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Eakins revised

Magazine Antiques, June, 2005 by Alfred Mayor

Henry Adams's revisionist biography of Thomas Eakins concludes with a pair of photographs of the pot-bellied painter at about the age of sixty-five. He is shown naked, first standing in the shallows of the Cohansey River in Fairton, New Jersey, and then diving in. The author comments that "In these two photographs he resembles nothing more than a big, fat, naked baby, and for once in his life, Thomas Eakins looks truly happy."

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It is about the only mention of happiness in this extensive book, which draws on the mother lode of Eakins related papers salvaged by his student Charles Bregler and now in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. The resulting portrait is very different from the Eakins of Lloyd Goodrich, which was for decades the official Eakins.

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Adams has uncovered a darker picture not only of the painter but of his complex and unhappy family. He writes: "If we discard the notion that Eakins represents some sort of perfect honesty and perfect truthfulness, it allows us to wake up to the fact that much of Eakins's work is very strange." Despite his obsession with anatomy, Eakins's portraits often embody very unrealistic anatomical details, particularly in the matter of women's breasts, which "often look like padding strapped to a male figure." Often too the haunting and haunted faces of his sitters are far from being faithful likenesses.

Eakins painted 246 portraits, of which only 25 were commissioned, and of those at least 5 were rejected by the sitters. Often the subjects never bothered to pick up their portraits, which Eakins gave them, or if they did, they were so displeased that they consigned them to the attic or destroyed them. The fact that many subjects looked pained or even in pain was often due to Eakins's agonizingly slow and measured pace. Adams writes: "Many of those who posed for him described his movement as lethargic. It is hard to avoid the impression that his torpid pace was deliberate, and that he was interested in tiring his sitters so that he could record their fatigue and psychological distress. Indeed, other aspects of sitting for Eakins were psychologically disturbing, particularly for women. His language was often crude. He told dirty jokes. He farted. He sometimes appeared for sessions in his underwear or in inappropriate clothes. He pressured his sitters to pose in the nude."

Nudity was an obsession for Eakins and the reason often given for why he was fired from his teaching post at the Pennsylvania Academy when he whisked the posing strap off the male model before a class of women. There are many photographs of Eakins naked, with and without other naked men or women. The most populous of these photographs is a series of studies for The Swimming Hole of about 1883-1885, which depicts six naked swimmers, including Eakins. This emphasis on remaining in the state of nature has led to ingenious but inconclusive speculations about whether Eakins was homosexual. Goodrich argued that homosexuality is basically effeminate, and because Eakins glorified aggressive masculine qualities he could not have been homosexual. Whitney Davis hedged his bets by proposing that Eakins was "not not homosexual." Adams wonders "whether Eakins could have been both homosexual and not homosexual at the same time. In other words, his painting seems to challenge the usual boundaries between the heterosexual, the homosocial, the homoerotic, and the homosexual. According to this view, we might suppose that Eakins's sexual identity was unstable, and open to reconstitution and revision."

In addition to his penchant for taking off his clothes, Eakins was fond of painting while sitting on the floor, drinking a quart of milk with each meal, and always carrying a pistol. These and other eccentricities cause Adams to apply Freud's theories at some length. Discussing the justly famous clinic paintings, The Gross Clinic of 1875, and The Agnew Clinic of 1889, Adams draws heavily on Freud: "If we view both clinic paintings as statements of aggression against Eakins's parents, they form a neat pair: the first [Gross Clinic] addressing his Oedipal relationship with his father, the second his even more troubled relationship with his mother. Whereas the first painting represents a symbolic act of male castration, the second portrays a kind of dismemberment that would turn a woman into something more similar to a man."

Adams repeatedly relates Eakins's paintings to events in his tortured family life, claiming that at moments of tension or tragedy at home Eakins turned to the discipline of perspective, as if to bring order into chaos. The rowing pictures, for example, were painted around the time of his insane mother's death and required the most complex preparatory perspective drawings. Eakins taught perspective, mechanical drawing, and isometric drawing to his students at the Pennsylvania Academy using a manual that he wrote for the purpose but never published. It was saved, like so much else, by Bregler, and after passing through several collections ended up at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in a rather chaotic condition. It has been pieced together along with the illustrations the artist made for it and has now been published by the museum. It is hard to understand how an art student with an average mathematical background could understand much of what the manual says, for Eakins could as easily have been a scientist as a painter.

Eakins revised

Magazine Antiques, June, 2005 by Alfred Mayor

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