Eakins and Icons - Thomas Eakins

Michael Leja

Thomas Eakins first came to public attention in the mid-1870s as a painter of water-sport subjects. In these early oils and watercolors, bird hunters quietly pole their boats through marshes or set out from shore under sail, and oarsmen slice through the reflective waters of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River. One of the earliest critical notices of these works, written by Eakins's friend and fellow painter Earl Shinn, appeared in the magazine Nation in 1874. Shinn introduced Eakins to a national readership in this way: "Some remarkably original and studious boating scenes were shown by Thomas Eakins, a new exhibitor, of whom we learn that he is a realist, an anatomist and mathematician; that his perspectives, even of waves and ripples, are protracted according to strict science...." (1) Well over a century later, Eakins is still a painter for whom these lessons remain fundamental. His art historical significance is rooted in his identity as a studious realist whose painting draws its force from extensive scient ific research into anatomy, perspective, reflection, and motion. He is credited with reinventing (or destroying) academic realism by filling its shell with scientific knowledge. (2) By combining close attention to visual appearances with systematic knowledge of structures, functions, and spatial relations, he generated likenesses of extraordinary intensity. In short, Eakins intensified his painted icons by merging seeing with knowing. (I am using icon as defined by Charles Sanders Peirce to designate a sign that evokes its object through resemblance. (3) This interpretation of Eakins's work remains quite resilient despite efforts by some scholars to advance alternative understandings of his "realism."

Eakins himself seems to have formulated his artistic objectives in these very terms. We know his devotion to the study of anatomy and perspective bordered on the fanatic from the evidence of his biography and the vast number of elaborate preparatory diagrams that cluttered his studio. Moreover, the demanding curriculum Eakins developed for students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts featured these same emphases, so much so that a reporter for Scribner's magazine writing an article on the school in 1879 was astonished by the exhaustiveness and apparent irrelevance of much of the instruction. Hearing of the grueling routine of dissection and anatomical study at the school, the reporter posed the obvious question: "[M]ust a painter know all this?" To which Eakins replied:

To draw the human figure it is necessary to know as much as possible about it, about its structure and its movements, its bones and muscles, how they are made, and how they act.... Knowing all that will enable [an artist] to observe more closely, and the closer his observation is, the better his drawing will be. (4)

Knowledge enables close observation, and close observation brings knowledge. Eakins here articulates a belief in the harmonious reciprocity of seeing and knowing that is fundamental to his art. He was no Romantic dreaming of an innocent eye--in fact, quite the opposite. His fantasy of vision featured an omniscient eye. Truthful seeing demanded full and systematic knowledge of the laws of nature and of art. Hearing Eakins make this argument, the reporter for Scribner's remained skeptical, worrying that too much knowledge was dangerous for art, that it "distorted genuine impulses." He wondered whether Eakins "would insist upon a landscape painter taking an elaborate course of botany," but apparently he did not pose this question in the interview. (5)

Several interpreters of Eakins's work--including such insightful and influential scholars as Lloyd Goodrich, Barbara Novak, Elizabeth Johns, and Kathleen Foster--have analyzed it in terms of an interaction between seeing and knowing. Although their approaches have differed considerably, most have mapped this interaction directly onto another: the interplay between graphic and painterly elements in Eakins's art. Science and measurement most often appear in the underdrawings and diagrammatic preparatory works; these provide a skeleton of knowledge that informs but does not limit the close observation, the approximation of appearances, and the crafting of a work of art accomplished in the skillful overpainting. Analysts generally have agreed that the integration of graphic and painterly modes is the mechanism by which the conceptual and the perceptual are merged in Eakins's work. Any tension that may arise between cognition and perception becomes a problem to be worked out in the relation of drawing to painting. (6)

I want to propose a different approach: viewing Eakins's paintings as animated by irreconcilable conflicts that stem from his commitment to truthful vision through systematic knowledge. These conflicts are too pervasive and unruly to be contained within an opposition of drawing and painting. One type of conflict arose from the multiple systems of knowledge Eakins attempted to mobilize, which often resisted integration. Another stemmed from a growing rift between knowing and seeing. I will illustrate both varieties of conflict as they are played out in particular paintings in order to outline what I see as the descriptive and explanatory value of this view of Eakins's work.

What Is and What Seems To Be

The Champion Single Sculls of 1871 (Fig. 1), one of the first paintings Eakins exhibited, was an early and ambitious effort to see and render with a knowing eye. Although almost no preparatory studies for the painting have survived, there is every reason to believe that many were made. Indeed, technical analysis has revealed pinholes and incised lines in the underpainting that are evidence of a process involving transfer drawings. (7) The finished work has struck many commentators as filled with acute observation and careful illusionism. Lloyd Goodrich has offered what is probably the most extreme statement of this view: "This was a scene completely familiar to the artist, observed firsthand, and recorded with fidelity to .... An original mind was dealing directly with actualities. The vision was photographically exact, crystal-clear." (8)

Goodrich's reference to photography may have some value in drawing our attention to certain features of the painting--the relations of lights and darks, the momentariness of the scene, the fine detailing of forms. However, it is inapt overall, not only because Eakins probably had not yet begun working with the camera when he did this painting, but more importantly because the painting refuses the homogenizing and unifying vision of photography. "One senses that boat, man, and water were not all apprehended and painted simultaneously but put together out of different aspects of the painter's experience and sensibility," as Novak has observed. (9) Eakins's thorough knowledge of anatomy plays a small but important part in the central figure, Max Schmitt, whose recent victories in amateur races on the Schuylkill River are memorialized in this portrait. The rendering of his body is only about three inches high in the lower middle of the painting, yet his arm and shoulder are modeled with a sureness and emphasis t hat pick them out from the pictorial field in a way no contemporary daylight photograph would (putting aside all questions of color).

More emphatic than anatomy in this painting is Eakins's systematic study of linear perspective, which would have helped him situate the objects and reflections precisely in space and keep relationships of scale internally consistent. Equally important is his study of the physical principles of reflection. Most of the pictorial interest here is concentrated in the reflective surface of the water. The painting is bisected horizontally by the waterline in the distance and by the separation between the landmass at the right and its reflection, which invests the structure of the picture with a mirroring dynamic. The reflections are carefully calibrated to give legible information regarding the distance of the reflected objects; recession brings a proportional diminution of clarity, integrity, and contrast. The river's mirroring is interrupted only by the wakes of the sculls rowed by Schmitt and, beyond him, by Eakins himself. These dark interruptions in the reflected sky convey a narrative of movement through the picture space. Eakins's boat has entered at left and is shown following the river into the distance. Schmitt's is moving in the opposite direction, his trail revealing that a moment ago he stopped rowing and began dragging his oars over the water.

Eakins has taken obvious liberties to ensure the clarity and legibility of this narrative of movement and action. Most striking is the fact that each rower has left a trail of perfectly intact rings marking the points where the oars were inserted into the water (Fig. 2). Time has not dissipated them: the earliest remain as integral and discrete as the most recent. Schmitt has left thirteen identical rings neatly stacked like gray lily pads on the canvas; Eakins is in the midst of producing his seventh. While the rowers have continued moving through time and space, the river surface is shown arresting time. As if filled with gelatin, the river stills and preserves the marks of the oars' contact. These undissipated rings are anachronisms: they compress past events into the painting's expanded present. Two different temporalities are juxtaposed in the schematic marks representing the indexical traces of the oars' contact with the water. The wakes of the dragged oars signify continuity and duration, while the ser ies of rings presents intervals within a structure of repetition.

Temporal disruption is also suggested by the wake of Eakins's boat at the extreme left edge of the painting. This is a beautifully studied and rendered passage in which the wake moves through light-toned reflections of shore foliage, but this wake is far more condensed and active than it should be at such a distance from Eakins. Such contained turbulence is difficult to justify in comparison with the much less energetic water in the immediate wake of Schmitt's boat, even if we grant Eakins the greater speed.

These departures from plausible appearances serve a clear purpose: to enhance narration and convey information. The undissipated rings are temporal disturbances in the painting's narrative that paradoxically clarify the story pictured. Seeing the rings intact on the water surface enables the viewer to know more precisely the spatial orientation and trajectory of the rowers; like everything else in the painting, they have been rendered in careful perspective. The perfectly regular spacing of these rings also conveys information about the elegance and consistency of the rowers' strokes. Eakins's conspicuous presence in midstroke most obviously stakes the painting's claim to contain firsthand information about the art of sculling. Representing himself as an earnest practitioner of the activity portrayed is a device Eakins often used. (10) It gives him a double presence in his works: as knowing participant and as unseen painter-viewer, who in this case is the implicit object of Schmitt's piercing gaze. In this wa y Eakins's paintings literalize a seeing-knowing dynamic. Sometimes this double presence generates explicit tensions, and in this picture the blurring of genres (portraiture with quotidian scene) is one such effect. In The Gross Clinic, which shows Eakins sitting among the medical students and taking notes or drawing at the right edge of the painting, curious fragments of participating bodies draw our attention to the artist's double viewpoint. Either the painting is not what he witnessed but rather what he imagined from his position on the other side of the scene, or his inclusion of himself is a liberty he has taken with what he saw, and may be one of many fabrications. (11)

In The Champion Single Sculls, Eakins's expertise as a rower is not only pictured but also reinforced by the perfectly spaced rings, the detailed information about boat design, and the precise hand and body positionings shown in the painting. That Eakins wished to highlight this kind of information is suggested by the absence of some reflections that would seem required by strict mimesis. Where are the reflections of the red and white latticework bridges in the distance, and of those extraordinary, bright, and wispy clouds that trail across the sky, the long central group echoing both the near scull and its frothy wake? [12] If these had been included they would likely have obscured the painting's narrative of powerful and skillful movement through exquisitely plotted space. But the omission of these reflections produces other effects, too. It brings an unsettling sense of absence to the painting, and it enhances the presence of the water as material substance with absorptive density as well as reflective cap acities. Eakins's water has occult powers: it can stop time and swallow reflections.

In this painting Eakins's commitments to multiple forms of knowledge come into conflict. Information about the depicted space and about the fine art of sculling jostles against elaborate knowledge about the behavior of water surfaces and reflections. Fidelity to plausible appearances receives a relatively low priority, but the painterliness of some areas of this work signals another system of knowledge high in Eakins's hierarchy: the art of painting. The range of paint handlings shows him to be engaged in experimental if unsystematic study of the processes by which drawn and painted marks operate simultaneously as equivalents for things in the world and as literal presences capable of evoking affective responses.

Similar conflicts can be seen in another boating subject done three years later: Starting Out after Rail of 1874 (Fig. 3). In this painting, whose verisimilitude has also been praised in extravagant terms, Eakins was apparently determined to provide recognizable and forceful portraits of two bird hunters and their boat as they set out from shore in bright sunlight. (13) The watercolor version of this work was originally titled Harry Young, of Moyamensing, and Sam Helhower, "The Pusher," Going Rail Shooting, and its first owner was a boatbuilder. (14) Some of Eakins's painstaking perspectival diagrams for this work survive, and they document his interest in achieving an absolute internal consistency of scale in the painting. Eakins once wrote that putting a boat such as this in perspective, getting the tilt and proportions exactly right, could be done more effectively from a mechanical drawing of the boat and a perspective diagram than from life study. (15) He had no doubt that systematic application of diagra mmatic knowledge would yield graphic results identical to those achieved with much more difficulty through fully informed study of appearances.

Eakins also lavished attention on the heads and figures of the two men in this painting. They are strongly modeled in direct sunlight, and the deep shadows give emphatic information about anatomy and facial features. If one senses a disjunction between the figures and their surroundings it may stem in part from the absence of backlighting reflected from the bright white sail behind them or from the shimmering surface of the water. While the water has been portrayed with studious attention to reflection and transparency, these effects do not touch the men, and the white sail has been rendered far too unreflective. (It should eliminate deep shadows from the men's faces the way a smaller white screen does for a portrait photographer.) Eakins was no Impressionist. The studio lighting on the figures ensures that anatomical and perspectival knowledge-measurable information about bodies in space-will not be undermined by the dissolving and flattening effects of light and reflection. The painting stages a competition for prominence and authority among different knowledge systems with conflicting demands.

The artistic process Eakins devised was analytic, conceptual, and additive. His subjects were broken down into component parts, plotted and rendered according to the application of systematic principles, and additively recombined. (16) Linear perspective put the boat and other objects in space; anatomical research modeled the figures; mathematical calculations generated the reflections; and so on. Just as Eakins did not need life study to set a boat in perspective, so he could calculate reflections systematically. He taught his students to rely on mathematical analysis: the angle of reflection equals the angle of incidence. Once the science had been learned, outdoor study of reflections and wave motion would be redundant. (17) Even as a young man Eakins had written to his father that "the big artist does not sit down monkey like and copy a coal scuttle or an ugly old woman like some Dutch painters have done nor a dung pile, but he keeps a sharp eye on Nature and steals her tools." (18)

The surfaces of some of Eakins's paintings bear witness to the overall sense of dissonance, presenting a discordant collage of processes and techniques, as if each section were produced using a specially designed method of paint application. In these canvases can be seen Eakins's attention to the comparative study of painted marks along with evidence of procedural discontinuity at a deep level, Apparently, Eakins generally preferred to let stand any disjunctions generated in his additive process rather than trying to conceal them. He did not turn to appearances to unify his awkward syntheses. "Strain your brain more than your eye," he is reported to have told his students. (19) He seems to have assumed that all knowledge systems would become perfectly integrated and fully congruent with appearances once the learning process was complete.

If we share this premise with Eakins we may be inclined to treat seams and awkwardness in his paintings as signs of modest failures. The project, after all, was outrageously ambitious; imperfections were inevitable. This reasoning has made possible the conflicting emphases in the art historical scholarship on Eakins: on the one hand, strong claims that extraordinary knowledge and truthful observation are mobilized in his paintings, and on the other, insistent cataloguing of the disjunctions in his work. Both elements were also present in the early critical reception of his paintings, even if the mimetic force of his painting was highlighted earlier, while its artifice and awkwardness have taken more of the spotlight in recent scholarship. I will argue presently that these conflicting emphases are two sides of a coin. That argument begins by acknowledging that the fractures in Eakins's paintings are certainly inevitable, not primarily because of any failures in execution but because Eakins's fundamental assump tion was mistaken. Seeing and knowing could not be made congruent in mimetic painting.

This point is clarified in the further problems that came with Eakins's growth as a painter. A decisive rift between knowledge and appearances became explicit in A May Morning in the Park, also known as The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand, of 1879 (Fig. 4). Studying this painting closely, one can extract much factual information from it. One can locate the exact place in Fairmount Park where the scene is set and identify each of the figures by name, the horses as well as the men and women. One can classify the magnificent custom-built coach that was the pride of its owner and driver, Fairman Rogers, an engineer who was a member of the board of directors of the Pennsylvania Academy and Eakins's friend and supporter. With careful analysis of the perspective in the work, one can establish the distance from which the scene was viewed and the precise placement in depth of each element. One can re-create the painstaking process by which the artist produced the painting from numerous researches, photographs, and prepara tory works. Scholars have pursued all these avenues and collected all this information. (20)

This painting introduces a further knowledge system into Eakins's work: the analysis of motion to be found in the stop-action photography of Eadweard Muybridge (Fig. 5). In an essay drawing attention to Eakins's study of motion, Rogers articulated Eakins's thinking: "It is only by thoroughly understanding the mechanism of the motion that the artist will be able to portray it in any satisfactory manner." (21) Eakins's fascination with motion photography has been well documented. He studied Muybridge's work and technical procedures, corresponded with the photographer, helped bring him from California to a position at the University of Pennsylvania, and undertook his own photographic studies of motion. In May Morning and the preparatory works for it, Eakins labored over equine anatomy and motion, attempting to transfer the truths of movement from Muybridge's photographs into his painting. He produced a number of preparatory studies focusing on this issue, including a wax sculpture of the horses. He even tried to persuade Muybridge to alter his procedure so that the results would be better adapted to the requirements of Eakins's art. (22) Here, as with some of his other scientific researches, Eakins was attempting to embed information beyond the reach of the naked eye in a realist painting. Once again the question was whether painting could remake appearances so that their capacity to contain and display nonapparent truth was enlarged.

Although Eakins took much from Muybridge's photographs, he refused one of their features. The photographs stopped all motion and gave complete information about the forms understood to be moving. One could count the number of spokes in the carriage wheels if one wished. Eakins chose to handle his carriage wheels differently (Fig. 6). Perhaps because he believed that the unfamiliar configuration of the horses' legs might compromise the painting's power to suggest motion, Eakins attempted to make the wheels of the carriage do this signifying work. (23) In place of the spokes in all four wheels he inserted odd markings that read as blurs. Viewers of this painting find themselves seeing the world through a vision fast enough to stop the legs of a horse but not the spokes of a spinning wheel. Those with any experience in photography would recognize this as a question of shutter speed and a matter of a fraction of a second. That is, in order to comprehend the illusionism of this painting, reference to photography b ecomes necessary. Photography had opened a rift between seeing and knowing, but to Eakins it also held promise of helping to heal that rift. And if here, as in The Champion Single Sculls, conflict between seeing and knowing produces temporal disjunctions, photography now bears clear responsibility for that fact. Originally, as Roland Barthes observed, "cameras ... were clocks for seeing." (24)

Perhaps discomforted by these challenges, contemporary critics disparaged the painting. One problem was the same one that greeted Muybridge's photographs: established convention seemed truer than the truths revealed through science. Some critics construed the problem in terms of conflict between art and science, or between art and photography. (25) The critic for the Philadelphia Press called it "a mechanical experiment" that failed as a painting. (26) Two reviewers, however, articulated the problem more clearly. Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer wrote that the painting was "scientifically true; but it is apparently, and so, I think, artistically false." (27) Her distinction between science on the one hand and appearances and art on the other was expanded by Sylvester Koehler writing in the American Art Review.

It is said that the artist studied the motion of the horses from the instantaneous photographs lately taken on racecourses. The result is that each limb is motionless, while the spokes of the wheels of the vehicle whirl about so rapidly that they cannot be seen. As a demonstration of the fact that the artist must fail when he attempts to depict what is, instead of what seems to be, this picture is of great value, and perhaps the artist himself has by this time seen his mistake, and only allows the picture to be shown so that others may profit by his experience. (28)

The artist must fail when he attempts to depict what is, instead of what seems to be. Koehler reveals the crux of the problem: a rift was opening between what is and what appears, between the truths of scientific knowledge systems and the ambiguities or deceptions of perceptual experience. This conflict would become central to discussions of "instantaneous photography" in the 1880s, which echoed the terms invoked by Koehler and Van Rensselaer. H. P. Robinson spoke for the majority when he asserted that what was scientifically correct could be artistically wrong, "for it is the mission of the artistic photographer to represent what he sees and no more." (29) W. de W. Abney, a leading photochemist and writer on photography, went so far as to argue that instantaneous photographs were untrue and incorrect from an artistic point of view. A photograph in which "the carriage wheels will be seen with every spoke sharp" will be "incorrect and untruthful, as a record of what would strike the eye at the same time." (30) P. H. Emerson agreed that only what could be seen should be represented by artists and photographers, "for nothing is more inartistic than some positions of a galloping horse, such as are never seen by the eye but yet exist in reality, and have been recorded by Mr. Muybridge." (31)

The questions, however, were trickier than these writers acknowledged. For example, what the eye can see may be quite different for different moving objects. When horses are moving at moderate speeds, as are those in Eakins's painting, human vision is quite capable of seeing all the horses' legs simultaneously. The crux of the perceptual and cognitive limitations is an inability to organize and process the fleeting information about the relative positions of four legs moving simultaneously. With spinning spokes the positions relative to one another remain completely consistent, so viewers have no trouble organizing the elements mentally. The problem is that at high speeds persistence of vision prevents the human eye from following the movement of individual spokes. (This may not have been the case for the limited speed represented in Eakins's painting, but no matter.) Eakins may have been able to use this distinction to justify his decision to copy the positions of the horses' legs from Muybridge's photograph s but not the stilled spokes. But would he have wanted to assign a shutter speed to normal human vision? And would he have been willing to accept that limit to the knowledge a painting could contain--a limit based on the capabilities of unassisted vision?

One thing seems clear: the scientific research Eakins conducted was proving more an obstacle than an armature for realist painting. The various knowledge systems he drew into his analytic and additive process inevitably produced tensions and conflicts. He was forced to make hard choices, just as a photographer would have to do when the camera settings and darkroom procedures best suited to recording information about light, weather, and watery reflections conflicted with those ideal for representation of anatomy, or space, or movement, or technical information about rowing. And if this were not trouble enough, Eakins was humping up continually against the limits of the seen world to contain and display truthful information. His determination to reach and surpass these limits was an inexhaustible source of pictorial conflicts.

As truthful knowledge moved further from the domain of ordinary appearances, the practices and convictions of a painter such as Eakins proved harder to sustain. His confidence in the harmonious reciprocity of knowledge and appearances would become a casualty of photography, modern science, and other developments associated with modernity. Even as motion studies like Muybridge's pointed the way toward the powerful illusionism of cinema, illusionistic painting's claims to truthfulness and realism would come to ring hollow. (32)

Icons and Eye Cons, Diagrams and Illusions

Eakins's statements and writings give no evidence of conscious awareness of this crisis of scientific realism; nonetheless, the insight is embedded in his paintings. The blurs he substituted for spokes in May Morning indicate a direction to which he would return in subsequent works. (33)

What interests me about the blurs is that they do not fit easily the principle I cited earlier regarding Eakins's artistic achievement. If we take Eakins here, as elsewhere, to be intensifying his painted icons by merging seeing with knowing, we will have to understand the blur as an iconic sign. That is, it will be taken to resemble the phenomenological form in which spinning spokes present themselves to human vision. This is the view asserted by Foster: "In painting the entire wheel blurred, Eakins made a concession to human perception and the visual logic of his art, anticipating that a correctly photographic depiction would look unnatural in his painting." (34) The theorists of instantaneous photography generally believed that blurred spokes were truer to human vision. Abney, who argued that art should strive to show what the eye sees rather than any invisible truths, approved the solution to the problem of the spinning wheel developed by Punch cartoonist John Leech. In Leech's work, according to Abney, " instead of the sharp spokes of the wheel, is seen a fuzzy mass of wool-like matter radiating from the center, and surmounted by a tire by no means defined." (35) Abney's specification of a preferred type of blur reminds us that there were blurs and blurs. A developed tradition of painting moving wheels offered various possibilities to Eakins if he wished an alternative to Muybridge's example. The problem of the wheel in motion had interested artists at least since Leonardo, and it was a controversial matter during the seventeenth century. In Eakins's time instantaneous photography was merely producing a sudden revival of interest in an old problem. (36)

As a young art student visiting the Prado in Madrid, where his lifelong admiration for Diego Velazquez began, Eakins contemplated Las Hilanderas (The Spinners) of 1657 and jotted his thoughts about it in his journal. (37) An oil sketch for May Morning seems to test Velazquez's approach to the depiction of a turning wheel by giving a clear view through the wheel with little indication of connections between hub and rim. (38) Another alternative would have been an opaque blur, one that partially or fully obscures the view through the wheel. (39) Eakins rejected these conventional approaches, and contrasted with them, his solution appears idiosyncratic. Unlike prior efforts that lodge plausible claims to phenomenological legitimacy, Eakins's blurs seem to show the artist as uninterested in approximating perceptions. Of course, what one sees when looking at a spinning wheel will vary with the speed of the wheel, the size of the spokes, viewing distance, lighting conditions, and so on, but it is hard to imagine a ny combination of these that will yield the discrete zigzagged arcs and smears Eakins has rendered.

Perhaps the blur was associated securely enough with photography that Eakins's device would have operated as a photographic reference? Eakins certainly made this connection. On first seeing Muybridge's photographs he wrote that it was "pretty to see the sharp & blurred motion in these photographs. They mark so nicely the relative speed of the different parts." Eakins paid close attention to the spokes of the wheels and noted that not all of them were entirely sharp. "[The] sulky wheels are blurred above and sharp below, because the upper part travels twice as fast as the hub while the lower part is still." (40) In a subsequent painting, Eakins apparently reproduced a photographic blur. Some of the geese in the foreground of his Mending the Net of 1881 are blurred, apparently in emulation of some of the photographs of geese Eakins made as studies for the painting (Fig. 7). (41)

Although a blur appearing in a photograph would not resemble Eakins's spokes, it might function in the same semiotic register. That is, Eakins's painted blurs might inherit something of the hybrid semiotic identity of photographic blurs, which are simultaneously icons and indexes of movement, to revert again to the terminology of Peirce. In a photograph a blur is a physical effect of the movement of reflected light imprinted on a photographic plate, which makes it an index. Like many indexes, it may very well be illegible in itself and require auxiliary iconic and indexical signs to establish its signification of movement and any resemblance it may bear to the look of moving forms. (42) That Eakins's spokes would be illegible in isolation is certainly true, although that is far from unusual in his paintings. Even more plausible might be an understanding of the blurs as symbols, if they call to mind conventional notations of the sort familiar to us from cartoon graphics.

As interesting as an archaeology or a semiotics or a phenomenology of the blur might be, that is not what I propose to undertake here. My point is that the blurred spokes of May Morning are to some significant extent nonmimetic signs for motion. They show that the effect of Eakins's merging of knowledge and vision is often not simply to intensify icons (whatever that may mean) but rather to alter their character. One way of describing the effect is to say that Eakins conflates two forms of resemblance: that of the diagram with that of the illusion. (43) This description would apply to the peculiar signs in The Champion Single Sculls--the overactive, condensed wake and the undissipated rings. Here, icons dislocated temporally from the context that gives them illusionistic legitimacy shift to a diagrammatic function. The stacked rings do not mimic what would be observed in nature; instead, they effectively signify elegant rowing to a viewer prepared to read them as schematic markings on a map. (44) The result m ay be an intensification of iconicity, but these two forms of icon will not blend easily. Combining the abstraction and timelessness of the diagram with the contingency and immediacy of illusionism might be expected to result in just the sorts of disjunctions and seams we have been noticing in Eakins's paintings--and just the sorts of time warps I have described.

A second way of describing the semiotic effect of Eakins's marriage of seeing and knowing is to say that it sometimes moves his signs away from resemblance entirely and toward other semiotic strategies. That some of Eakins's icons migrate into other semiotic classifications may seem surprising in a type of painting cherished for its rich illusionism, but it is a strategy to which Eakins was drawn on many occasions. His efforts to make illusionistic painting a vehicle for nonapparent truths often led him away from mimesis toward semiotic adventurousness.

Sometimes he appropriated the frame as a space for experiments with signs. The musical notes he carved and colored along the bottom of the frame of The Concert Singer are presumed to specify the song she sings (Fig. 8). (45) A trained reader of these symbols gains knowledge of the subject through them. They clarify the mood of the event depicted and verify the truth of the painting's title. As Eakins himself put it, "I once painted a concert singer and on the chestnut frame I carved the opening bars of Mendelsohn's 'Rest in the Lord.' It was ornamental unobtrusive and to musicians I think it emphasized the expression of the face and pose of the figure." (46)

The bizarre hand with baton projecting from the lower left corner is also semiotically complex. It playfully challenges the viewer to integrate it into the painting by imagining an orchestra pit below the bottom edge. But this challenge is so great that the hand insistently floats free as a symbol of musical performance, helping to secure an interpretation of the woman's activity as singing rather than speaking or yawning. The fern that intrudes into the painting at upper left seems intended to reinforce the suggestion of a continuous world beyond the frame, but it, too, is difficult to situate in any imaginary space continuous with that of the picture. It breaks free, becoming a witty transformation of the conducting hand, filled with baton fingers that reach out toward the singer. Moreover, it stands as a kind of diagram of vocal projection. The leaves fan out as if mimicking the spray of sound waves from the singer's mouth. This painting and its frame show Eakins to be much less a realist (in the conventio nal, simplified sense of that term) than an inventive experimenter with visual signs.

Perhaps the most concentrated and dazzling of Eakins's experiments with signs is his portrait of Professor Henry A. Rowland, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University (Fig. 9). He is shown seated before his famous invention: a ruling machine for producing concave diffraction gratings, which are slightly curved metal plates scored with minutely spaced lines that diffract light into spectra. Rowland's machine used a diamond-tipped tool to etch 14,400 lines per inch into a five-inch plate; each line being about three inches long, the total length of lines per plate approached three miles. Using such gratings, Rowland was able to map the spectrum of solar light. In Eakins's portrait, Rowland holds in his left hand one of these implements evidently being struck by sunlight and splitting that light into its component elements. We are shown clearly the bands of colors, but Rowland's more exacting analysis would spread this spectrum over sixty feet, revealing also the Fraunhofer lines: hundreds of dark lines interspers ed throughout the spectrum. (47) By measuring precisely the wavelengths of these lines and the thousands more that his enlarged spectrum revealed, Rowland was able to determine with new accuracy the chemical composition of the sun's atmosphere. In the process, he founded the field of spectrometry.

To convey maximal information about Rowland and his work, the painting employs a striking array of sign types. Working outward from the center: the color spectrum, positioned just to the right of center and angled slightly into depth, exceeds its illusionistic function in the painting. It leaps from the otherwise monochromatic field and asserts itself as a diagram of the color relationships on which the painter's art is based. Moreover, as pure color applied densely and directly from the palette, these swatches are also literal samples (a kind of index) of the painter's materials. Spectrum and palette are conflated as an immediate physical presence, which asserts a direct relation between Rowland's work and Above the spectrum and behind Rowland two disks can be seen; they are elements of the ruling apparatus that force the diamond needle across and along the diffraction grating. These disks would be turning slowly when the machine was operating, and Eakins has rendered them with highlights and reflections tha t suggest rotation. The wheel nearer to Rowland, which drove the engine, has a smooth bronze sheen made with concentric brushstrokes. The silver-gray disk farther to the right and positioned directly before the assistant in the background contains strangely irregular, light gray brush marks that have no obvious mimetic function. They serve pictorially to separate the disk from the assorted hardware before it, and they vaguely suggest some form of blur on an opaque and reflective wheel. As part of a ratchet mechanism, this wheel would have turned sporadically.

Here again, the frame is enlisted in the signifying work of the painting. Those able to decipher its signs--or even to assign them to some particular fields of science--will gain additional information about the identity and achievements of the person represented. Nearly a foot wide and covered in gold leaf, the frame presents a brilliant field whose surface area (25 square feet) almost equals that of the painting (30). Its face is carved, according to Eakins's own description, "with lines of the spectrum and with coefficients and mathematical formulae relating to light and electricity, all original with Professor Rowland and selected by himself." (49) In a letter to Rowland written in October 1897, Eakins first suggested incorporating some graphic materials into the frame: "it seems to me it would be fine to saw cut shallow some of the Fraunhofer lines which you were the first man to see." Like Muybridge, Rowland had made visible something previously beyond the reach of sight, and Eakins wished to bring that discovery into his painting. He went on to ask Rowland, "would there be some simple & artistic way I wonder of suggesting the electric unit that I heard of your measuring so accurately." (50) Rowland apparently provided Eakins with this material and more.

Along the top and bottom of the frame Eakins reproduced segments of Rowland's spectroscopic analysis of solar light. (51) The top panel shows the spectral signature of pure sodium set above a matching configuration of lines taken from the solar spectrum; this match indicates the presence of sodium in the solar data but also presents a large number of unmatched lines in solar light. At left, two circles and some wavy lines form a pictograph suggesting the Earth, its atmosphere, and the Sun. The circle with a dot at the center is repeated at a larger scale on the bottom panel of the frame, which suggests it may be a symbol for the Sun as source of the spectral lines etched alongside it on both panels. While the top panel of the frame represents the part of Rowland's work involved in chemical analysis, the bottom counterbalances this by signifying measurement. It represents a section of one of Rowland's maps of the solar spectrum, which aligns a carefully ruled measuring gauge (enlarged to scale in the painting, each inch on the rule measuring precisely five inches) with another sample of spectral lines. The frame itself becomes an instrument of measurement and analysis, a tool of spectrometry. The regularity of these series of lines also evokes the diffraction grating, as if the frame had been in physical contact with the machine portrayed in the painting. A viewer may wonder whether it would diffract raking light like the depicted grating. Indexical signification is invoked ingeniously in these elements.

The handwritten quality of the diagrams and computations on the side panels stands in contrast to the mechanical ruling at top and bottom. The handwriting is implicitly autographic, as if evidence of Rowland's own hand inscribing the frame with notations. Of course, these abstract markings have been enlarged and transferred by Eakins from Rowland's own designs, which makes them iconic renderings of autographic originals. Above all, they are signs evoking Rowland's work on the measurement of electrical resistance, the speed of light, the mechanical value of heat, and the sharpness of lines in a spectrum. Various kinds of signs are employed toward this end, including mathematical formulas, electrical diagrams, and pictographs. In the upper right corner a pictographic icon of a resistor is placed atop computations of resistance and diagrammatic icons of electrical circuits. Immediately above it, a wheel with hub and seven spokes is set into clockwise motion by an arrow at its perimeter. As an indexical pointer s ignifying directional movement, the arrow eliminates the need for blurred spokes. (52)

Having pushed illusionism to the limits of its capacity to contain information--to the point where knowledge systems jostled and displaced one another--Eakins understood that the information and truth content of his mimetic signs could be supplemented through indexes, diagrams, and symbols. The way toward increasing the truthfulness of paintings was not through strict mimesis but through semiotic hybridity. (53) His paintings point the way toward modernist work on signs in Cubism, Futurism, collage, and Dada, and they reveal the logic of the wariness about the relation of picture and world that is a hallmark of modernism. (54)

Eakins's Reality Effects

"By what art or mystery, what craft of selection, omission or commission, does a given picture of life appear to us to surround its theme, its figures and images, with the air of romance while another picture close beside it may affect us as steeping the whole matter in the element of reality?" (55) Henry James recognized that the power of a novel or a painting to warrant the description "realistic" was no straightforward matter. Roland Barthes, Nelson Goodman, W.J.T. Mitchell, and many others have illuminated the complexities of this issue. Instead of concentrating solely on the relation of the picture to what it represents, they have shifted attention to the relation between viewer and picture. The perception of iconicity--that is, judging a picture to be realistic, or even merely to resemble what it depicts--is as much an effect of operations involving beliefs, conventions, habits, values, interests, and power relations as it is of skilled artistic imitation. (56)

For some time now the idea that Eakins's paintings provide faithful transcriptions of the seen world has been unconvincing. Shifting the emphasis to the scientific knowledge compressed into his likenesses may correspond better with Eakins's own conception of his artistic project, and it may make some room to accommodate disjunctions in the paintings, but it does not solve fundamental problems. One kind of fidelity to reality merely replaces another.

I have argued that a premise of Eakins's art--that seeing and knowing are fundamentally congruent--is untenable, and that his efforts to make them congruent generated pictorial disjunctions as inevitably as they produced fragmentary and partial likenesses. I now want to propose that these disjunctions served a purpose essential to Eakins's realism. They were integral to the rhetorical mechanisms of his paintings by virtue of their ability to signal to viewers that the paintings were engaged in a particular kind of truthful rendering of a real subject. That is to say, the seams in Eakins's paintings were not obstacles to his realism but essential vehicles of his art's reality effects. (57)

In the analyses of Eakins's paintings presented in this essay I have sought to demonstrate the reasonability of moving from recognition of certain peculiarities and discrepancies (missing reflections, undissipated rings of water, ambiguous temporalities, nonmimetic signification) to the artist's analytic, additive, research-laden process and his commitment to representing knowledge. The disjunctions characteristic of Eakins's art invite interpretation as effects of conflict between highly articulated ordering systems or as effects of pressuring knowledge into appearances. In this way the paintings signal their commitment to a particular kind of realism: one not of shallow mimicry but of likenesses grounded in reliable, systematic, bedrock knowledge and natural laws.

The fractures in Eakins's illusions serve, among other devices, to distinguish his art from a kind of realism that provides amazing simulations of surface appearances in an intricate web of illusion (as in William Harnett's trompe l'oeil paintings), as well as from a kind that employs pictorial theatrics to draw viewers into sensational exoticism and eroticism (as in the works of French academicism)--from any kind of realism that employs trickery to deceive viewers. "To get these things is not dexterity or a trick. No--it's knowledge," Eakins told his students. (58) Critic Clarence Cook reinforced this distinction when he contrasted Eakins's work with the academic realism of Edouard Detaille, "which has more to do with trick and mechanism than with art." (59) One need only compare Eakins's Crucifixion (1880), especially its simple composition and resolutely embodied Christ, with the spectacular Crucifixion panoramas by Paul Philippoteaux, Mihaly Munkacsy, Karl Frosch, Antonius Brouwer, and others that were dr awing large audiences in New York and other American cities in the 1880s and 1890s while celebrated in the popular press as triumphs of exact science, realism, and truth in painting. (60) Eakins exhibited his Crucifixion frequently during this period, and it must have carried an implicit critique of the sensationalism and gimmickry of popular, spectacular versions of the subject. (61)

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)

This last passage implies that Eakins's rigorous study of particulars was responsible for the pictorial disunity, and indeed, critics often traced the causes of disturbances to Eakins's scientific ambitions and systematic researches. Van Rensselaer's and Koehler's attributions of May Morning's discrepancies to Eakins's borrowings from instantaneous photographs are other cases in point. As often as not, Eakins's contemporaries found his realism to suffer from "errors" and "mannerisms" that alienated them from the paintings while reminding them of his knowledge and skill. The general form of this response--that disruptions alienate and point back to scientific process--displays remarkable consistency across the Eakins literature, although the features of the paintings that provoked the response have varied considerably.

Van Rensselaer and Koehler, of course, went on to conclude that Eakins's painting was a failure, which indicates that for them its disjunctions were producing anything but a reality effect. Paradoxically, the pattern of response I am tracing is most evident when a painting is perceived to exceed the acceptable limits of disjunction and therefore to fail as realism. When the reality effect is operating at maximum effectiveness--that is, when the impression of realism is most powerful--there will be little or no conscious awareness of disjunctions and, consequently, no evidence of their functioning. I envision them registering at the level of unconscious disturbance or inarticulate intuition, a vague sense that something is not quite right unaccompanied by the desire or ability to pinpoint the problem. That one is not fully aware of missing reflections, anachronisms, or semiotic inconsistencies in a painting does not mean that one is unaffected by them. Eakins's reality effect would have operated most efficient ly when his disjunctions subliminally signified research, science, and additive knowledge without producing confusion or distress. Ideally, a viewer would discern the illusion to be strong and yet contain indescribable elements that resisted ordinary, habitual processing of likenesses.

This was a hard balance to achieve; moreover, the point of maximum effectiveness would differ for different audiences. What worked for his contemporary followers would not necessarily work for twenty-first-century art historians. Yet the continued coexistence of claims for his realism alongside fascination with his disjunctions indicates remarkable endurance. It is difficult to account for these persistent and conflicting emphases in the reception of his work unless they are understood as two sides of a single coin.

Nelson Goodman has argued that the perception of a picture as realistic is motivated not by the quantity of information provided but by how easily it is read. According to this interpretation, the more stereotypical and familiar the conceptual classifications and modes of representation that generate an image, the more natural and true it will seem. (69) In other words, we should understand the phenomenon of realism as a matter of matching learned codes so closely that pure transparency of communication is achieved. This may be a good description of the kind of realism operating in stock photography, but Eakins's case is a clear exception to this account. It belongs rather to that tradition of artistic realism that stakes its claim to truth on calculated departures from familiar modes of seeing and knowing. (70) Such departures become the sign that mere conventions have been left behind and some more accurate matching of experience is being sought. This is especially true in cultural situations in which estab lished codes have lost some credibility. In such situations, a picture's opacity may be a more effective sign of realism, insofar as the difficulties and disjunctions in the image register as marks of the hard work of seeing and representing more clearly and truly. (71) The many devices responsible for the disjunctions in Eakins's paintings--analytic process, scientific research, emphatic application of systematic knowledge, precarious balancing of knowledge systems, selective use of photographic references, intermixing of diagrammatic icons, and other kinds of semiotic hybridity--were tools deployed in pursuit of truth beyond surface appearances and beyond accepted conventions.

Realism has been resurgent lately, thanks in part to the development of new media allegedly capable of reproducing a "virtual reality." The old notion of realism as pure, autonomous mimesis is alive and well in this fantasy. Eakins's commitment to a scientifically grounded realism may cast him as a grandfather to this development when the histories begin to be written. We can only hope that he will also help us see the outlines of virtual reality's own reality effects.

Realism and Modernism

A simplistic understanding of realism as intensified iconicity was implicit in the modernist critique of realist art as false and deceptive--an art of illusions portraying illusions. By refusing to be contained by that definition and by incorporating into a realist art semiotic experiments similar to those modernist artists were conducting, Eakins's work forces a rethinking of the realism versus modernism opposition. The argument of Eakins's painting is that a modern realism must find creative ways to overcome the limitations of vision, of appearances, and of mimesis as instruments for knowing and representing the world. All three kinds of limits--of the unaided eye to discern truthful information in the aspects of things, of the surfaces of the world to contain and display truth, of resemblance as a tool for representing knowledge and truth--were relentlessly tested in his paintings.

Abandoning mimesis could never have been the answer for Eakins; it would have meant giving up too much. The more or less plausible slices of the seen world he insistently deployed as skeletons for his paintings were essential to this researcher in "iconology." They put iconicity on the dissecting table and kept it there as the perpetual object of analysis and critique in his work. As Rowland had perfected the diffraction grating, and Muybridge instantaneous photography, so Eakins experimented with iconic representation in order to make it a finely machined tool for gathering, recording, and communicating precise information. Modernism's expressive distortion and abstraction represented abandonment of hope for mimesis as a foundation for a modern art, and Eakins was unwilling to follow this path as long as possibilities for enriching and extending iconicity remained untested. Taking mimesis beyond illusionism through scientific research and through judicious intermixing of diagrammatic and noniconic signs was Eakins's vision of the route to a modern art. It is easy to imagine that this could have seemed a course with considerable potential, but it lost momentum even in Eakins's own late work, and no brilliant followers took up the struggle.

Eakins's paintings confound our maps of late nineteenth-century American and European art in two significant ways. First, they disregard the terms of the period opposition between art and science. Caroline Jones and Peter Galison have described the shape of the binary economy of art and science at that moment: "the scientific method became linked inextricably with technology, industrial progress, and class mobility, while institutionalized art and literature came to be associated with the preservation of tradition, social order, and the conservation of rustic values." (72) They go on to point out that the modernist avant-garde defined itself in part through opposition to this binary structure by claiming for itself affiliation with science and technology. Eakins's involvement with science was certainly different from modernism's, particularly insofar as he employed it to extend the reality effects of academic realism. Nonetheless, it disrupted one of the fundamental oppositions through which academicism and m odernism were defining themselves.

The second mapping problem concerns the route that led Eakins to semiotic experimentation. His art did not pass through an Impressionist stage, in which the flux of appearances in experienced time and embodied perception undermined academic illusionism's orientation toward the fixed gaze of a transcendental eye. Eakins's commitment to the latter remained firm. The temporal peculiarities encountered in his paintings move in a direction opposite Impressionist time. They signify an effort to free vision from its various corporeal limitations. (73) Eakins pressed the mode of vision that has been called "Cartesian perspectivalism" to its limits, and his turn to semiotic complexity was an attempt to address problems that resulted from the extreme application of internal pressure to that mode. (74)

By indicating a different path toward modernist representation and by appropriating science for academic realism, Eakins's art complicates the familiar counterpositioning of realism and modernism in turn-of-the-century art. His case invites far-reaching reconstruction of these inherited stylistic classifications.

Eakins, Peirce, and the Culture of Deception

One last conclusion to which I wish to bring this study lies in the realm of cultural history. Eakins's commitment to a knowledge-based realism and his pursuit of it through semiotic variety had important dimensions in this field. Some of these can be illuminated by attending to similarities between Eakins and his slightly older contemporary Charles Sanders Peirce, who was rigorously analyzing and codifying the operations of signs. (75) My repeated references throughout the present essay to some of Peirce's semiotic classifications-- index, icon, and symbol--are motivated by historical as well as interpretative concerns. Although the two men apparently did not know one another's work, their interests and commitments overlapped to a remarkable degree. Peirce was an acquaintance of Henry Rowland and, like him, conducted research on color spectrography. He shared Eakins's interest in motion photography and in 1900 translated anonymously for the Smithsonian Institution Jules-Etienne Marey's "History of Chronophot ography." (76) Most important, there is a fundamental resemblance in the intellectual orientations and objectives of these two figures. Eakins tried to do with oil painting what Peirce attempted with logic: to make it a medium capable of complete representation of the truths of the world. Both pursued this objective by subordinating sense data or common sense to knowledge derived from rational and systematic analysis. During the 1880s, while Eakins worked on his drawing manual, Peirce was writing a textbook on logic. Both wished to elevate public understanding through education in formal systems.

Peirce's semiotic theory was a sustained effort to hone logic and bring truth within reach of reasoning. "Logic has in view only the possible truth and falsity of signs," he wrote. (77) His pursuit of truth was every bit as monomaniacal as Eakins's. For Peirce truth was no abstract philosophical ideal; he envisioned it as the unification of mind and world, which lent it urgency and immediacy. He believed that an individual's consciousness of self was also a consciousness of separation from the world and truth, and it was born of the experience of error. A child may be told that the stove is hot, but disbelieving, he touches it anyway. When he burns himself, "he becomes aware of ignorance, and it is necessary to suppose a self in which this ignorance can inhere....Ignorance and error are all that distinguish our private selves from the absolute ego of pure apperception." (78) Erro, ergo sum.

Interestingly, the example Peirce cites presents a situation in which vision is inadequate to self-protection. One cannot tell by looking if the stove is hot. Alienated from truthful knowledge, and unable to trust perceptual data without supplementary information, the individual is sundered from the world. Through his semiotic, philosophical, and scientific labors, Peirce sought ceaselessly to heal that rift and to achieve the unity of mind and world that truth represented.

I hope the parallels with Eakins's compulsion to make paintings in which the data of vision were rationalized and systematized in order to be rendered true are becoming clear by now. And perhaps it is a bit less surprising that without knowing Peirce's work, Eakins might have resorted to unconventional uses of signs in his efforts to force illusionistic painting to contain a maximum of truth. Some of Eakins's written statements imply a semiotic consciousness worthy of Peirce: "the big [that is, great] painter sees the marks that Nature's big boat made in the mud & he understands Them..."(70) Like Peirce, Eakins discovered that truthful propositions were not a matter of icons alone but had to partake of multiple varieties of signs. Moreover, both men understood resemblance to integrate the perceptual and the conceptual; true likeness necessarily involved diagrammatic and illusionistic elements. The clarity and coherence of Peirce's theory of icons suffer from this elision, but Eakins would have endorsed it who leheartedly. Some historical commonality must explain why Peirce's notoriously unstable and obscure semiotic classifications are so useful in understanding Eakins's paintings.

I sketch this parallel because I think it offers a useful way of drawing Eakins's art into larger issues of cultural history. I suggested earlier that a rift was opening for Eakins and his contemporaries, a rift between what is and what appears, between the truths of scientific knowledge systems and the ambiguities or deceptions of perceptual experience, and I associated these developments with modernity. A condensed clarification of this suggestion will bring this essay to a close.

Both Peirce and Eakins inhabited a culture that was coming to understand "modern life" as characterized by startling growth in the forms and occasions of deception. Cultural commentary frequently lamented the proliferation of fraud and deception that seemed a defining feature of modernity. Fraudulent advertising, mass-market swindles, contrived self-presentations in a confusing urban population, organized corruption and hypocrisy in politics and the economy, sensationalism in the new mass media, and the illusions that marked the limits of human perception as revealed through modern science-all these and more blended together, obscuring their differences and magnifying their threats to knowledge and judgment. Illusions, misperceptions, and hallucinations were assimilated to frauds, hoaxes, swindles, counterfeits, forgeries, tricks, cons, and humbugs. This subtly articulated period lexicon for deception is itself a sign of the issue's importance.

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.

Notes

My thanks to Martin Berger, Perry Chapman. Kathleen Foster, Michael Ann Holly, Jennifer King, Mare Simpson, and Margaret Werth for valuable contributions and criticisms.

(1.) Earl Shinn, using the nom de plume Earl Strahan, 'Notes," Nation, Mar. 12, 1874, 172. The works in question wee four watercolors Eakins contributed to the annual exhibition of the American Society of Painters in Watercolors in 1874.

(2.) Clement Greenberg wrote that Eakins "reentered academic painting, to destroy it by its own logic," in "Review of Two Exhibitions of Thomas Eakins," Nation, July 1, 1944; reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O'Brian, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 222.

(3.) In Peirce's terminology, a sign signifies some object to an interpretant. The terms index, iron, and symbol are Peirce's designations for three principal kinds of relations between signs and objects. Indexes are signs that have a real, physical relation with their object, as a spot in the carpet is a sign of a past accident involving spilled wine. Icons signify by resemblance: a portrait painting is an icon of a sitter. And symbols signify by convention: a certain configuration of stars and stripes is a sign for the United States. For a selection of Peirce's writings on signs, see James Hoopes, ed., Peirce on Signs (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

(4.) Thomas Eakins, quoted in William Brownell. The Art Schools of Philadelphia," Scribner's Monthly, Sept. 1879, 745-46.

(5.) While Eakins first says an artist needs to know as much as possible, he later indicates that there are limits to what knowledge is useful. Ibid., 750: "When I began to study ... I not only learned much that was unnecessary, but much that it took me some time--time that I greatly begrudged--to unlearn; for a time, my attention to anatomy hampered me."

(6.) See Barbara Novak, "Thomas Eakins, Science and Sight," in American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (New York: Praeger, 1969); Elizabeth Johns, "Drawing Instruction at Central High School and Its Impact on Thomas Eakins," Winterthur Portfolio 15 (summer 1980): 139-49; Goodrich; and Foster.

(7.) See Christina Currie. "Thomas Eakins under the Microscope: A Technical Study of the Rowing Paintings," in Thomas Eakins: The Rowing Pictures, ed. Helen Cooper, exis. cat., Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 1996. 92-96.

(8.) Goodrich, vol. 1, 81-83.

(9.) Novak (as in n. 6), 193.

(10.) In addition to The Champion Single Srulls, Eakins portrayed himself in The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake (1873), The Artist and His Father Hunting Reed Birds in the Cohansey Marshes (1874). The Cross Clinic (1875), and Swimming (1885). Further examples are given in Fried, 12-13.

(11.) A notorious extra hand in The Cross clinic signifies this double vantage. The assistant to whom it belonged is almost totally hidden behind Gross but fully apparent to Eakins the note taker. By virtue of its strange detachment, that hand symbolizes both disjunction between vision and knowledge and Eakins's commitment to full information For further discussion of The Gross Clinic as a drama of visibility, see Fried, 59ff.

(12.) Fried, 47, notes that the clouds lack reflections and that they resemble the foreground boat.

(13.) Earl Shinn described the painting this way in 1881: "By a kind of brutal exactitude which holds its a vise-grip the scientific facts of wave-shape and wave-mirroring, Eakins has arrived at a representation of flat water reflecting boat and sky which borders on the miraculous"; Shinn, "The Pennsylvania Academy Exhibition," Art Amateur, May 1881. 115.

(14.) Goodrich, vol. 1, 87, 94.

(15.) Eakins seems to have preferred working from a mechanical drawing of a boat and a perspective diagram. With such materials, he wrote, a draftsman "should be able to put her in perspective exactly.... It is likely that an expert would not have got the tilts by drawing at all, but would have figured tlsem out from trigonometric tables"; from a lectttre on perspective contained in Eakins's unpublished drawing manual, ca. 1885, quoted its Goodrich, vol. 1, 102.

(16.) As a student Eakins made a conscious decision to pursue this sort of process. "All the progress that I have made until today has beets the result of discoveries that have allowed me to divide my powers and means of working. Always divide to begin as strongly as possible"; from the notebook he kept during his travels in Spain its 1869-70, quoted in Foster, 50. Bregler (pt. 1, 384) quoted Eakins teaching his students this approach: "In mathematics the complicated things are reduced to simple things. So it is in painting. You reduce the whole thing to simple factors. You establish these, and work out from them, pushing them toward one another. This will make strong work."

(17.) See the illustrations Eakins prepared for his drawing manual, reproduced in Foster, 346-47. Foster, 127, notes that where reflections are generated geometrically. "they do not seem to have been studied outdoors." See also Charles Bregler's notes on Eakins's lectures, included in Kathleen Foster anti Cheryl Leibold, eds., Writing about Eakins: The Manuscripts in Charles Bregler's Thomas Eakins Collection (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 123.

(18.) Eakins's 1868 letter to his father is quoted in Goodrich, vol. 1, 31.

(19.) The quote is from Bregler, Pt. 1, 383, and continues (385): "You can copy a thing to a certain limit. Then you must use intellect."

(20.) See esp. Foster, 151-62; and Gordon Hendricks, "A May Morning in the Park." Bulletin of the Philadelphia Museum of Art 60 (spring 1965): 48-64.

(21.) Fairman Rogers, "The Zootrope," Art Interchange, July 9, 1879, 3.

(22.) The letter is quoted in Hendricks (as in n. 20), 51-52: "Dear Muybridge, I pray you to dispense with your lines back of the horse in future experiments.... Have one perpend[icular] centre line only behind the horse marked on your photographic plate. Then after you have run your horse and have photographed him go up and hold a measure perpendicularly right over die centre of Isis track and photograph it with one of the cameras just used."

(23.) Ibid., 57. Hendricks writes that Eakins "had to decide between making the horses look as if they were its motion (according to the tastes of the time), and making them look as lie knew-from the Muybridge photographs-they actually were. He also had to decide the same matter about the wheels of the coach."

(24.) Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 15.

(25.) The most colorful commentary is retrospective and appears in an unsigned review of Muybridge's Animal Locomotion, "New Publications; Wonders of the Camera," New York Times, Mar. 5, 1888, 3: "The horses looked as if struck by a petrifying disease in their places; the coach was also stationary, us sympathy with the team, but the wheels were whirling like the pin-borne fireworks sacred to St. Catherine." In Muybridge: Man in Motion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 157, Robert Haas asserts that this excerpt seas written by Muybridge, but he must be mistaken.

(26.) Philadelphia Press, Nov. 25, 1880, 5. Quoted in Amy Werbel, "The Critical Reception of Thomas Eakins's Work." in Wilmerding, 193.

(27.) Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, "The Philadelphia Exhibition--II," American Architect and Building News, Dec. 25, 1880, 303.

(28.) Sylvester Koehler, "Second Annual Exhibition of the Philadelphia Society of Artists," American Art Review, Jan. 1881, 110. The emphasis is Koehler's.

(29.) H. P. Robinson, "Fog or Focus?" International Annual of Anthony's Photographic Bulletin 2 (1889): 196-98, quoted in Beaumont Newhall, "Photography and the Development of Kinetic Visualization," Journal of the Warhurg and Courtauld Institutes 7 (1944): 45.

(30.) W. de W. Abney. "Are Instantaneous Photographs True?" International Annual of Anthony's Photographic Bulletin 2 (1889): 285, quoted in Newhall (as in n. 29), 44.

(31.) P. H. Emerson, Naturalistic Photography (New York: Spon, 1890), 161, quoted in Newhall (as in n. 29). 44. See also "New Publications; Wonders of the Camera" (as in n. 25).

(32.) William Homer has Suggested that Eakins's work was moving toward film and the production of an illusion of motion. He writes, "If Eakins had continued Isis photographic experiments, he, instead of Marcy or Edison, might conceivably have become the father of the motion picture process"; Homer and John Talbot, "Eakins, Muybridge and the Motion Picture Process." Art Quarterly 26 (summer 1963): 213. I think this statement mistakes the analytic emphasis of Eakins's motion studies. May Morning and other works show him to be relatively uninterested in illusionism compared with truth to structural principles. That lie did not move in the direction of simulating movement in photography seas not accidental.

(33.) In addition to the spinning-wheel subjects and Mending the Net, discussed below, Eakins's Swimming (1885) has relevance here. The splash made by its diving figure is like the wheels of May Morning in requiring stop-action treatment. Even more radically than the wheels of May Morning, the splash is schematically rather than illusionistically rendered. The water surface remains strangely unperturbed; only a few squirts of water, pictured as delicate white lines, shoot from the surface. This splash is especially peculiar for being so undramatic, given that it brings the issue of instantaneous movement to a climax in the picture. The diver is shown at the moment of impact between head and water, yet the physical effects of that collision are remarkably undeveloped. If Eakins tried to make an instantaneous photograph of a diving figure for study purposes, no evidence of it survives. If he did not attempt it, one wonders why. At least one critic viewing the painting in 1885 saw it as a motion study. "It repre sents a group of men bathing and is evidently intended to show the results of instantaneous photography. The attitude of the diver is presumably correct, but it does not convey the impression of any possible motion ...."; "At the Private View." Philadelphia Times, Oct. 29, 1885, 2; reprinted its Milan R. Hughston and Sarah Cash, "Exhibition History and Bibliography for Swimming," in Thomas Eakins and the Swimming Picture, ed. Doreen Bolger and Sarah Cash, exh. cat., Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, 1996, 123-24.

(34.) Foster, 269 n. 41.

(35.) Abney (as in n. 30), 286.

(36.) A useful overview of blurred wheels in western European painting is provided in Alexander Sturgis, Telling Time, exh. cat., National Gallery, London, 2000, 43-49.

(37.) Excerpts are reproduced in Goodrich. vol. 1, 61-62.

(38.) The sketch is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and is reproduced in Goodrich, vol. 1, 266. Eakins painted a number of small works roughly contemporary with May Morning that show women at spinning wheels. These were part of a group of historical subjects painted between 1876 and 1881. In these works Eakins experimented with solutions to the spinning-wheel problem. One of the most innovative, Courtship (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) tests Velazquez's solution by making the spokes largely invisible, but the folds of the woman's dress seen through the wheel double as blurs.

(39.) See, for example, George Stubbs, Phoeton and the Horses of the Sun (1762), reproduced in Sturgis (as in n. 36), 46.

(40.) From a page of undated notes--possibly a draft of a letter to Rogers--in the Bregler collection, quoted in Foster, 151, 269 n. 41.

(41.) Theodor Siegi, The Thomas Eakins Collection (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1978), 93.

(42.) A conversation with Joel Snyder helped me to clarify these issues.

(43.) Rogers (as in n. 21), 2, describes Eakins as diagramming movement.

(44.) On the possibility of changing the status of a sign through changing its context, see Michael Leja, "Peirce, Visuality, and Art," Representations 72 (fall 2000): 97-122.

(45.) The model, Weda Cook, did sing professionally and recalled to Lloyd Goodrich (vol. 2, 84) that she posed for this painting hundreds of times over two years. At the start of each session Eakins would ask her to sing "O Rest in the Lord" "so that he could observe the muscles of mouth and throat."

(46.) Eakins to Henry Rowland, Oct. 4, 1897, in the archives of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass. The letter is reproduced in Goodrich, vol. 2,139.

(47.) Named after Joseph von Fraunhofer, who had first observed about five hundred such lines in the 1820s.

(48.) Bryan Wolf describes the spectrum as a synecdoche for painting. See his catalogue entry for the painting in Wilmerding, 132.

(49.) Eakins, quoted by Goodrich, vol. 2, 140.

(50.) Eakins to Rowland (as in n. 46).

(51.) Bryan Wolf has written in Wilmerding, 129, that "at Rowland's suggestion, Eakins abandoned the idea of Fraunhofer lines and turned instead to designs supplied by Rowland himself." I have been unable to locate any evidence for this in the Rowland papers at Johns Hopkins University or in the Eakins archives at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. My impression is that the frame displays more or less what Eakins proposed. My discussion of the imagery of the frame draws heavily from A. D. Moore, "Henry Rowland," Scientific American, Feb. 1982, 150-61. Moore presents his interpretations of the frame's markings as if they were self-evident to anyone knowledgeable in physics, but there is reason to think otherwise. In a letter from 1973 in the files of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass., Aihud Pevsner, at the time professor of physics and chair of the physics department at Johns Hopkins University, noted that "the meanings of the symbols and diagrams on the frame have been the source of much speculation. I must confess that we have not yet deciphered all of them." For a clear account of Rowland's work on spectroscopy, see George Kean Sweetnam, The Command of Light: Rowland's School of Physics and the Spectrum (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2000).

(52.) In addition to the two frames discussed here, Eakins carved, painted, or decorated several others, including those for The Agnew Clinic (1889). Frank Hamilton Cushing (1895, frame lost), Salutat (1898, frame lost), and Rear Admiral George Wallace Melville (1904, Philadelphia version). The Cushing frame, according to Eakins, was designed by Gushing, "largely made and ornamented by him"; Judith Zilczer, "Eakins Letter Provides More Evidence on the Portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing," American Art Journal 14 (winter 1982): 75. The frame is reproduced and described in William H. Truettner, "Dressing the Part: Thomas Eakins's Portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing," American Art Journal 17 (spring 1985): 58-59. The Melville portrait has not been discussed, to my knowledge, in the literature on Eakins's frames. Embedded in the bottom panel of the frame are metal naval insignia--two stars and an anchor--in the same configuration and scale as they appear on the epaulets of the sitter's uniform. Like the strips of r awhide on the Gushing frame, these insignia are symbolically charged samples of materials portrayed in the painting.

(53.) Arguing for Eakins's involvement in a thematics of writing, Fried, 15, has drawn attention to the artist's interest in "graphic notational systems of all kinds." His discussion of The Gross Clinic also moves into the field of semiotics when he notes, 22, that blood and paint are treated as "tokens" or "natural equivalents" of one another.

(54.) In a discussion of Picasso's work in collage around 1912, Rosalind Krauss argues that the use of signs shifts from an iconic to a symbolic representational system. Eakins's blurs represent an analogous phenomenon emerging within a realist project. Krauss, "The Motivation of the Sign," in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. William Rubin et al. (New York: Museum of Modem Art, 1992), 261-86.

(55.) Henry James, preface to The American (New York: Scribners, 1907), xiv.

(56.) Roland Barthes, "The Reality Effect," in French Literary Theory Today, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 11-17; Nelson Goodman, esp. "Imitation" and "Realism," in Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), 6-10, 34-39; W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), esp. 53-94. One need not take an extreme relativist position on the issue of realism (that perception of mimetic truthfulness is entirely contingent and learned) to recognize the role of nonillusionistic factors in Eakins's reception as a realist.

(57.) A few interpreters have discussed Eakins's medical subjects in terms of their reality effects. In his discussion of The Gross Clinic, Fried (10-11, 63-64) has argued against the tendency to analyze the painting as a faithful transcription of an actual scene. He notes that this "tautological argument from reality" (11) is characteristic of scholarly analyses of this painting and of Eskimo's work generally. Jennifer Doyle has recast this argument to attribute to the painting a power to seduce viewers with a fantasy of origins, which she describes as one of "realism's definitive effects." The question, she writes, is "how [The Gross Clinic] generates an effect of the real through its solicitation of a particular kind of epistemological attention from the viewer"; Doyle, "Sex, Scandal, and Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic," Representations 68 (fall 1999): 1-33. Bridget Goodbody has argued that the realism of The Agnew Clinic is rooted in a dynamics of power involving the authority of medical discourse. The painting uses "a mechanics of displaced desire ... to trick the viewer into being an accomplice to the patient's ravishment.... This is precisely what allows the viewer to believe the fiction of The Agnew Clinic's realism"; Goodbody, "'The Present Opprobrium of Surgery': The Agnew Clinic and Nineteenth-Century Representations of Cancerous Female Breasts," American Art 8 (winter 1994): 33-51.

(58.) Eakins, quoted in Bregler, pt. 1, 383.

(59.) Cook, "The Water-Color Society Exhibition at the Academy," New York Tribune, Feb. 9, 1878, 5. Although Eakins's debts to academic training were substantial, his researches were oriented toward scientific inquiry rather than the theatrical interests of Jean-Leon Gerome and his associates.

(60.) See Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama; History of a Mass Medium (1980), trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone, 1997), 343; and George Clinton Deosmore Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. 13 (New York:Columbia University Press, 1942), 552-53.

(61.) For the exhibition history and reception of Eakins's Crucifixion, see Elizabeth Milroy, "Consummatum est ...': A Reassessment of Thomas Eakins's Crucifixion of 1880," Art Bulletin 71(1989): 269-84.

(62.) Fried, 73, has described Eakins's paintings as animated by an acute tension between "projective" and "pictorial" modes of seeing. The paintings produce conflicting desires "to project oneself imaginatively into the represeated scene" and "to keep one's distance and apprehend the painting as an object of 'pictorial' seeing." My own view is quite close to Fried's at this point, although I think he overdramatizes the tension in the work. Moreover, his interpretation differs from mine in situating this tension in Eakins's rival commitments to writing and drawing on the one hand and to painting on the other and in the psychobiographical factors implicated in this dual commitment.

(63.) The laboriousness of Eakins's paintings was a significant feature of the critical commentary on his work. "The industry and endeavor to be true are readily acknowledged," wrote one anonymous critic, "The Academy of Design," New York Times, Mar. 30, 1882, 5. In Art Amateur, Shinn (as in n. 13) noted that Eakins's paintings were "without any labor-saving ideas of brushwork or texture." Eakins also presented himself, through manner, clothing, and studio ambience, as a laborer or workman rather than an aesthete. After visiting Eakins in 1881, critic Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer noted that his studio contained so many anatomical models that it resembled a butcher's shop rather than the refined aesthetic environment that artists such as William Merritt Chase preferred. Eakins's look and manner reminded her more of an inventor or a mechanic than an artist. See her letter to Sylvester Koehler, quoted in Lois Dinnerstein, "Thomas Eakins' Crucifixion as Perceived by Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer," Arts 53 (M ay 1979): 140-45.

Eakins literally juxtaposed his own painting with Whistler's in Music (1904), in which a violinist and a pianist are shown in performance. Whistler's painting of the Spanish violinist Sarasate is reproduced in the upper right corner of the painting. The small size of the copied painting indicates either that it hangs in the distant background or that it refers to a reduced-scale reproduction. One effect of the juxtaposition of the two violinists is to emphasize the difference in painting styles; Whistler's musician is flattened and disembodied in comparison with Eakins's painstakingly rendered figure. At the same time, Whistler's willful flaunting of the artifice of painting, which evokes things in the world through suggestive painted signs for them, is likened to the semiotic daring involved in Eakins's appropriation and handling of Whistler's work. The calculated placement of Sarasate in the very corner of Eakins's painting and the simulation of Whistler's style ensure that the quotation will provoke compar ison not only of the violinists but also of the painters. See Steven Nash's catalogue entry for Music in Masterworks at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, ed. Karen Lee Spaulding (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1999), 66. I am grateful to Kathleen Pyne for suggesting the relevance of this painting for my argument.

(64.) Philadelphia Press, Nov. 25, 1880, quoted in Hendricks (as in n. 20), 61.

(65.) Shinn (as in n. 13).

(66.) L[eslie] W. M[iller], "Art: The Awards of Prizes at the Academy," American, no. 274 (Nov. 7, 1885): 45, reprinted in Hughston and Cash (as in n. 33), 124.

(67.) S.G.W. Benjamin, "The Exhibitions: IV. Society of American Artists," American Art Review 1 (Apr. 1880): 261.

(68.) "Art Notes," New York Art Journal 8 (1882): 190.

(69.) Goodman (as in n. 56).

(70.) In contrast to Goodman, Fried, 64, sees the history of artistic realism as one in which "tactics of shock, violence, perceptual distortion, and physical outrage were mobilized against prevailing conventions of the representation of the human body specifically in order to produce a new and stupefyingly powerful experience of the 'real.'"

(71.) Goodman's argument has been criticized by Mitchell (as in n. 56), 72-73, on the grounds that styles of depiction can become "familiar, habitual, and standard" without ever being regarded as "realistic." I agree with Mitchell that "Realism' cannot simply be equated with the fansiliar standard of depiction but must be understood as a special project within a tradition of representation Nonetheless, within this enlarged conception of realism, familiarity and unfamiliarity do play significant roles. See also Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994).

(72.) The quotation comes from the introduction to the volume edited by Caroline Jones and Peter Galison, Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York: Roudedge, 1998), 3.

(73.) Eakins's careful specification of viewing distance and height in his perspective studies may imply an embodied viewer. I would argue just the opposite: his specifications plot the location of the monocular vantage point fundamental to classical perspective theory.

(74.) On Cartesian perspectivalism. see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), esp. chap. 2.

(75.) Peirce lived from 1839 to 1914. Eakins from 1844 to 1916. For more on Peirce, see Leja (as in n. 44).

(76.) Charles Sanders Peirce Papers, Cambridge, Mass., Houghton Library, Harvard University, file 1514 (S). The marginal notes in the manuscript of Peirce's translation reveal that he was unimpressed by Marey's powers of logic and argument. His disparaging comments begin with wisecracks about Marey's discussion of time-lapse photography: "He ought to show the movements of slime moulds and the growth of a child from the cradle to old age." A later section on the scientific applications of chronophotography provokes this outburst from Peirce: "I wouldn't have written this if I had known what a charlatan this creature was to show himself to be.... This is unspeakable rot! A disgrace to an educated man. As if there ever could be an analogous situation to that of Galileo! Is the camera going to supply intelligence and genius? Does not this mark the degeneracy of France? This man is Membre de I'Institute. This is enough for me. I want to know no more of this charlatan.... He simply has no conception of the subject. "

(77.) From a draft of a letter from Peirce to Lady Welby dated Mar. 9, 1906, reprinted in Charles Hardwick, ed., Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1977), 199.

(78.) Charles Sanders Peirce, "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man," Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1868; reprinted in Writings of Charles S. Perice A Chronological Edition, ed. Edward C. Moore et al. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1984), vol. 2, 202-3. The emphasis is Peirce's.

(79.) Foster and Leibold (as in n. 17), 206.

(80.) Foster, 223, notes that Eakins abandoned a nearly completed first version of this painting and restarted on a larger canvas in order to accommodate the eye-test chart. "We can be sure that, having gone to so much trouble to include this eye chart, Eakins felt its presence was extremely significant to both the design and the meaning of his picture."

Frequently Cited Sources

Bregler, Charles, "Thomas Eakins as a Teacher," pt. 1, Arts 17 (Mar. 1931): 379-86; pt. 2, 18 (Oct. 1931): 29-42.

Foster, Kathleen, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered: Charles Bregler's Thomas Eakins Collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

Fried, Michael, Realism, Writing Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Goodrich, Lloyd, Thomas Eakins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

Wilmerding, John, ed., Thomas Eakins (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993).

Michael Leja is Sewell C. Biggs Professor of American Art at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Reframing Abstract Expressionism (Yale University Press, 1993) and is currently completing a new book, Art, Modernity, and Deception in New York, 1869-1917 [Department of Art History, University of Delaware, Newark, Del. 1971 6-2516].

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