‘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. There, studying under Jean-Léon Gérôme, he learnt polished technique. He returned home with what Whitman deemed to be triple dexterity: ‘the hand of the mechanic, the hand of a sculptor and the hand of the surgeon’.
The best of Eakins is his handling of 1870s Philadelphia and Philadelphians. There is Dr Gross, mutton-chop whiskers lit from above as he turns from the incision in his osteomyelitis patient’s leg to explain a surgical procedure to his audience. And there are able-bodied chaps sculling with geometric precision under clear skies on the mirror- like Schuylkill river. ‘The Crucifixion’ (which currently shares a room with, among others, ‘Whistler’s Mother’ in the excellent Americans in Paris at the National Gallery) features another such chap, a waxy-marmoreal ‘Jesus of the Life Class’, for whom he built a 12-foot cross.
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