Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) was one of the greatest
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Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) was one of the greatest American painters yet he met with little success during his lifetime. Eakins always believed that his life had little to do with his art. He approached his art from a scientific, realist perspective and held that everything the viewer needed was present on the canvas. But connections between Eakins' beliefs, the difficulties of his artistic career, and his private life are important keys to understanding his work. Three examples of typical Eakins subjects demonstrate how knowledge of his ideas and circumstances illuminates his work. His 1875 painting The Gross Clinic was a portrait of a celebrated surgeon that reflects not only Eakins' artistic influences but his ideas about heroism in American life. His Portrait of a Lady with a Setter Dog (1885) was a portrait of his wife Susan Eakins, painted shortly after their marriage. This work offers insight into Eakins' private life as well as providing an example of the type of psychological realism that he sought in private portraiture. The third painting, Salutat (1898), is one of many pictures Eakins painted of sporting events and activities--either as portraits of individuals or genre pictures. Eakins viewed sports and physical activity not just as a special challenge to the artist but as an aspect of life that brought out many of people's best qualities. These works are only a small part of the great number painted by Eakins but they give a great deal of insight into
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ed, the major accent in the picture. As Johns points out, Eakins began with a thin layer of red underpainting and red accents run throughout the picture. As these red highlights get closer to the center of the painting they become more vivid. The reds move in a vortex beginning with the bit of deep red floor visible beneath the operating table, moving to the dull red of the doorway to the operating circle, the orange-red in the railing to Gross' left and the pen of the recording doctor, the mother's chair-back, red pens in Eakins' paint box (seen in the foreground), the reds of blood on the hands of the assisting doctors and in the wound, and (with the retracting tool curving up and pointing the way) "climactically, on Gross's hand and scalpel." The manner of painting varies throughout the picture in a similar fashion. The sketchiness of anything that falls outside the spotlight is contrasted with the increasingly flamboyant but precise painting of the details of the operation and, again in climax, the painting is "densest and most vivid, at the site of the working hands of the protagonist." In the combination of the intensely expressive head and the vividly rendered hand of Dr. Gross Eakins locates the essence of the com
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Approximate Word count = 2474
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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