Early life and artistic training
Eakins was born in Philadelphia and, except for one extended study trip abroad and a brief trip to the West, virtually his entire life was spent in that city. From his father, a writing master, Eakins inherited not only the manual dexterity and sense of precision that characterizes his art but also the love of outdoor activity and the commitment to absolute integrity that marked his personal life. He did well in school, especially in science and mathematics.
As his interest in art developed, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Concerned particularly with the human figure, he reinforced his study of the live model at the academy by attending lectures in anatomy at Jefferson Medical College and eventually witnessing and participating in dissections.
Eakins went to France in 1866. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts and studied with the leading academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme for over three years. Unaffected by the avant-garde painting of the Impressionists, Eakins absorbed a solid academic tradition with its emphasis on drawing. After completing his study, Eakins went to Spain late in 1869, where he was greatly influenced by the 17th-century paintings of Diego Velázquez and José de Ribera. Perhaps reacting against the rigours of his academic training, he preferred artists who used paint and brush boldly to express their sense of life, creating what he called “big work.” In Spain, his student days behind him, Eakins undertook his first independent efforts at oil painting.
Early career
Eakins returned to Philadelphia in the summer of 1870. His earliest artistic subjects were his sisters and other members of his family and the family of his fiancée, Katherine Crowell. Redolent with the character of each individual in an intimate and personal domestic setting—pensive young ladies at the piano, children engrossed with toys scattered on the floor, Katherine playing with a kitten in her lap—these rich, warm portraits seem to express in colour and mood the essence of what Lewis Mumford called “the Brown Decades.” Close family ties were important to Eakins, and the intimate harmony of his home life was seriously disrupted and saddened by the death first of his mother and later of Katherine Crowell.
Eakins resumed the vigorous outdoor life of his earlier years—hunting, sailing, fishing, swimming, rowing. These activities, like his family circle, provided him with subject matter for his art. A candid realist, Eakins simply painted the people and the world that he knew best, choosing his subjects from the life that he lived. Like the poetry of his aged friend Walt Whitman, who lived across the Delaware River in Camden, N.J., Eakins’s art was autobiographical, “a song of himself.” Eakins in fact often included himself as an observer in his own paintings—sculling in the background behind his friend in Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, peering intently at a surgical operation in The Agnew Clinic, or treading water next to his setter dog Harry and watching a group of students swimming in The Swimming Hole. Each of the early outdoor scenes, natural and informal at first glance, was in fact carefully composed on a perspective grid, with each object precisely located in pictorial space. Each image is further informed by Eakins’s personal knowledge of the scene depicted. Thus, colour, composition, and the play of lights and darks subtly convey to the viewer a fuller understanding of and feeling for the concentrated energy of a sculler propelling his boat through the water, or the taut equilibrium of the moment when a hunter standing in his boat balances himself, sights his target, and slowly squeezes the trigger.
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