Thomas Eakins’s art was closely associated with Philadelphia, the city where he spent his entire career. A consistent and uncompromising realist, he drew the material for his art almost completely from the life of his community. Eakins’s mind was an unusual combination of artistic and scientific qualities, interested in mathematics, optics, and anatomy as much as art. In the early 1860s while a student at PAFA, he also took courses in anatomy and dissection at Jefferson Medical College. In Paris, from 1866 to 1869, he went through the severe academic discipline of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, founded on a rigorous study of the nude. A visit to Spain in 1870 introduced him to the great realistic art of Velasquez and Ribera, who, with Rembrandt, became his greatest artistic inspirations.
On his return to America in 1870 he began at once to paint the life he knew best—genre scenes such as outdoor sports, and portraits of family and friends—with a realism that was almost primitive in its direct relation to actuality, yet with a technical mastery based on his years of study. In these works the sense of character, the grave sentiment and the loving care in representing everyday details remind one of the little Dutch masters. His outdoor subjects, with their utter fidelity to the light and color of America are among the most authentic achievements of American genre painting.
In middle life, Eakins abandoned the genre scenes of his earlier years and concentrated on portraiture, expanding his subject range to include scientists, musicians and other professionals. While under-appreciated during his lifetime and for many decades thereafter, he is now ranked among the greatest of American painters. (Excerpted from Lloyd Goodrich's short essay on Eakins in the catalogue of The One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition, PAFA, 1955.)
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