Thomas Eakins

The life of Thomas Eakins,
scene by scene

1. 1866Paris

   A twenty-two-year-old from Philadelphia arrives in Paris. That autumn Thomas Eakins was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts and began working in the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme. He also studied with the painter Léon Bonnat and the sculptor Augustin Dumont.

   While he was in Paris, he wrote to his father almost every week. His letters to family and friends from 1866 to 1870 were later published as The Paris Letters of Thomas Eakins. Thanks to them, we can still read what excited the young painter and what let him down, in his own words.

2. 1870Seville

   Down in Seville, in the south of Spain, Eakins took on his first big picture. His models were a family of street musicians, the Requenas.

   He hired the family to pose for him, set up his easel on the roof of his hotel, and worked there for more than three months. The young daughter, Carmelita, also got a lively oil sketch of her own.

3. 1876Philadelphia

   Philadelphia is throwing a huge fair for the nation's hundredth birthday. Eakins sent in a large canvas he had finished the year before, The Gross Clinic. It shows the surgeon Samuel Gross lecturing in the middle of an operation, his hand red with blood.

   The art jury turned it down. Instead of hanging with the paintings, it ended up in the U.S. Army Post Hospital exhibit, among the medical displays. In 1878 alumni of Jefferson Medical College bought it for $200, and it stayed at the college for more than a century.

4. 1882Philadelphia

   The old man in The Writing Master is the painter's father, Benjamin Eakins. Benjamin filled in diplomas and other documents by hand in fine script. That same year the family lost Margaret, the sister Eakins had painted again and again. Look at the picture. Benjamin bends over the paper behind his glasses, every bit of his attention in the pen tip, while blue copperplate loops curl across the sheet. In 1893 this portrait was one of ten paintings Eakins showed at the world's fair in Chicago.

   Painted around this timeThe Writing Master
5. 1886Philadelphia

   Early 1886, in the anatomy lecture room of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Eakins, who ran the school, had a male model remove his loincloth in front of a class that included women.

   In February, Edward Coates, who chaired the Academy's committee on instruction, asked him to resign, and on February 9 Eakins did. Male students who were loyal to him petitioned to bring him back. That same month students opened a school of their own, the Art Students' League of Philadelphia. Eakins taught there without pay until it closed in 1893.

6. 1899Philadelphia

   Mary Adeline Williams, known to everyone as Addie, takes a seat in the studio. She was a family friend who had been Margaret's playmate as a girl. In the portrait she looks stern, in a black dress with a white collar pinned high at the throat.

   The Addie in the diary of Susan Macdowell Eakins, the painter's wife, is a different person. Between sittings she rode bicycles, went to art exhibitions, and saw friends. The next year, in 1900, Addie moved into the Eakins home to live with the couple. Benjamin Eakins died in 1899.

   Painted around this timePortrait of Mary Adeline Williams
7. 1901–02Philadelphia

   Eakins and Susan go to a small theater in the Italian quarter of Philadelphia. It was run by Enrico Gomez d'Arza, and his wife was an actress of Italian background. In 1927 Susan remembered them as very poor, unable to speak English, and living on their acting and on the Signora's teaching of young actors.

   Eakins spoke Italian. Talking with her, he learned that she had lived through tragic things early in life. She was about thirty. In Signora Gomez d'Arza she wears a dark shawl edged with lace.

   Painted around this timeSignora Gomez d'Arza
8. 1916Philadelphia

   On June 25, 1916, Eakins died in Philadelphia at seventy-one. Two months earlier, Bryson Burroughs, curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had bought his 1874 picture Pushing for Rail for the museum.

   The next November, with Susan's help, Burroughs opened a memorial exhibition of sixty Eakins paintings at the Met. The Writing Master entered the Met in 1917 and Signora Gomez d'Arza in 1927. Addie's portrait went to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1939.