Projecting an Image: The Contested Cultural Identity of Thomas Eakins - Exhibition Reviews

The master himself appears in the nude. In one series of shots, he stands on the studio floor, an unidentified naked young woman (possibly a student, maybe his wife) hoisted aloft in his arms, his genitalia bobbing into the light beneath her rump and his fingers tucking into the flesh beneath her exposed breast (Fig. 6). What's going on here? The master appears to be so... so masterful. Is that a smirk on his face? It's difficult to say for sure, but he seems to be grinning. Are he and she playacting dominance and submission, that is, making theater of the male/female, master/slave dyad in a manner that sets it on its ear? Or is this a straight-up display of sexual prowess and control, the Mermaid in the clutches of the Minotaur? The wall label affixed to the one photograph from the series that was used in the exhibition came close to acknowledging the problematic sexual dynamics of the picture, only to brush aside such considerations with a discourse that at once heroized the artist and normalized his behavi or: "Any photograph mixing male and female nudes would have raised eyebrows from all quarters, and Eakins reserved for himself the task of posing for such images and the risk of disapproval." (15)

Eakins was breaking all rules with teaching practices such as these. What we see in this photograph did not constitute normal studio procedure, not in Philadelphia, nor in Paris. For us today to shrug off such an obvious transgression of the academic, pedagogical, and moral codes of the time by regarding the photograph as one more piece of evidence demonstrating Eakins's disinterested pursuit of scientific and artistic knowledge--and, moreover, his heroism ("reserved for himself.., the risk of disapproval")--smacks of either naivete or obtuseness.

The cache of letters and affidavits that Bregler had sequestered from prying eyes turned out to be equally revelatory about Eakins and his circle. It has long been known that Eakins was forced to resign from his position as director of instruction at the Pennyslvania Academy because in the midst of an impromptu lecture on anatomy in a life study class attended by female students he had impulsively stripped away the loincloth of a male model, leaving nothing to the imagination. The Bregler documents reveal that the loincloth incident precipitated a crisis already in the works; for months, if not longer, a cabal of senior students and junior instructors at the academy had been looking for a way to depose their leader.

Rumors, it seems, had been circulating beyond the academy walls that well-bred female art students were posing in the nude for one another (a matter of truth, as it turns out). In the face of such rumors, certain of these students, and their indignant husbands, boyfriends, or brothers, felt cheapened and humiliated, prompting them to mount a whispering campaign against Eakins for having encouraged the women to remove their clothes in front of one another in the first place. The most outraged of the assailants was an academy student named Frank Stephens, who was married to Eakins's youngest sister, Caddie. Stephens insinuated that the artist had had incestuous relations with another sister, Maggie Eakins, recently deceased, while she was his pupil. More than a decade later, incest allegations surfaced again when the artist's twenty-four-year-old niece Ella Crowell, who had taken art lessons with her uncle, turned a gun on herself. Her father, another Eakins brother-in-law, William Crowell, blamed Ella's death on the painter, whom he said had corrupted and perhaps even molested his daughter. All these matters and others, a welter of unproven charges and countercharges, have come to light by way of the documents long stashed beneath Mary Bregler's bed. (16)