'''Thomas Cowperthwaite Eakins''' (July 25, 1844 - June 25, 1916) was a painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. He is associated with realism, and is often identified as a "father" to American painting.

Life and work

Eakins lived in Philadelphia. He graduated from Central High School (Philadelphia), studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and then in Europe 1866-1870, notably with Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris, though he spent time in Spain as well, enamored with artists such as Diego Velazquez. He returned to the Pennsylvania Academy to teach in 1876, later becoming the director of the Academy in 1882. His teaching methods were controversial, most notably his interest in instructing his students in all aspects of the human figure, including the nude. Though there were tensions between him and the Academy's board of directors throughout his teaching career, he was ultimately fired in 1886 for removing the loincloth of a male model in a class where female students were present. The majority of Eakins's students liked his teaching methods and encouraged him to continue teaching at Philadelphia's Art Students League.

Eakins's first works upon his return from Europe included a large group of rowing scenes. The most famous of these is "The Champion Single Sculling" also known as "Max Schmitt in a Single Scull" (1871), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Eakins placed himself in the painting, in a scull behind Schmitt, his name inscribed on the boat. Typically, the work entailed critical observation of the painting's subject, as well as preparatory drawings of the figure and perspectival plans of the scull in the water.

In the late 1870s Eakins was introduced to the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, and became enamored with the possibilities of the camera. He performed his own motion studies, usually involving the nude figure, and even developed his own technique for capturing movement on film. In 1881 he obtained a camera, and after this point some paintings,
such as "Mending the Net" (1881) and "Arcadia"(1883), are known to have been derived from Eakins' photographs.

Some of his most well-known works include "The Gross Clinic" (1875) and "The Agnew Clinic" (1889) (both portraits of surgeons), as well as "The Swimming Hole" (1884-1885, also referred to as "Swimming"). The Gross Clinic is impressive for its ambition as well as its subject, that of a renowned Philadelphia surgeon, Dr. Samuel Gross, presiding over an operation to remove part of a diseased bone from a patient's thigh. Gross lectures in an amphitheater crowded with students at Jefferson Medical College. Stunningly illuminated, he is the embodiment of heroic rationalism, a symbol of the intellectual achievement that Eakins held dear. At 96 by 78 inches this is one of the artist's largest works, and arguably his greatest. But if Eakins hoped to impress his home town with the picture, he was to be disappointed; public reaction to the painting of a surgical incision and the resultant blood was ambivalent at best, and it was finally purchased by the college for the unimpressive sum of $200. The college now describes it thusly: "Today the once maligned picture is celebrated as a great nineteenth-century medical history painting, featuring one of the most superb portraits in American art".

Deeply affected by his dismissal from the Academy, Eakins's later career focused on portraiture. Even as Eakins approached these portraits with the skill of a highly- trained anatomist, what is most noteworthy is the intense psychological presence of his sitters. However, it was precisely for this reason that his portraits were often rejected by the sitters or their families. As a result, Eakins came to rely on his friends and family members to model for portraits, and of his late studies very few were actually commissioned. His portrait of Walt Whitman was the poet's favorite.

Legacy

Eakins's attitude toward realism in painting, and his desire to explore the heart of American life strongly influenced the Ashcan School. He was a teacher of African-American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner. Though his is not a household name, and though during his lifetime Eakins struggled to make a living from his work, today he is regarded as one of the most important American artists of any period. His impact on American painting can be seen not only in the work of students and contemporaries such as Thomas Anschutz and Susan Macdowell (who married Eakins), but later in the art of George Bellows, Andrew Wyeth and Jamie Wyeth.

Furthermore, since the 1990s, Eakins has emerged as a major figure in sexuality studies in art history, for both the homoeroticism of his work and for the complexity of his attitudes toward women. Controversy shaped much of his career as a teacher and as an artist. He insisted on teaching men and women "the same", used nude models in mixed sex classes, and was accused of abusing female students. Recent scholarship suggests that these controversies were grounded in more than the "puritanical prudery" of his colleagues (as has been assumed). Today, scholars see these controversies as caused by a combination of factors such as the boheminanism of Eakins and his circle (in which students, for example, sometimes modeled in the nude for each other), and Eakins' inclination toward provocative behavior.

See also

*Eakin's Oval

External links

*Thomas Eakins: Scenes from Modern Life
*2002 Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
*Thomas Jefferson University: The Eakins Gallery

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