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Eakins and Icons - Thomas Eakins
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 2001 by Michael Leja
The visual arts' long-standing commerce in illusion was absorbed into this wider cultural economy of deception. "Humbug" became a common term of disparagement in art criticism. This is the proper context, I think, for understanding Eakins's unwillingness to give much credence to mere appearances and his compulsion to develop a new foundation for artistic realism in deep, nonapparent knowledge, systematic science, and diagrammatic representation. That Eakins embraced so fully belief in the reciprocity of seeing and knowing implicates him in a particular cultural history, and this history helps to explain how fractures and inconsistencies could have been decisive assets to painting with realist commitments. They signaled the artist's wholehearted and energetic pursuit of the deeper truths beyond deceptive appearances.
The cultural circumstances I have described illuminate the paradoxes at the heart of Eakins's project. With the apparent world disintegrating into deception and illusion, Eakins tried to enlist art--and its ineluctable artifice and illusionism--in the effort to restore to appearances reliability and truth. Unlike some of his contemporaries who were more interested in bringing art into engagement with the deceptions and spectacles of modern life, Eakins sought to fend off these developments through the certainty and security of scientific knowledge. With hindsight his resistance to the uncertainties of vision and appearances is bound to look quaintly defensive. I hope, however, that its impressive scale and the ingenuity of its inventions are evident by now.
Eakins's grand enterprise inevitably proved frustrating, as his peculiar paintings and their lukewarm reception attest. The frustrations ultimately wore away his confidence in the possibility of making seeing and knowing fully congruent. His work became less committed to developing imaginative solutions to this hopeless problem. At the end of his life he turned back to it with some irony.
His last full-length portrait presents Dr. William Thomson, an early pioneer in ophthalmology (Fig. 10). Thomson is shown seated in his office receiving the viewer, an ophthalmoscope in his hand, as if he were about to begin an eye test. In the upper left corner of the painting an eye-test chart barely emerges from the brown shadows. On the table are some books and perhaps another obscure object. Murkiness envelops the realm of visibility. The deck is stacked against the subject taking an eye test in this space. Moreover, over-lighting the painting reveals that the lower lines of the visual acuity test have been painted out. (80) While Dr. Thomson squarely faces the viewer, which is infrequent in Eakins's portraits, his look is more typical of the artist's late work in suggesting the priority of inner vision over outer. Although Eakins's process here was his familiar one, involving many perspectival and preparatory studies, there now seems some irony concerning his erstwhile commitments. To Eakins the young m an, the harmonious interdependence of observation and knowledge was unquestionable. But age abetted by the forces of cultural history finally may have brought Eakins to lose some of this distinctive confidence. Although his innovative work on icons had extended normal vision's purchase on the world, he must have realized he was fighting a losing battle.
