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Preface
Helen A. Cooper
Description: Thomas Eakins: The Rowing Pictures
Thomas Eakins: The Rowing Pictures
Considered one of the greatest artists America has produced and the foremost realist of his time, Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) enjoys a well-established place in the history of art; equally well-established are the facts of his turbulent career. Painter, sculptor, and photographer, he was also an influential and inspiring teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of...
Author
Helen A. Cooper
PublisherYale University Art Gallery
Copyright© 1996 Yale University Art Gallery
Related print edition pages: pp.11-
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00169.005
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15307
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Preface
Considered one of the greatest artists America has produced and the foremost realist of his time, Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) enjoys a well-established place in the history of art; equally well-established are the facts of his turbulent career. Painter, sculptor, and photographer, he was also an influential and inspiring teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, beginning in 1876. But his emphasis on the thorough study of the nude, particularly his insistence on the completely nude male model, scandalized the more proper women students and conservative Victorian society in Philadelphia and ultimately forced his resignation in 1886. For further indiscretions in his teaching practices, he lost his position at the Drexel Institute in. 1895. Widely acknowledged as an important, though unorthodox contemporary artist, he could no longer earn his living as a teacher.
As Eakins grew older, he was increasingly disinterested in genre and outdoor subjects, and portrait commissions were rare. Almost all his sitters were friends and students, or individuals who interested him because of their intellectual and creative achievements. His portraits—uncompromisingly acute in their observations and psychological insights—did not make for flattery or financial success. In a letter of 1894, Eakins voiced bitterness about his rejection as a teacher and an artist: “My honors are misunderstanding, persecution & neglect, enhanced because unsought.” Recognition of his importance as a major figure in American art began to grow only near the end of his life. It needed the memorial exhibitions in New York and Philadelphia in 1917, the year after his death, to finally accord him his just reputation.
This book and the exhibition it accompanies focus on the most ambitious project of Eakins’ early career, when the artist was full of optimism and success appeared within his grasp. The rowing pictures, created over a period of less than four years, are crucial to an understanding of Eakins’ creative process. In no subsequent series is the tension between the intellect and the senses, between the scientific and the artistic, and between observed reality and abstract composition so evident. The rowing theme presented the young artist with the perfect metaphor for his belief in the interrelatedness of physical, mental, and moral discipline. Like almost all the art he would create throughout his life, these pictures are, at heart, about the strivings of the human spirit.
HELEN A. COOPER