Thomas Eakins: The Complete Story
Thomas Eakins was the American painter who refused to flatter anyone. Working in Philadelphia, he painted surgery, rowing and plain unsmiling portraits with a scientist's honesty, studying anatomy and photography to get the body exactly right. His truthfulness was so blunt that it kept getting him into trouble.
His greatest painting was thrown out of an art exhibition for being too bloody.
Born: Philadelphia, 1844
Known for: The Gross Clinic, rowing scenes, unflinching realist portraits
Died: Philadelphia, 1916
The painting too real for the show
In 1875 Eakins painted The Gross Clinic, a famous surgeon operating in a packed lecture theatre, his bloodied hand and scalpel lit like a stage. A relative shields her eyes from the wound.
Judges for the 1876 Centennial art display found it too brutal and refused it. It ended up hung in a medical section instead, art exiled to the hospital. See what is realism.
Painting with a stopwatch
Eakins treated the body as a problem to solve. He dissected cadavers, studied perspective like an engineer, and used the new motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge to see exactly how people and horses move.
His rowing pictures, like Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, place a real man on real water under real light, the reflections worked out almost mathematically.
The scandal that cost him his job
As a teacher he insisted students draw from the fully nude model, men and women alike. In a mixed class he removed the loincloth from a male model so students could see the body whole.
Philadelphia was scandalised, and the Pennsylvania Academy forced him out. His devotion to the naked truth, in every sense, made him an outsider in his own city. See what is the nude in art.
The portraits nobody wanted
Eakins painted more than two hundred portraits, most of them unpaid and unasked for. He chose his own sitters, scientists, doctors, musicians, and gave them no flattery, only the truth of a tired face.
Many subjects disliked the result and refused to take the picture home. He kept the rejects stacked in his studio. The honesty that built his later reputation cost him sitters while he lived.
What readers ask about Eakins
What is Thomas Eakins famous for?
Brutally honest realist paintings like The Gross Clinic, plus rowing scenes and portraits.
Why was The Gross Clinic rejected?
Exhibition judges thought its blood and surgery were too graphic for an art display.
Why did he lose his teaching post?
He removed a male model's loincloth in a mixed class, causing a scandal that ended his job.
When did he die?
In 1916, in Philadelphia.
Why the honesty finally won
Eakins was underappreciated in his lifetime, but The Gross Clinic is now considered one of the greatest American paintings, and the city that once rejected it paid a fortune to keep it from leaving Philadelphia in 2007.
One last detail. Eakins photographed his own students swimming and used the shots to compose his painting Swimming, an early case of a painter building a masterpiece directly from the camera.