Thomas Eakins Who Painted

McFeely sheds new light on painter Thomas Eakins' genius and on the evocativemelancholy of his portraits, particularly of women, which include many of hisremarkable wife, Susan McDowell Eakins. Those deeply perceptive paintings maybe the greatest expressions of his art.

An examination of the dark side of American painter Thomas Eakins's life and work unveils new facts about the artist's life and makes sense of the enigmas of his work, documenting the bitter personal feuds and family tragedies that affected him, as well as the artist's own tendency toward psychological abuse and sexual harassment.

Why did Thomas Eakins, now considered the foremost American painter of the nineteenth century, make portraiture his main field in an era when other major artists disdained such a choice? With a rich discussion of the cultural and vocational context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Elizabeth Johns answers this question.

The range of Thomas Eakins' (1844-1916) work is dazzling - handsome sporting scenes (sculling, swimming, baseball, boxing..), dramatic historical tableaux, psychologically incisive portraits, as well as sculptures and scientifically astute experiments with photography. His influence as both artist and teacher permeates American art history.

Thomas Eakins is recognized today as the strongest purely realistic artist of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century America. But in his lifetime he was the most neglected and misunderstood major painter of the period. This is an illustrated two volume discourse on the Eakins work.

Thomas Eakins was misunderstood in life, his brilliant work earned little acclaim, and hidden demons tortured and drove him. Yet the portraits he painted more than a century ago captivate us today, and he is now widely acclaimed as the finest portrait painter our nation has ever produced. This book recounts the artist's life in fascinating detail, drawing on a treasure trove of Eakins family correspondence and papers that have only recently been discovered. Never before has Thomas Eakins's story been told with such drama, clarity, and accuracy. Sidney Kirkpatrick sets the painter's life and art in the wider context of the changing world he devoted himself to portraying, and he also addresses the artist's private life-the contradictory impulses, obsessions, and possible psychological illness that fired his work. Kirkpatrick underscores Eakins's unflinching integrity as an artist and discloses how his profound appreciation of the beauty of the human form was both the source of his greatness and ultimately of his undoing. Nevertheless, the author observes, Eakins has had his "revenge," inspiring a new generation of realist painters and gaining the recognition that eluded him in life.

Eakins's strong commitment to the development of a uniquely American art never wavered, although his painting was influenced and informed by his studies in Paris and his admiration for Velazquez and Ribera. He devoted his career to creating a penetrating series of portraits of professional and artistic society in Philadelphia.