Thomas Eakins: The Rowing Pictures

 

By Stephen May

NEW HAVEN, CONN. -- Two outstanding exhibitions now on tour reflect continuing interest in the complex methods and grand art of Thomas Eakins, America's finest realist painter.

"Thomas Eakins: The Rowing Pictures," the first exhibition to explore the earliest major project of the artist's career, already seen at the National Gallery of Art, is on view at the Yale University Art Gallery through January 14. It travels next to the Cleveland Museum of Art, to be seen there February 15 through May 15.

An even more tightly focused but equally fascinating show, "Thomas Eakins and the Swimming Picture," examines the background and implications of one of the painter's most interesting and acclaimed canvases. Following showings at the Amon Carter Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Brandywine River Museum, it will be on display at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art January 17 through April 27.

Organized by Helen C. Cooper, Holcombe T. Greene curator of American paintings and sculpture at the Yale University Art Gallery, the rowing exhibition brings together all the artist's known works on the subject: nine paintings and 14 works on paper. It offers intriguing insights into how this meticulous craftsman worked and reworked a challenging theme, and set the stage for subsequent achievements. This narrow inquiry, noted Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr, the National Gallery's Curator of American and British Paintings, "allows you to burrow into the artist's work...and see Eakins for the first time as a mature artistic personality."

An added visual bonus in New Haven is a display of a sleek, contemporary rowing shell loaned by actress Meryl Streep. Little-changed since Eakins painted them, these thin-skinned, fragile, beautiful craft "walk on water," Cooper observed.

Rowing was a natural subject for Eakins (1844-1916), a native of Philadelphia, who was born and spent virtually his entire life in the City of Brotherly Love. His home and studio at 1729 Mount Vernon Street (now being restored for public tours) is a few blocks from the Schuylkill River, famed for its Boat House Row, oarsmen and races.

After drawing instruction at Central High School and courses at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and at Jefferson Medical College, where he studied anatomy, Eakins went to Paris in 1866. During three years there he studied with the prominent French academic painter Jean Leon Gerome, and in the atelier of portraitist Leon Bonnat. These experiences helped establish a foundation of academic technique which underpinned Eakins' work for a lifetime. Also highly influential was a visit to Spain in 1869, where he came to admire the earthy palette and broad technique of Ribera and, especially, Velazquez.

"If I live to keep my good health," Eakins wrote his father from Paris in 1868, "I am certain now of one thing that is to paint what I can see before me better than namby pamby fashion painters." He thus defined the philosophy of uncompromising realism which was to govern his entire career.

Eakins returned to Philadelphia in 1870, determined to make his mark as a realistic painter of contemporary American life. Plunging into the artistic mileau of the community, he continued his studies of the human body, and began to paint what he saw at home and outdoors around the city.

Eakins found an ideal theme in rowing on the nearby Schuylkill River. His attachment to the subject was enhanced by his own experiences as an enthusiastic amateur oarsman and his thorough, scientific knowledge of the human figure. In addition, as art historian Martin A. Berger argues in a provocative catalogue essay, the subject offered Eakins - who was unmarried, had avoided military service in the Civil War, lived and worked in his parents' home and was unable to earn his own living - a means to assert his masculinity.

Eakins' three-year exploration of rowing themes - which introduced the sport as a subject for serious art - came at a time when shell racing was America's most popular spectator sport.

"The rowers that Eakins painted were the sports superstars of their day," says rowing historian William Lanouette. Philadelphia was a particular hotbed for both amateur and professional oarsmen.

For Eakins, the sport had the added appeal of combining physical strength with practice, discipline, perseverance and refined technique - attributes he recognized were similar to those necessary for artistic success. From his own experiences and observations, he knew that the single scull racer in particular is completely on his own.

The painstakingly prepared perspective drawings and other preliminary sketches in the rowing show document how the young painter methodically investigated various pictorial problems, especially how to depict the physical motions of rowing and how to devise accurate and convincing perspectives combining closely observed foreground figures and deep space.

"Nothing," says Cooper, "was left to chance."

Out of this laborious process, which clearly required more perspiration than inspiration, came superb, highly finished oils and watercolors in which Eakins depicted single scullers, pair-oared shells and four-man barges, at rest and in midstroke, near or distant, at sunset or high noon, in open water and under bridges.

The hands-down highlight of the exhibition is "The Champion Single Sculls" (1871). Painted when Eakins was 26 years old, it reflects his mastery of difficult technical issues and is surely one of the finest paintings in American art.

The first in a lifetime of paintings of people of accomplishment, it features the artist's boyhood chum and rowing and swimming companion, Max Schmitt, in his shell Josie, at ease in a practice session. The canvas commemorates Schmitt's victory in a three-mile race to regain the single scull championship of the Schuylkill Navy Regatta in October 1870. In the middle distance, Eakins depicted himself rowing a scull inscribed with his name and the date.

Illuminated by the late afternoon sun, the picture captures the stillness of the moment with crystalline clarity, and is filled with genre details and forms frozen in time. Eakins gave "The Champion Single Sculls" to Schmitt, who made it the first Eakins painting shown publicly. It is now part of a large Eakins trove at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Eakins' favorite rowing models were Barney and John Biglin, celebrated professional oarsmen from New York, whom he knew and admired, and portrayed in a memorable series of 1872-74. A number of fastidious preparatory studies document how "The Pair-Oared Shell" (1872), showing the sinewy brothers practicing, evolved from sketches in which the painter systematically worked his way through problems of spatial relationships, placement of figures and landscape masses. Eakins' own observations, based on close association with the sport and the oarsmen, added verve and color to the finished canvas.

In the early 1870s Eakins began to experiment with watercolor, which was attracting great interest among American artists. He did several versions of the powerful John Biglin, who dominated American single sculling for a decade, in action. Eakins sent an early Biglin watercolor to his old teacher, Gerome, who felt it was too static. Eakins responded with several new efforts.

One of the later versions was praised by Gerome, who wrote Eakins, "Your watercolor is entirely good and I am very pleased to have in the New World a pupil such as you who does me honor."

Eakins' rowing images recorded the golden era of the sport in America. Within a few years gambling, dirty tricks and race-fixing scandals caused rowing to lose much of its popularity. By the end of the Nineteenth Century it had disappeared as a professional sport.

The rowing pictures are enduring masterpieces by a young athlete/painter who came to see rowers - representing all classes of society, pursuing excellence and committed to hard work - as symbols of America's egalitarian spirit. Eakins appreciated that rowing was a sport open to all, epitomized by John Biglin, a laborer by day. Rowing was, observes Berger, a "true meritocracy" in Victorian America.

One year after his last rowing canvas, Eakins completed "The Gross Clinic," the bloody masterpiece which many consider the greatest of all American paintings.

"This extraordinary work," says Cooper, "celebrates a different kind of human achievement - that of a great surgeon - but it too combines the best of head and hand. It owes much to the lesson of the rowers."

This beautiful, informative exhibition offers not only an exceptional record of a period when rowing was wildly popular in this country, but provides insights into the creative process of a young painter on his way to becoming one of our greatest artists. The excellent catalogue, with essays by Cooper, Berger, Christina Currie and Amy B. Werbel, is a valuable addition to Eakins scholarship. It sells for $20.95 softcover and $30 hardcover.

"Swimming" (formerly known as "The Swimming Hole") offers another fine subject for intense examination, embodying as it does many of Eakins' basic beliefs about the beauty of the human body and the importance of scientific study of the human form by artists, as well as his allegiance to the classical tradition and his use of photography as an aid to painting.

A revealing exhibition, organized by the Amon Carter Museum, it benefits from a recent cleaning of the painting and five years of research into its background. Those efforts documented the single-word title Eakins used when he first exhibited the work, and that "Swimming" was completed in 1885, rather than 1883, as previously thought.

Helping explain the centerpiece canvas and place it in context are some 40 works by Eakins, including oil paintings, preliminary oil sketches, sculpture, photography and three-dimensional objects. They demonstrate how he utilized both the traditional technique of oil sketching and the experimental method of photography in crafting his complex composition.

The painting was commissioned by Edward H. Coates, a Philadelphia businessman, philanthropist and key trustee of the Pennsylvania Academy where Eakins was teaching. A splendid bust by Philadelphia sculptor Charles Grafly suggests the mustachioed Coates' formal, patrician air.

Although aware of the controversies swirling around Eakins' teaching methods which emphasized using nude models, Coates asked the painter to create a canvas with the understanding it might someday enter the Academy's collection. With that significant incentive, Eakins devoted much thought and effort to the project.

The artist's exposure to the European academic tradition was very much on his mind as he undertook the Coates commission. "In Eakins' imagination," writes art historian Kathleen A. Foster in the accompanying catalogue, "swimmers and bathers - long a staple of the European tradition - could be recast as American, too."

In the summer of 1884 Eakins and his models - friends and students - took a train to Bryn Mawr, several miles west of Philadelphia, then proceeded to Dove Lake, a new recreational spot a few miles away. There Eakins used both oils and a camera to produce his preliminary studies.

Photographs from the outing show the artist and the young men swimming nude or posing on the rocky pier depicted in the painting, while oil sketches explore the effects of light and color at the site. Back in his studio, Eakins drew on this wealth of preparatory materials to create an ambitious, classically inspired image.

The result was what Eakins scholar Elizabeth Johns calls "the most intense, the most thought-provoking picture." In it, the nude bathers climb, lounge, stand or dive into the water, assuming a coordinated cycle of classical poses. The artist's setter, Harry, paddles in the watery foreground.

As he had done in several rowing pictures, Eakins inserted himself in the lower right, swimming toward the younger men, his graying head, upper back and left arm in view.

At the time he was creating "Swimming," Eakins was also immersed in a series of paintings and bas-reliefs exploring Arcadian themes. A large, ambitious oil, "Arcadia" (circa 1883) shows two nude young men playing instruments as a somewhat formless person listens in an idyllic, pastoral setting. A plaster relief of the same title and photographs of students posing in the landscape share the possibly homoerotic mood and Neoclassical quality of "Swimming."

Also on view are a series of photographs Eakins took of his students in motion and at rest. These were outgrowths of his work with pioneering English photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who developed a sequential photography technique for capturing the movements of human and animal figures, samples of which are displayed.

Although Eakins and Coates knew each other well and the artist poured much talent, conviction and effort into creating the swimming picture, it was apparently too graphic a representation of recognizable people in the nude for the patron to keep. Coates initially lent "Swimming" to the Academy's fall exhibition where - surprisingly - it went virtually unmentioned by critics.

Before long, however, while stressing "the present canvas is ... admirable in many ways," Coates asked Eakins to exchange it for another painting, one "more acceptable" for donation to the Academy.

Coates selected "The Pathetic Song" (1881), a more typical, tamer work, much admired to this day. The canvas immortalizes the point when the soloist and her accompanists reach the end of a performance. As art historian William Innes Homer has observed, "It would be hard to find a more skillful representative of a musical moment anywhere in the history of art."

Within a month after Coates returned the swimming canvas, the culminating incident which triggered Eakins' dismissal from his teaching post at the Academy occurred, when he removed the loincloth from a male model in a women's life class. Although to Eakins the nude was "the most beautiful thing there is," to many Victorian-era Philadelphians the unclothed body was indecent, certainly not a fit subject for an artist's brush, much less mixed classes of students.

Sadly, "Swimming" remained in the painter's possession until his death, depriving the public of the opportunity to appreciate and debate its merits and meaning. Sold for $700 by Eakins' widow Susan in 1925 to the Fort Worth Art Association, it was purchased by the Amon Carter Museum from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth for $10 million in 1990.

The exhibition also explores the results of the painting's recent conservation, which removed layers of discolored varnish and overpaint, brought out the work's rich and varied surface and subtle tonalities, and revealed Eakins' painstaking manner of putting paint to canvas. Reinstalled in its original gilt Renaissance Revival frame, "Swimming" is once again an unforgettable sight to behold.

As this splendid exhibition underscores, "Swimming" is recognized today as a provocative masterpiece by one of our most challenging, complicated artists. For all the insights provided by this provocative display and catalogue, this is unlikely to be the last word on the painting.

As Foster points out, "Swimming" was an expression of Eakins' mind - a visual manifesto, a modern and academic paradox - as well as a complex image of period culture. Tensely wrought, it remains unsettled and ambiguous, inviting - like all of Eakins' best work - renewed investigation and continuing development of meaning.

The exhibition catalogue, loaded with illustrations, is very well done. Edited by Doreen Bolger and Sarah Cash, with informative essays by Bolger, Cash, Marc Simpson, Foster, Johns, Richard Brettell, Claire M. Barry and Milan R. Hughston, it sheds useful light on this work and aspects of Eakins' thinking. It sells for $30 (soft cover only).