***October 2007*** |
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Thomas Eakins
July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916
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Thomas Eakins was born in Philadelphia on July 25, 1844.
The young boy showed great talent for drawing as a child and
when he turned seventeen began studies at the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts from 1861 to 1866, where he drew
chiefly from casts. To make up for his lack of study of living
models, he entered Jefferson Medical College and took the
regular courses in anatomy, including dissecting cadavers
and observing a variety of operations. His concurrent study
of anatomy at the college led to a lifelong interest in scientific
realism.
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Eakins spent three years in Paris from 1866 to 1869, where he
went through rigorous academic training at the École des
Beaux-Arts. When he finished his training he traveled to Italy,
Germany and Spain, where at Madrid’s Prado Museum he discovered
17th-century Spanish painting, especially the work of Diego Velázquez
and the Dutch artist Rembrandt. These masters impressed him with
their realism and psychological penetration. After a winter in Seville,
Eakins went back to Paris and in July 1870 he returned to Philadelphia,
where he would live for the rest of his life, never going abroad
again.
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Once back in Philadelphia, Eakins painted
feverishly using friends, family and scenes of local interest.
One of his most important paintings of this time was the “Gross
Clinic” (1875), portraying the great surgeon Samuel
D. Gross operating before his students in Jefferson Medical
College. The painting shocked the public and critics but established
Eakins's reputation as a leader of American naturalism. Eakins
had an unusual combination of artistic and scientific gifts.
Anatomy, mathematics, and the science of perspective were
major interests to him and played an essential part in his
painting. As early as 1880, he was using photography as an
aid to painting and as a means of studying the body and its
movement.
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In 1876, Eakins began instructing at the Pennsylvania Academy and in 1879 became
head instructor of the school. Discarding old-fashioned methods,
he subordinated drawing from casts to painting from the model,
and based instruction on thorough study of the human body,
including anatomy courses and dissection--innovations that
were to eventually revolutionize art education in America.
But his stubborn insistence on the nude, particularly the
completely nude male model in lectures on anatomy, scandalized
the academy trustees and the more proper women students, and
he was forced to resign in 1886. Most of his men students
seceded from the academy and started the Art Students' League
of Philadelphia, which continued for about 7 years, with Eakins
as its unpaid headmaster.
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Another of Eakins's interests was sculpture. He sometimes
made small models of figures he used in his paintings, and
he produced several full-scale anatomical casts. In the 1880s
and early 1890s he executed eight original pieces. Although
he did not try to make sculpture his major medium, his ability
and strength in sculpture was more than evident.
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In 1884 Eakins married Susan Hannah Macdowell,
a former pupil and a fellow painter. After the 1880’s,
though Eakins was accomplished as a painter, commissions
were becoming increasingly rare as time went on. Usually
Eakins asked sitters to pose, then gave them the paintings
free of charge. Even so, his sitters often did not bother
to take their portraits, so that he was left with a studio
full of them. Soon he began suffering increasing neglect
from the academic art world and on more than one occasion
was refused when he tried to enter works into public exhibitions.
In spite of this lack of recognition, he continued to work
in the same uncompromisingly realistic style. Finally, towards
the end of his life, he began to receive a small recognition
of honours though not much financial success. Fortunately
he still had a modest income from his father, and Eakins
and his wife resided in the family home, where he had lived
since childhood. It was there that he died on June 25, 1916.
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