Our Weird Uncle Eakins

1.

Did the painter Thomas Eakins—regarded by many as the greatest American artist of the nineteenth century—drink too much milk? The inquiring mind of art historian Henry Adams, author of the controversial bio­graphy Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist, wants to know. And that is the least of his inquiries. As one concerned reviewer put it: “Adams accuses Eakins of, to list some charges alphabetically, anti-Semitism, bestiality, exhibitionism, incest, lying, poor writing skills, sadism, sexism, sodomy, peeping-Tomism and unattractiveness. Oh yes, and he was shifty-eyed, became overweight in old age and didn’t speak French as well as he let on.”¹

It’s not too surprising that, in the midst of the debate surrounding this biography last spring, hardly anybody paid attention when a drawing manual by Eakins himself was published, for the first time, 120 years after he wrote it. A book about how to take pains drawing is going to lose out every time, press coverage–wise and otherwise, to a book about a man who took down his pants. Eakins worked on the manual while teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, but after he was famously forced to resign in 1886—for removing the loincloth of a nude male model in a class that included female students, apparently to show the origin of a muscle—he abandoned plans to publish it. (The text and illustrations got separated after his death and were later given to two different institutions, the Pen­nsylvania Academy and the Phila­delphia Museum of Art, which have now brought them back to­gether.)

At first glance, A Drawing Manual might appear merely to underscore the ideas we already have about Eakins: that he was an uncompromising realist, an artist who be­lieved utterly in the accurate portrayal of the world around him, an engineer of sorts who didn’t give a jot about, or rather abhorred, what he called “picture making” of the pretty, romantic, idealized sort. People love Eakins’s light-filled paintings of rowers on the Schuyl­kill river, his sailing and shooting pictures, his penetrating humanist portraits, his baseball players and his worthy citizens.² And if they do not love The Gross Clinic, Eakins’s ex­plicit portrayal of the progress and reality of science, they generally re­spect and admire it.

But some of these Eakins ap­preciators (and yes, I include my­self) have perhaps also secretly wished he wasn’t America’s greatest nineteenth-century painter. Look at what all those Europeans were doing at the same time! Breaking with tradition. Breaking down the elements of the representational image. Paying attention to and even pointing out the two-dimensional plane of the canvas rather than creating false, frozen illusions of...