and his relationship with his domineering father. In 1875, nobody wanted the thing, but it finally sold for $200. Society retreated from the artist as a wave draws back into the sea.

      Following the cool reception of The Gross Clinic, Eakins entered the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts as a teacher. He rose to the position of salaried professor in 1878 and was named a director in 1882. To his students he brought refreshing if controversial teaching methods. Harking back to his own rigorous academic studies, he banned sketching from dusty antique casts – the standard of the time – and following a brief introduction to charcoal sketching, his students plunged directly into painting in colour. At this time, he introduced photography as an artist’s aid.

      Photography had arrived from M. Daguerre in France about the same time Eakins was born. By the 1880s, it had been refined from a slow chemical-optical nightmare into a common hobby and documentation tool. Thanks to Richard Leach Maddox, photographs were made on a dry glass plate coated with silver bromide suspended in gelatin – negatives were no longer made on freshly coated wet plates that had to be developed immediately after exposure. This development allowed for portable full (20.3 × 25.4 centimetres), half (12.7 × 17.8 centimetres) and quarter (10.2 × 12.7 centimetres) plate cameras to be used by anyone. Film was exposed in plate holders by the lens and shutter to be developed later in a darkroom lit by a dim ruby-red lamp. Eakins obtained his first camera and took his first photograph in 1880. He also discovered the photographic motion studies of Edward Muybridge. Using multiple cameras firing in sequence, the flying legs of a galloping horse or the muscular arc of a pole-vaulting man were studied to see how the anatomy functioned. Eakins was enthralled and began using photos in his work and his classes.

      Photographs allowed Eakins to continue his practice of assembling a painting from many different sketches and studies, but with greater precision due to the photo’s detail. From his collection of more than 800 photos, many were used to add elements to paintings by tracing the captured action and transferring the pencil tracing on see-through paper with a rubbing on the paper’s opposite side. His photographing of nude figures in his classroom was usually done in the presence of a chaperone if young women were involved. He photographed his wife and his nieces who СКАЧАТЬ