American Realism. Gerry Souter

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      Never the prude and always willing to help, when a female student, Amelia Van Buren, requested some instruction as of the movement of the pelvis, Eakins promptly dropped his trousers to show her how his pelvis moved: “I gave her the explanation as I could not have done by words only.”[18]

      This parade of naked people through his life, work and teaching culminated in his casual act of whipping away the loincloth from a male model in his class in front of attending female students. This rude demonstration, plus a litany of accumulated complaints from students and faculty, got him fired from the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. He was devastated. Some of his loyal students quit the academy as well and created the Art Students League of Philadelphia where he did some instructing, but a great depression swept over him. At home, a collection of his relatives rose up against him as well. A student, Lillian Hammitt, who claimed she was his wife, was hauled away to a mental institution in 1888. His mother had died in 1872 of a consuming mania and later, another young lady, Eakins’ repressed niece, Ella Crowell at the age of twenty-three blew her head off with a shotgun. Family members all pointed at Eakins because of his surly attitude and often eccentric habits. Because of a lack of primary resource material – Eakins wrote very few letters in his lifetime and kept no diaries – all accusations are speculation or second-hand declarations. Eakins refused to even display his growing number of unsold paintings, keeping them stacked against the wall of his studio.

      On the recommendation of Dr Horatio C. Wood, a professor of nervous diseases, Thomas Eakins fled to North Dakota and lived on the B-T Ranch in Little Missouri Territory of the Badlands. In the wide-open spaces, he thrived.

      Eakins scholar Elizabeth Johns, PhD writes of his stay: “So he was at a very low ebb when he came out here. And I think what this experience gave him was a vital contrast to the constricting landscape of Philadelphia. This was a sanctuary that he would remember. A largeness of the physical universe. A hardiness of the characters that made their living on this soil that would inspire him the rest of his life.”[19]

      His enthusiasm for the rugged life and its restorative powers come through a letter to his wife, Susan: “Dear Sue, Only last fall a horse thief was shot full of holes a few miles north of here and fall before last they hung one… While I was holding down the ranch I had all the chores to do: milking the cows, cleaning the stables, watering and feeding stock, etc. On the second day the twin calves broke out of the stable. I tried to shoo them in but they wouldn’t go. Then I ran into the stable and picked up the first rope I saw and made a loop and tried to catch one. The rope was too short and mean and I couldn’t get them so then I went and got my good lariat… I chased them up and down throwing at them for about an hour till I was so hot and mad I should have enjoyed branding those same calves… The boys had a good laugh when they heard how I had tried to rope the calves afoot. They got on their horses and caught them right away. I killed a big rattlesnake the other day and will bring home the rattle for Ella. My horse is the fastest of all those on the ranch… The time is more than half gone now. How happy I shall be to see you again.”

      His rehabilitation lasted from July to October 1887 when he returned to Philadelphia. He and his wife had been staying in a small flat near the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts and now moved into his father’s house where he ultimately became the patriarch following Benjamin Eakins’ death. To accommodate his work, he added a fourth floor to the building in the form of a faux Mansard roof and there he remained for the rest of his life. On his return, he produced a portrait of Walt Whitman, which the elderly poet favoured above all the previous attempts. Eakins would make many trips to Whitman’s home over the next years. Their friendship lasted until Whitman’s death in 1892.

      His one sortie into sculpture came in 1891 when he collaborated with his sculptor friend William Rudolf O’Donovan in the creation of bronze equestrian reliefs of Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln for the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza. O’Donovan sculpted the two human figures while Eakins created the horses.[20]

      His teaching continued at various venues including: the Art Students League in New York City, the National Academy of Design, the Women’s Art School at New York’s Cooper Union, and the Art Students’ Guild in Washington D. C. By 1898, he withdrew from teaching to concentrate on his portraiture.

      As before, his portraiture, especially of women, while some writers call it “revealing”, is for the most part bleak and distracted. Even the men came off as cold and distant. Their clothing always seemed to need a good ironing. In fact, he often asked his sitters to pose in old clothes rather than their finery. This is a СКАЧАТЬ