‘Eakins errs just a little — a little — in the direction of the flesh,’ Walt Whitman observed in the late 1880s. Ideally he would have had the Frenchman Millet do his portrait, but the painter of humble peasants was already dead. Eakins made him a flushed old soul in jovial mood.
Sidney Kirkpatrick’s account of Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) errs a little in the direction of voiceover-speak. His Eakins is ‘a neglected and tortured genius’ for whom Philadelphia, city of love, was no fleshpot and who, though somewhat prim himself, was rated outrageous by the leading figures of that God-fearing hell-hole. This Eakins is one of those posthumously vindicated figures common in popular accounts of 19th-century painting. ‘An enigma who shocked art lovers and critics alike in his time … today he is considered the finest portrait painter our nation has ever produced.’
Born into a reasonably prosperous family (his father taught penmanship and developed a business doing handwritten diplomas and citations for Philadelphians keen to certify their respectability), young Tom tried medical school but decided that his future lay in art and went to Paris.
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