Swimming

Like art and medicine, combat sports provide a licit space both actual and virtual for looking closely at and representing the...

~Upon arriving in Philadelphia in the spring of 1884, Muybridge began his work by photographing animals in an outdoor studio he set up at Philadelphia’s Zoological Garden. Ultimately, his outdoor studio for human subjects in the enclosure of the university’s Veterinary Department would...

John Singer Sargent’s Roman sketchbook of 1869 contains—besides a pale gray wash of the Colosseum and a drawing of the white oxen of the Campagna—studies by the sixteen-year-old artist of the Laocoon and the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican ...

From the beginning of Thomas Eakins’ career in the early 1870s to the present, critics and scholars have consistently remarked on the “manly” nature of the artist’s works, but never have the masculine qualities of the paintings been explained. In...

When Charles Willson Peale painted Exhumation of the Mastodon, he intended it as a backdrop for the bones of the beast, installed in his encyclopedic museum. Both the painting and the bones were impressive and tangible evidence of the artist’s accomplishments and legacy. Eakins created several works with that same impulse, but the three that stand out most prominently in his career are The Gross Clinic, painted expressly for the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia; Swimming (1885), …