Eakins and Icons - Thomas Eakins

One of the ways Eakins differentiated his illusionism from deceptive and theatrical forms was by preventing viewers from entering too easily into the imaginative space of the painting. His pictorial discrepancies and fractures were among his devices for positioning viewers outside the work and eliciting critical, analytical scrutiny from them. (62) The effect resembles Brechtian estrangement, although the critical distance it promotes adheres to an ideology of science rather than to any theory of political and ideological demystification.

The ruptures in Eakins's paintings also communicated the studious and laborious character of the artist's process. This theme, heavily emphasized in the critical commentary on his art, differentiates his work from the effortless artifice of Whistlerian Aestheticism. (63) Such contrasts with contemporary styles were significant factors in securing an understanding of his work as a kind of realism committed to nonsuperficial and scientific knowledge and opposed to simplification, ease, shortcuts, trickery, fraud, and deception of every sort. "He has acquired this knowledge and skill by arduous study, study not confined to outward phenomena, but dealing with constituents, from the skeleton to the skin." (64) As I have suggested, the disjunctions were certainly not doing this work alone; the message was also being carried by the information-and knowledge-packed forms that filled the paintings as well as by the publicity that surrounded Eakins's work.

It may seem paradoxical that the seams and disjunctions, the noniconic elements, of Eakins's paintings intensified their realist claims, but reality effects are always a matter of some configuration of selections and contrivances that enhances the persuasiveness of the representation for a particular audience. "The spectator's approval is not solicited, but extorted" by Eakins's work, according to Shinn. (65) The question we must ask is: Under what cultural and historical circumstances would Eakin's particular interruptions and fractures assist, not to say extort, a viewer's assent to a painting's truthfulness? I will turn to that question in a moment.

Readers will no doubt wonder whether I am attributing to all Eakins's viewers, including his contemporaries, the model of response that I have described. There is no shortage of evidence in the writings of contemporary critics that disjunctions were regularly noticed in Eakins's work. "Mr. Eakins has done some very strange things, and while compelling admiration for his knowledge and skill in certain important respects, has kept his friends perpetually apologizing for him by the wildness of his errors in dealing with other things of quite as much importance." (66) The author of this passage, Leslie Miller, counted himself among those overburdened friends. His comment, prompted by discrepancies noted between the figures and the landscape in Swimming, is representative in conjoining appreciation of the knowledge and skill visible in the painting--its nonsuperficial realism--with recognition of its fractures. In the words of another critic writing in 1880: "The occasional flashes of brilliancy which start out of his canvases are so sudden as to convey the impression of unreality. Yet, in spite of such mannerisms, Mr. Eakins is one of our best artists." (67) One more example concerning Mending the Net: "It shows ... the closest study. Each figure is sharply individualized, and the interest of the work is in these separately. Taken as a whole, they do not fuse into the landscape...." (68)