Thomas Eakins

1844-1916

Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) was a Philadelphia painter, photographer, sculptor and teacher who spent his career observing his native city with an unsparing realist eye. Trained in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme and Léon Bonnat, and steeped in Spanish realism after a visit to Seville, he returned home determined to paint what he actually saw rather than academic ideals. His rowing scenes, above all Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, announced a new American subject matter, and he went on to paint hundreds of portraits of Philadelphia's scientists, clergy, musicians and friends, alongside large scenes set in surgical theaters, parks and rivers where he could study the nude figure in motion. As director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts he built a rigorous, anatomy-based curriculum, but his insistence on nude models cost him his post in 1886 and much of his public standing. Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, he is now regarded as one of the great American realists, his work held by major museums nationwide.