Gutekunst – Thomas Eakins Philadelphia 1870s Men – RARE IMPORTANT Albumen Photo

Gutekunst - Thomas Eakins Philadelphia 1870s Men - RARE IMPORTANT Albumen Photo

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Item: 266624229734

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Item must be returned within:30 Days
Refund will be given as:Money Back
Unit of Sale:Single Piece
Antique:Yes
Size:10 x 12 in
Date of Creation:1870-1879
Image Color:Sepia
Framing:Unframed
Region of Origin:US
Vintage:Yes
Size Type/Largest Dimension:Large
Listed By:Dealer or Reseller
Format:Albumen
Year of Production:1870
Original/Reprint:Original Print
Style:Realism
Features:One of a Kind (OOAK)
Featured Person/Artist:F Gutekunst
Photo Type:Albumen Print
Image Orientation:Landscape
Color:Sepia
Material:Paper
Original/Licensed Reprint:Original
Subject:Historic & Vintage
Modified Item:No
Type:Photograph
Photographer:F Gutekunst
Number of Photographs:1
Theme:Americana
Time Period Manufactured:1850-1899
Production Technique:Albumen Print
Country/Region of Manufacture:United States

RARE ORIGINAL Albumen Photograph Important Photo Group of Prominent Men – Philadelphia, PA Possibly – Artist Thomas Eakins in center Photographer Frederick Gutekunst – upper left ca 1870s For offer, a nice old photograph! Fresh from a prominent estate. Never offered on the market until now. Vintage, Old, Original, Antique, NOT a Reproduction – Guaranteed !!This photo came with a few other photos that were by Frederick Gutekunst, epic 19th photographer. This one is unmarked, and is possibly by him or has him in it. The man in the upper left could be him, with an interesting facial expression. At lower center is most likely artist Thomas Eakins. Others are unidentified. More research is needed. I have listed the other photos this one came with, one by confirmed by Gutekunst. Please see my other listings. All the photos are exactly the same size – this one 10 x 12 inches (including back matte). Back is blank. There are a few pencil notations (trying to identify men in photo). Photo is in good to very good condition. Light corners bumps, and small rip to left side edge. Please see photos. If you collect 19th century Americana history, American photography, portraits, etc. this is a treasure you will not see again! Add this to your image or paper / ephemera collection. Combine shipping on multiple bid wins! 2689 Frederick Gutekunst (September 25, 1831 – April 27, 1917) was an American photographer. His photographic career started in 1856 in Philadelphia and his business grew during the Civil War. After the war his reputation was known outside of Philadelphia and the military so that distinguished individuals were coming to having their portrait made by the master. Eventually, the Gutekunst studio became a photographic industry with two studios in Philadelphia and a large photo reproduction press. He continued working until he died in 1917 from Bright’s Disease. When comparing the overall number of portraits made by Gutekunst and other studios in Philadelphia during the same period one can find similar quality work being accomplished, but photographs with the name Gutekunst on them are of a consistent high quality in different sizes and throughout the years and it is this consistency that made him the Dean of American Photographers.[1] Early lifeFrederick Gutekunst was the son of a cabinet maker who claimed to have been born in Germantown in Philadelphia and this story of his birthplace is often reproduced in histories. However, according to his obituary in The Photographic Journal of America[2] he was born in Germany, possibly Haiterbach, Württemberg as was his father.[3] Hence, he was born in a “German” “town”. The reason we should accept this account is due to the friendship between Mr. Gutekunst and his former assistant and at the time of the obituary the founder and publisher of The Photographic Journal of America, Mr. Edward L. Wilson. Mr. Gutekunst most likely wanted clients visiting his studio and gallery to believe that he was born in the more rural and gentile Germantown than a poor immigrant ghetto along the Delaware River waterfront. His birth date is another matter as there were two different dates published during his lifetime. Additionally, among census records there are different years recorded for his birth. The 1880 Census lists his year of birth as 1831, but other Censuses list him as born in 1833 and 1835. The first listing for Frederick Gutekunst Sr. in Philadelphia is in McElroy’s city directory in 1837 as: Gutterhurst, Frederick, carpenter, at St. John Street (currently N. American St.) north of George in the Northern Liberties section of Philadelphia. This would be the block where N. American St. meets Germantown Ave. This was known as a neighborhood of German immigrants and where Philadelphia’s second German Catholic church, St. Peter’s, was established. One of the remnants of the German character of this part of town is the German Society of Pennsylvania on Spring Garden St. Frederick Gutekunst Sr. wanted young Frederick to become a lawyer and so he was indentured for six years to Joseph Simon Cohen, prothonotary to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. However, by the time he was eighteen he became more interested in the art of the daguerreotype and became a frequent visitor to Marcus Aurelius Root’s gallery, and his talents turned toward chemistry. One of Frederick’s experiments was a method to mass-produce daguerreotypes; although it was a success, it was not financially practical. Frederick’s father found work for him in the drug store owned by the consul for the Kingdom of Wurttemberg in Philadelphia, Frederick Klett, who was also one of the founders of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy from which Frederick Gutekunst graduated in 1853. He found employment at Avery Toby’s drug store at 1235 Market St., later at 451 Market St., and spent two years working there. His interest in photography was renewed and he was able to exchange a homemade battery for a camera owned by Isaac Norris, later the Secretary of the Franklin Institute. His work and ambitions in photography grew and he bought a better lens for five dollars from the “Buckeye Blacksmith” who ran an ambrotype gallery near Toby’s drug store, and this was where he was introduced to the ambrotype process. His father, the accomplished cabinetmaker, proceeded to build a camera for the lens and thus began Frederick Gutekunst’s amateur career. Photography studioFrederick’s brother, Louis Gutekunst, was a barber-hair dresser with a business at 4th and Vine[4] and had noticed the talent displayed by Frederick with a camera. When Frederick had mentioned to his brother that a storefront on Arch St. was for rent on Friday and would be a good place for a gallery, Louis secured the property at 706 Arch St. on Monday. F & L Gutekunst photographists opened for business in 1856,[5] and currently there is only one known daguerreotype by Gutekunst.[6] However, by 1859 Louis was again working as a hairdresser at 219 N. 4th Street.[7] The 1856 McElroy’s also lists Frederick living at 1220 Ogden in Philadelphia. Career exterior, 712 Arch St. Philadelphia PA exterior, linotype of studioWhen the Civil War began, soldiers came to have their portraits made at the Gutekunst studio, and then officers came, and eventually the generals arrived. The growth of the business meant that it was time for a larger space, and in 1864 Gutekunst moved a few doors up Arch St. to number 712, and occupied the whole building. A full description is found in The Photographic Times & American Photographer, November 1885. One notable feature of the reception room was an “orchestrion” which used a large cylinder much like a music box to provide music for waiting patrons. The portrait of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant seems to have been the work that stirred uniform national interest and set Gutekunst apart from his contemporaries. Here he tells the story of the how it was created. Grant was stopping at the Continental Hotel at the time, and I sent someone over there to invite him to come to the studio for a sitting. In a short time he strolled in and said he would have come here himself, without an invitation as his brother officers wanted to come to me. When he arrived I was busy in the operating-room with a sitter, and while he waited his turn Grant sauntered around the reception-room, his right hand in his trousers-pocket, his left resting in his negligently worn vest. I kept him waiting as little as possible, and when I came out I found him in the attitude in which he is photographed. ‘General’, I said, ‘that is a very nice position; just keep your hand that way.’ Then I took him under the skylight, and he resumed that attitude which was so characteristic while I made the photograph. The picture has been considered the best taken of Grant; it has been used for the statue of him in Galena, and General Sherman sent me a letter in which he asserts his belief that it is the most characteristic of the great General.[8] Railroads needed photographers to show what was to be seen from a train and what was nearby to induce people to travel. In the 1870s Gutekunst was a photographer for the Pennsylvania Railroad and a collection of stereo views were taken. The Library Company of Philadelphia has a set of these prints some of which can be viewed at LCPImages.org.[9] The next great achievement for Gutekunst was the panorama of the 1876 Centennial Exposition held in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. The description of the work is as follows: This ten feet long by eighteen inch wide picture was made from seven negatives by William Bell that were taken from a scaffold erected near the Belmont reservoir. The panoramic view printed on a single sheet of paper show all the buildings from Agricultural Hall to the Observatory on George’s Hill. The large sheet of albumen paper for this panorama was supplied by the John H. Clemons factory on Sansom Street. The whites of one hundred and twenty five dozen eggs were required to coat the paper. To produce the print the entire sheet had to be exposed to sunlight, one section at a time, under each negative. Careful joining of the negatives was required to prevent a dark line from appearing at each juncture. Each section had to be printed to the same density despite the ever changing light from the sky. After printing out to a much darker shade than desired, the final appearance of the print was achieved through gold toning which had to be evenly applied or some of the blacks would have a bluish cast and others a reddish tone. Great difficulty was also encountered handling such a large sheet of wet paper as it passed through the fixing baths, toning and washing processes. The success with which he achieved a uniform color and tone can be seen today from a framed copy of the print hanging in the Library Company of Philadelphia.[10] Louis Gutekunst was placed in charge of developing the print and described the process at a meeting of the Photographic Society of Philadelphia in January 1877.[10] The work was met with praise from all over the world. Frederick Gutekunst was recognized for the monumental work with the Cross of the Knights of the Austrian Order from Emperor Franz Joseph I of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Queen Victoria of Great Britain, and King Victor Emmanuel of Italy also sent similar honors, and the Emperor of Japan rewarded him with two gold-lined bronze vases.[10] Gutekunst was as much artist as businessman and on a visit to Germany in 1878 he purchased the rights for the Phototype process. One year later upon visit to Philadelphia, J. H. Fitzgibbons, the editor of the St. Louis Practical Photographer, noted that Gutekunst was manufacturing thousands of prints every day. Eventually, this new factory needed to move out of Arch Street and up to 813 Girard Ave where a staff of forty under the supervision of the engraver, James P. Harbeson, kept up with demand for reproduction for publications, etc. Girard Ave was a perfect location for this endeavor since this part of Philadelphia was more industrial and less retail than Arch St. Some of the products of this venture were illustrations for books such as the Biographical Album of Prominent Pennsylvanians, Artistic Houses, and Artistic Country Seats published by D. Appleton & Co. of New York. Also, Gutekunst began to use what we would now call a panoramic camera which took a photo of one hundred and eighty degrees and from which the studio could produce a print thirty-six inches in length. In 1885, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.[11] On the morning of January 26, 1886, a fire started at 715-719 Arch St. which burned down the five-story building at that address. Additionally, the fire spread across the street to the Gutekunst establishment and caused approximately $10,000 in damage.[12] What impact this had on his business is difficult to estimate because Frederick Gutekunst did not seem to mention this fire in any later interviews. Walt Whitman admired Gutekunst and after recovering from an illness Whitman went to have his portrait taken. Gutekunst took the last professional portrait of Whitman.[13] By 1893 Gutekunst had been in business almost forty years and an additional studio was needed for the growing enterprise. The new studio was established in an upscale part of Philadelphia at 1700 N. Broad St. with William Braucher[14] as manager. With this Gutekunst also acquired a house nearby at 1842 N. Bouvier St.[15] The success early in his career meant that he could move his home out of Center City Philadelphia and own a home on Pulaski Avenue in Germantown in Philadelphia.[16] A year before his death Gutekunst incorporated his business and some of the older employees became stockholders, but Mr. Braucher resigned at that time.[17] Frederick Gutekunst died April 27, 1917. Eight weeks earlier he fell down the steps of his N. Bouvier residence returning to his studio after lunch at home. This fall and Bright’s disease seem to have caused his death. SourcesFrederick Gutekunst: Dean of American Photographers exhibit at the University of the Sciences; Philadelphia 2006Wilson’s Photographic Magazine; Dec. 1913, vol. L, no. 712, page 537Philadelphia: A History of the City & Its People by Ellis Paxon Oberholtzer, page 134Philadelphia Photographers: 1840 – 1900 by William & Marie BreyThe Photographer; vol. 2, no. 31 Nov 26, 1904, page 69The Studio of F. Gutekunst, Philadelphia. In: The Photographic Times and American Photographer, Vol. XIII., Scovill, New York 1883, page 572f.Note: The sitters book (list of clients) of the Gutekunst Studio is in the collection of The Library Company of Philadelphia. GallerySelected Photographs by Frederick Gutekunst Lucretia Mott Abraham Lincoln Grover Cleveland William Lloyd Garrison Caroline Still Anderson Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (/ˈeɪkɪnz/; July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916) was an American realist painter, photographer,[1] sculptor, and fine arts educator. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important American artists.[2][3] For the length of his professional career, from the early 1870s until his health began to fail some 40 years later, Eakins worked exactingly from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia. He painted several hundred portraits, usually of friends, family members, or prominent people in the arts, sciences, medicine, and clergy. Taken en masse, the portraits offer an overview of the intellectual life of contemporary Philadelphia; individually, they are incisive depictions of thinking persons. In addition, Eakins produced a number of large paintings that brought the portrait out of the drawing room and into the offices, streets, parks, rivers, arenas, and surgical amphitheaters of his city. These active outdoor venues allowed him to paint the subject that most inspired him: the nude or lightly clad figure in motion. In the process, he could model the forms of the body in full sunlight, and create images of deep space utilizing his studies in perspective. Eakins also took a keen interest in the new technologies of motion photography, a field in which he is now seen as an innovator. No less important in Eakins’ life was his work as a teacher. As an instructor he was a highly influential presence in American art. The difficulties which beset him as an artist seeking to paint the portrait and figure realistically were paralleled and even amplified in his career as an educator, where behavioral and sexual scandals truncated his success and damaged his reputation. Eakins was a controversial figure whose work received little by way of official recognition during his lifetime. Since his death, he has been celebrated by American art historians as “the strongest, most profound realist in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American art”.[4] Life and workSee also: List of works by Thomas EakinsYouth Thomas Eakins, at age 6Eakins was born and lived most of his life in Philadelphia. He was the first child of Caroline Cowperthwait Eakins, a woman of English and Dutch descent, and Benjamin Eakins, a writing master and calligraphy teacher of Scots-Irish ancestry.[5] Benjamin Eakins grew up on a farm in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, the son of a weaver. He was successful in his chosen profession, and moved to Philadelphia in the early 1840s to raise his family. Thomas Eakins observed his father at work and by twelve demonstrated skill in precise line drawing, perspective, and the use of a grid to lay out a careful design, skills he later applied to his art.[6] He was an athletic child who enjoyed rowing, ice skating, swimming, wrestling, sailing, and gymnastics—activities he later painted and encouraged in his students. Eakins attended Central High School, the premier public school for applied science and arts in the city, where he excelled in mechanical drawing. Thomas met fellow artist and lifelong friend, Charles Lewis Fussell in high school and they reunited to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.[7] Thomas began at the academy in 1861 and later attended courses in anatomy and dissection at Jefferson Medical College from 1864 to 65. For a while, he followed his father’s profession and was listed in city directories as a “writing teacher”.[8] His scientific interest in the human body led him to consider becoming a surgeon.[9] Eakins then studied art in Europe from 1866 to 1870, notably in Paris with Jean-Léon Gérôme, being only the second American pupil of the French realist painter, famous as a master of Orientalism.[10] He also attended the atelier of Léon Bonnat, a realist painter who emphasized anatomical preciseness, a method adapted by Eakins. While studying at the École des Beaux-Arts, he seems to have taken scant interest in the new Impressionist movement, nor was he impressed by what he perceived as the classical pretensions of the French Academy. A letter home to his father in 1868 made his aesthetic clear: She [the female nude] is the most beautiful thing there is in the world except a naked man, but I never yet saw a study of one exhibited… It would be a godsend to see a fine man model painted in the studio with the bare walls, alongside of the smiling smirking goddesses of waxy complexion amidst the delicious arsenic green trees and gentle wax flowers & purling streams running melodious up & down the hills especially up. I hate affectation.[11] Already at age 24, “nudity and verity were linked with an unusual closeness in his mind.”[12] Yet his desire for truthfulness was more expansive, and the letters home to Philadelphia reveal a passion for realism that included, but was not limited to, the study of the figure.[13] A trip to Spain for six months confirmed his admiration for the realism of artists such as Diego Velázquez and Jusepe de Ribera.[14] In Seville in 1869 he painted Carmelita Requeña, a portrait of a seven-year-old gypsy dancer more freely and colorfully painted than his Paris studies. That same year he attempted his first large oil painting, A Street Scene in Seville, wherein he first dealt with the complications of a scene observed outside the studio.[15] Although he failed to matriculate in a formal degree program and had showed no works in the European salons, Eakins succeeded in absorbing the techniques and methods of French and Spanish masters, and he began to formulate his artistic vision which he demonstrated in his first major painting upon his return to America. “I shall seek to achieve my broad effect from the very beginning”,[16] he declared. Early career Thomas Eakins House at 1729 Mount Vernon Street, Philadelphia. Benjamin Eakins added the 4th floor in 1874 as a studio for his son. Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Kathrin Crowell with Kitten (1872)Eakins’ first works upon his return from Europe included a large group of rowing scenes, eleven oils and watercolors in all, of which the first and most famous is Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871; also known as The Champion Single Sculling). Both his subject and his technique drew attention. His selection of a contemporary sport was “a shock to the artistic conventionalities of the city”.[17] Eakins placed himself in the painting, in a scull behind Schmitt, his name inscribed on the boat. Typically, the work entailed critical observation of the painting’s subject, as well as preparatory drawings of the figure and perspective plans of the scull in the water.[18] Its preparation and composition indicates the importance of Eakins’ academic training in Paris. It was a completely original conception, true to Eakins’ firsthand experience, and an almost startlingly successful image for the artist, who had struggled with his first outdoor composition less than a year before.[19] His first known sale was the watercolor The Sculler (1874). Most critics judged the rowing pictures successful and auspicious, but after the initial flourish, Eakins never revisited the subject of rowing and went on to other sports themes.[20] At the same time that he made these initial ventures into outdoor themes, Eakins produced a series of domestic Victorian interiors, often with his father, his sisters or friends as the subjects. Home Scene (1871), Elizabeth at the Piano (1875), The Chess Players (1876), and Elizabeth Crowell and her Dog (1874), each dark in tonality, focus on the unsentimental characterization of individuals adopting natural attitudes in their homes.[21] It was in this vein that in 1872 he painted his first large scale portrait, Kathrin, in which the subject, Kathrin Crowell, is seen in dim light, playing with a kitten. In 1874 Eakins and Crowell became engaged; they were still engaged five years later, when Crowell died of meningitis in 1879.[22] Teaching and forced resignation from Academy Thomas Eakins, circa 1882 Thomas Eakins, William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River, 1908. Brooklyn MuseumEakins returned to the Pennsylvania Academy to teach in 1876 as a volunteer after the opening of the school’s new Frank Furness designed building. He became a salaried professor in 1878, and rose to director in 1882. His teaching methods were controversial: there was no drawing from antique casts, and students received only a short study in charcoal, followed quickly by their introduction to painting, in order to grasp subjects in true color as soon as practical. He encouraged students to use photography as an aid to understanding anatomy and the study of motion, and disallowed prize competitions.[23] Although there was no specialized vocational instruction, students with aspirations for using their school training for applied arts, such as illustration, lithography, and decoration, were as welcome as students interested in becoming portrait artists. Most notable was his interest in the instruction of all aspects of the human figure, including anatomical study of the human and animal body, and surgical dissection; there were also rigorous courses in the fundamentals of form, and studies in perspective which involved mathematics.[24] As an aid to the study of anatomy, plaster casts were made from dissections, duplicates of which were furnished to students. A similar study was made of the anatomy of horses; acknowledging Eakins’ expertise, in 1891 his friend, the sculptor William Rudolf O’Donovan, asked him to collaborate on the commission to create bronze equestrian reliefs of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, for the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch in Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn.[25] Owing to Eakins’ devotion to working from life, the Academy’s course of study was by the early 1880s the most “liberal and advanced in the world”.[26] Eakins believed in teaching by example and letting the students find their own way with only terse guidance. His students included painters, cartoonists, and illustrators such as Henry Ossawa Tanner, Thomas Pollock Anshutz, Edward Willis Redfield, Colin Campbell Cooper, Alice Barber Stephens, Frederick Judd Waugh, T. S. Sullivant and A. B. Frost. He stated his teaching philosophy bluntly, “A teacher can do very little for a pupil & should only be thankful if he don’t hinder him … and the greater the master, mostly the less he can say.”[27] He believed that women should “assume professional privileges” as would men.[28] Life classes and dissection were segregated but women had access to male models (who were nude but wore loincloths). The line between impartiality and questionable behavior was a thin one. When a female student, Amelia Van Buren, asked about the movement of the pelvis, Eakins invited her to his studio, where he undressed and “gave her the explanation as I could not have done by words only”.[29] Such incidents, coupled with the ambitions of his younger associates to oust him and take over the school themselves,[30] created tensions between him and the Academy’s board of directors. He was ultimately forced to resign in 1886, for removing the loincloth of a male model in a class where female students were present. The forced resignation was a major setback for Eakins. His family was split, with his in-laws siding against him in public dispute. He struggled to protect his name against rumors and false charges, had bouts of ill health, and suffered a humiliation which he felt for the rest of his life.[31][32] A drawing manual he had written and prepared illustrations for remained unfinished and unpublished during his lifetime.[33] Eakins’ popularity among the students was such that a number of them broke with the Academy and formed the Art Students’ League of Philadelphia (1886–1893), where Eakins subsequently instructed. It was there that he met the student, Samuel Murray, who would become his protege and lifelong friend. He also lectured and taught at a number of other schools, including the Art Students League of New York, the National Academy of Design, Cooper Union, and the Art Students’ Guild in Washington DC. Dismissed in March 1895 by the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia for again using a fully nude male model, he gradually withdrew from teaching by 1898. Photography Standing Male Nude with Pipes by Eakins at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1880sEakins has been credited with having “introduced the camera to the American art studio”.[34] During his study abroad, he was exposed to the use of photography by the French realists, though the use of photography was still frowned upon as a shortcut by traditionalists. Study in Human Motion. Photograph by Thomas Eakins.In the late 1870s, Eakins was introduced to the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, particularly the equine studies, and became interested in using the camera to study sequential movement.[35] In the mid-1880s, Eakins worked briefly alongside Muybridge in the latter’s photographic studio at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.[36] Eakins soon performed his own independent motion studies, also usually involving the nude figure, and even developed his own technique for capturing movement on film.[37] Whereas Muybridge’s system relied on a series of cameras triggered to produce a sequence of individual photographs, Eakins preferred to use a single camera to produce a series of exposures superimposed on one negative.[38] Eakins was more interested in precision measurements on a single image to aid in translating a motion into a painting, while Muybridge preferred separate images that could also be displayed by his primitive movie projector.[36] After Eakins obtained a camera in 1880, several paintings, such as Mending the Net (1881) and Arcadia (1883), are known to have been derived at least in part from his photographs. Some figures appear to be detailed transcriptions and tracings from the photographs by some device like a magic lantern, which Eakins then took pains to cover up with oil paint. Eakins’ methods appear to be meticulously applied, and rather than shortcuts, were likely used in a quest for accuracy and realism.[39] An excellent example of Eakins’ use of this new technology is his painting A May Morning in the Park, which relied heavily on photographic motion studies to depict the true gait of the four horses pulling the coach of patron Fairman Rogers. But in typical fashion, Eakins also employed wax figures and oil sketches to get the final effect he desired. The so-called “Naked Series”, which began in 1883, were nude photos of students and professional models which were taken to show real human anatomy from several specific angles, and were often hung and displayed for study at the school. Later, less regimented poses were taken indoors and out, of men, women, and children, including his wife. The most provocative, and the only ones combining males and females, were nude photos of Eakins and a female model (see below). Although witnesses and chaperones were usually on site, and the poses were mostly traditional in nature, the sheer quantity of the photos and Eakins’ overt display of them may have undermined his standing at the Academy.[40] In all, about eight hundred photographs are now attributed to Eakins and his circle, most of which are figure studies, both clothed and nude, and portraits.[41] No other American artist of his time matched Eakins’ interest in photography, nor produced a comparable body of photographic works.[42] Eakins used photography for his own private ends as well. Aside from nude men, and women, he also photographed nude children. While the photographs of the nude adults are more artistically composed, the younger children and infants are posed less formally. These photographs, that are “charged with sexual overtones,” as Susan Danly and Cheryl Leibold write, are of unidentified children.[43] In the catalog of Eakins’ collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, photograph number 308 is of an African American child reclining on a couch and posed as Venus. Both Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten write, respectively, about the photograph, and the child that it arrests. Portraits The Gross Clinic, 1875, Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. According to one reviewer in 1876: “This portrait of Dr. Gross is a great work—we know of nothing greater that has ever been executed in America”.[44]I will never have to give up painting, for even now I could paint heads good enough to make a living anywhere in America.[45] For Eakins, portraiture held little interest as a means of fashionable idealization or even simple verisimilitude. Instead, it provided the opportunity to reveal the character of an individual through the modeling of solid anatomical form.[46] This meant that, notwithstanding his youthful optimism, Eakins would never be a commercially successful portrait painter, as few paid commissions came his way. But his total output of some two hundred and fifty portraits is characterized by “an uncompromising search for the unique human being”.[47] Often this search for individuality required that the subject be painted in his own daily working environment. Eakins’ Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand (1874) was a prelude to what many consider his most important work. Stunningly illuminated, Dr. Gross is the embodiment of heroic rationalism, a symbol of American intellectual achievement. — William Innes Homer[48]Thomas Eakins: His Life and ArtIn The Gross Clinic (1875), a renowned Philadelphia surgeon, Dr. Samuel D. Gross, is seen presiding over an operation to remove part of a diseased bone from a patient’s thigh. Gross lectures in an amphitheater crowded with students at Jefferson Medical College. Eakins spent nearly a year on the painting, again choosing a novel subject, the discipline of modern surgery, in which Philadelphia was in the forefront. He initiated the project and may have had the goal of a grand work befitting a showing at the Centennial Exposition of 1876.[49] Though rejected for the Art Gallery, the painting was shown on the centennial grounds at an exhibit of a U.S. Army Post Hospital. In sharp contrast, another Eakins submission, The Chess Players, was accepted by the Committee and was much admired at the Centennial Exhibition, and critically praised.[50] Portrait of Ashbury W. Lee, oil on canvas, 1905, Reynolda HouseAt 96 by 78 inches (240 × 200 cm), The Gross Clinic is one of the artist’s largest works, and considered by some to be his greatest. Eakins’ high expectations at the start of the project were recorded in a letter, “What elates me more is that I have just got a new picture blocked in and it is very far better than anything I have ever done. As I spoil things less and less in finishing I have the greatest hopes of this one”[51] But if Eakins hoped to impress his home town with the picture, he was to be disappointed; public reaction to the painting of a realistic surgical incision and the resultant blood was ambivalent at best, and it was finally purchased by the college for the unimpressive sum of $200. Eakins borrowed it for subsequent exhibitions, where it drew strong reactions, such as that of the New York Daily Tribune, which both acknowledged and damned its powerful image, “but the more one praises it, the more one must condemn its admission to a gallery where men and women of weak nerves must be compelled to look at it. For not to look it is impossible…No purpose is gained by this morbid exhibition, no lesson taught—the painter shows his skill and the spectators’ gorge rises at it—that is all.”[52] The college now describes it thus: “Today the once maligned picture is celebrated as a great nineteenth-century medical history painting, featuring one of the most superb portraits in American art”.[citation needed] In 1876, Eakins completed a portrait of Dr. John Brinton, surgeon of the Philadelphia Hospital, and famed for his Civil War service. Done in a more informal setting than The Gross Clinic, it was a personal favorite of Eakins, and The Art Journal proclaimed “it is in every respect a more favorable example of this artist’s abilities than his much-talked-of composition representing a dissecting room.”[53] Other outstanding examples of his portraits include The Agnew Clinic (1889),[54] Eakins’ most important commission and largest painting, which depicted another eminent American surgeon, Dr. David Hayes Agnew, performing a mastectomy; The Dean’s Roll Call (1899), featuring Dr. James W. Holland, and Professor Leslie W. Miller (1901), portraits of educators standing as if addressing an audience; a portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing (c. 1895), in which the prominent ethnologist is seen performing an incantation at the Zuñi pueblo;[55] Professor Henry A. Rowland (1897), a brilliant scientist whose study of spectroscopy revolutionized his field;[56] Antiquated Music (1900),[57] in which Mrs. William D. Frishmuth is shown seated amidst her collection of musical instruments; and The Concert Singer (1890–92),[58] for which Eakins asked Weda Cook to sing “O rest in the Lord”, so that he could study the muscles of her throat and mouth. To replicate the proper deployment of a baton, Eakins enlisted an orchestral conductor to pose for the hand seen in the lower left-hand corner of the painting.[59] Of Eakins’ later portraits, many took as their subjects women who were friends or students. Unlike most portrayals of women at the time, they are devoid of glamor and idealization.[60] For Portrait of Letitia Wilson Jordan (1888), Eakins painted the sitter wearing the same evening dress in which he had seen her at a party. She is a substantial presence, a vision quite different from the era’s fashionable portraiture. So, too, his Portrait of Maud Cook (1895), where the obvious beauty of the subject is noted with “a stark objectivity”.[61] The portrait of Miss Amelia Van Buren (c. 1890), a friend and former pupil, suggests the melancholy of a complex personality, and has been called “the finest of all American portraits”.[62] Even Susan Macdowell Eakins, a strong painter and former student who married Eakins in 1884,[63] was not sentimentalized: despite its richness of color, The Artist’s Wife and His Setter Dog (c. 1884–89) is a penetratingly candid portrait.[64] Miss Amelia Van Buren, c. 1891, The Phillips Collection, Washington DCSome of his most vivid portraits resulted from a late series done for the Catholic clergy, which included paintings of a cardinal, archbishops, bishops, and monsignors. As usual, most of the sitters were engaged at Eakins’ request, and were given the portraits when Eakins had completed them. In portraits of His Eminence Sebastiano Cardinal Martinelli (1902), Archbishop William Henry Elder (1903), and Monsignor James P. Turner (c. 1906), Eakins took advantage of the brilliant vestments of the offices to animate the compositions in a way not possible in his other male portraits. Deeply affected by his dismissal from the Academy, Eakins focused his later career on portraiture, such as his 1905 Portrait of Professor William S. Forbes. His steadfast insistence on his own vision of realism, in addition to his notoriety from his school scandals, combined to hurt his income in later years. Even as he approached these portraits with the skill of a highly trained anatomist, what is most noteworthy is the intense psychological presence of his sitters. However, it was precisely for this reason that his portraits were often rejected by the sitters or their families.[65] As a result, Eakins came to rely on his friends and family members to model for portraits. His portrait of Walt Whitman (1887–1888) was the poet’s favorite.[66] The figure Wrestlers, 1899, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California The Swimming Hole, 1884–85, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TexasEakins’ lifelong interest in the figure, nude or nearly so, took several thematic forms. The rowing paintings of the early 1870s constitute the first series of figure studies. In Eakins’ largest picture on the subject, The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake (1873), the muscular dynamism of the body is given its fullest treatment. In the 1877 painting William Rush and His Model, he painted the female nude as integral to a historical subject, even though there is no evidence that the model who posed for Rush did so in the nude. The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 helped foster a revival in interest in Colonial America and Eakins participated with an ambitious project employing oil studies, wax and wood models, and finally the portrait in 1877. William Rush was a celebrated Colonial sculptor and ship carver, a revered example of an artist-citizen who figured prominently in Philadelphia civic life, and a founder of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where Eakins had started teaching. Despite his sincerely depicted reverence for Rush, Eakins’ treatment of the human body once again drew criticism. This time it was the nude model and her heaped-up clothes depicted front and center, with Rush relegated to the deep shadows in the left background, that stirred dissatisfaction. Nonetheless, Eakins found a subject that referenced his native city and an earlier Philadelphia artist, and allowed for an assay on the female nude seen from behind.[67] When he returned to the subject many years later, the narrative became more personal: In William Rush and His Model (1908), gone are the chaperon and detailed interior of the earlier work. The professional distance between sculptor and model has been eliminated, and the relationship has become intimate. In one version of the painting from that year, the nude is seen from the front, being helped down from the model stand by an artist who bears a strong resemblance to Eakins.[68] The Swimming Hole (1884–85) features Eakins’ finest studies of the nude, in his most successfully constructed outdoor picture.[69] The figures are those of his friends and students, and include a self-portrait. Although there are photographs by Eakins which relate to the painting, the picture’s powerful pyramidal composition and sculptural conception of the individual bodies are completely distinctive pictorial resolutions.[70] The work was painted on commission, but was refused.[71] In the late 1890s Eakins returned to the male figure, this time in a more urban setting. Taking the Count (1896), a painting of a prizefight, was his second largest canvas, but not his most successful composition.[72] The same may be said of Wrestlers (1899). More successful was Between Rounds (1899), for which boxer Billy Smith posed seated in his corner at Philadelphia’s Arena; in fact, all the principal figures were posed by models re-enacting what had been an actual fight.[73] Salutat (1898), a frieze-like composition in which the main figure is isolated, “is one of Eakins’ finest achievements in figure-painting.”[74] Although Eakins was agnostic, he painted The Crucifixion in 1880.[75] Art historian Akela Reason says Eakins’s selection of this subject has puzzled some art historians who, unable to reconcile what appears to be an anomalous religious image by a reputedly agnostic artist, have related it solely to Eakins’s desire for realism, thus divesting the painting of its religious content. Lloyd Goodrich, for example, considered this illustration of Christ’s suffering completely devoid of “religious sentiment” and suggested that Eakins intended it simply as a realist study of the male nude body. As a result, art historians have frequently associated ‘Crucifixion’ (like Swimming) with Eakins’s strong interest in anatomy and the nude.[76] In his later years Eakins persistently asked his female portrait models to pose in the nude, a practice which would have been all but prohibited in conventional Philadelphia society. Inevitably, his desires were frustrated.[77] Personal life and marriageThe nature of Eakins’ sexuality and its impact on his art is a matter of intense scholarly debate. Strong circumstantial evidence points to discussion during Eakins’s lifetime that he had homosexual leanings, and there is little doubt that he was attracted to men,[78] as evidenced in his photography, and three major paintings where male buttocks are a focal point: The Gross Clinic, Salutat, and The Swimming Hole. The latter, in which Eakins appears, is increasingly seen as sensuous and autobiographical.[79] Until recently, major Eakins scholars persistently denied he was homosexual, and such discussion was marginalized. While there is still no consensus, today discussion of homoerotic desire plays a large role in Eakins scholarship.[80] The discovery of a large trove of Eakins’ personal papers in 1984 has also driven reassessment of his life.[81] Eakins met Emily Sartain, daughter of John Sartain, while studying at the academy. Their romance foundered after Eakins moved to Paris to study, and she accused him of immorality. It is likely Eakins had told her of frequenting places where prostitutes assembled. The son of Eakins’ physician also reported that Eakins had been “very loose sexually—went to France, where there are no morals, and the french morality suited him to a T”.[82] In 1884, at age 40, Eakins married Susan Hannah Macdowell, the daughter of a Philadelphia engraver. Two years earlier Eakins’ sister Margaret, who had acted as his secretary and personal servant, had died of typhoid. It has been suggested that Eakins married to replace her.[83] Macdowell was 25 when Eakins met her at the Hazeltine Gallery where The Gross Clinic was being exhibited in 1875. Unlike many, she was impressed by the controversial painting and she decided to study with him at the Academy, which she attended for six years, adopting a sober, realistic style similar to her teacher’s. Macdowell was an outstanding student and winner of the Mary Smith Prize for the best painting by a matriculating woman artist.[84][85] During their childless marriage, she painted only sporadically and spent most of her time supporting her husband’s career, entertaining guests and students, and faithfully backing him in his difficult times with the academy, even when some members of her family aligned against Eakins.[86] She and Eakins both shared a passion for photography, both as photographers and subjects, and employed it as a tool for their art. She also posed nude for many of his photos and took images of him. Both had separate studios in their home. After Eakins’ death in 1916, she returned to painting, adding considerably to her output right up to the 1930s, in a style that became warmer, looser, and brighter in tone. She died in 1938. Thirty-five years after her death, in 1973, she had her first one-woman exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.[84] In the latter years of his life, Eakins’ constant companion was the handsome sculptor Samuel Murray, who shared his interest in boxing and bicycling. The evidence suggests the relationship was more emotionally important to Eakins than that with his wife.[87] Throughout his life, Eakins appears to have been drawn to those who were mentally vulnerable and then preyed upon those weaknesses. Several of his students ended their lives in insanity.[88] Death and legacy Portrait of Maud Cook (1895), Yale University Art GalleryEakins died on June 25, 1916, at the age of 71 and is buried at The Woodlands, which is located near the University of Pennsylvania in West Philadelphia.[89] Late in life Eakins did experience some recognition. In 1902 he was made a National Academician. In 1914 the sale of a portrait study of D. Hayes Agnew for The Agnew Clinic to Dr. Albert C. Barnes precipitated much publicity when rumors circulated that the selling price was fifty thousand dollars. In fact, Barnes bought the painting for four thousand dollars.[90] In the year after his death, Eakins was honored with a memorial retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 1917–18 the Pennsylvania Academy followed suit. Susan Macdowell Eakins did much to preserve his reputation, including gifting the Philadelphia Museum of Art with more than fifty of her husband’s oil paintings.[91] After her death in 1938, other works were sold off, and eventually another large collection of art and personal material was purchased by Joseph Hirshhorn, and now is part of the Hirshhorn Museum’s collection.[92] Since then, Eakins’ home in North Philadelphia was put on the National Register of Historic Places list in 1966, and Eakins Oval, across from the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, was named for the artist.[93][94] In 1967 The Biglin Brothers Racing (1872) was reproduced on a United States postage stamp. His work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics.[95] Eakins’ attitude toward realism in painting, and his desire to explore the heart of American life proved influential. He taught hundreds of students, among them his future wife Susan Macdowell, African-American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Thomas Anshutz, who taught, in turn, Robert Henri, George Luks, John Sloan, and Everett Shinn, future members of the Ashcan School, and other realists and artistic heirs to Eakins’ philosophy.[96] Though his is not a household name, and though during his lifetime Eakins struggled to make a living from his work, today he is regarded as one of the most important American artists of any period. Thomas Eakins Carrying a Woman, 1885. Photograph, circle of Eakins.Since the 1990s, Eakins has emerged as a major figure in sexuality studies in art history, for both the homoeroticism of his male nudes and for the complexity of his attitudes toward women. Controversy shaped much of his career as a teacher and as an artist. He insisted on teaching men and women “the same”, used nude male models in female classes and vice versa, and was accused of abusing female students.[97] Recent scholarship suggests that these scandals were grounded in more than the “puritanical prudery” of his contemporaries—as had once been assumed—and that Eakins’ progressive academic principles may have protected unconscious and dubious agendas.[98] These controversies may have been caused by a combination of factors such as the bohemianism of Eakins and his circle (in which students, for example, sometimes modeled in the nude for each other), the intensity and authority of his teaching style, and Eakins’ inclination toward unorthodox or provocative behavior.[99][100] Disposition of estateEakins was unable to sell many of his works during his lifetime, so when he died in 1916, a large body of artwork passed to his widow, Susan Macdowell Eakins. She carefully preserved it, donating some of the strongest pieces to various museums. When she in turn died in 1938, much of the remaining artistic estate was destroyed or damaged by executors, and the remainders were belatedly salvaged by a former Eakins student. For more details, see the article “List of works by Thomas Eakins”. On November 11, 2006, the Board of Trustees at Thomas Jefferson University agreed to sell The Gross Clinic to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas for a record $68,000,000, the highest price for an Eakins painting as well as a record price for an individual American-made portrait.[101] On December 21, 2006, a group of donors agreed to match the price to keep the painting in Philadelphia. It is displayed alternately at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. AssessmentOn October 29, 1917, Robert Henri wrote an open letter to the Art Students League about Eakins: Thomas Eakins was a man of great character. He was a man of iron will and his will to paint and to carry out his life as he thought it should go. This he did. It cost him heavily but in his works we have the precious result of his independence, his generous heart and his big mind. Eakins was a deep student of life, and with a great love he studied humanity frankly. He was not afraid of what his study revealed to him. In the matter of ways and means of expression, the science of technique, he studied most profoundly, as only a great master would have the will to study. His vision was not touched by fashion. He struggled to apprehend the constructive force in nature and to employ in his works the principles found. His quality was honesty. “Integrity” is the word which seems best to fit him. Personally I consider him the greatest portrait painter America has produced.[102] In 1982, in his two-volume Eakins biography, art historian Lloyd Goodrich wrote: In spite of limitations—and what artist is free of them?—Eakins’ achievement was monumental. He was our first major painter to accept completely the realities of contemporary urban America, and from them to create powerful, profound art… In portraiture alone Eakins was the strongest American painter since Copley, with equal substance and power, and added penetration, depth, and subtlety.[103] John Canaday, art critic for The New York Times, wrote in 1964: As a supreme realist, Eakins appeared heavy and vulgar to a public that thought of art, and culture in general, largely in terms of a graceful sentimentality. Today he seems to us to have recorded his fellow Americans with a perception that was often as tender as it was vigorous, and to have preserved for us the essence of an American life which, indeed, he did not idealize—because it seemed to him beautiful beyond the necessity of idealization.[104] See alsoBiography portalartist’s palettePainting portalPhiladelphia portalList of painters by name beginning with “E”List of American artists before 1900List of people from PhiladelphiaVisual art of the United States Philadelphia (colloquially known simply as Philly) is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the United States. It is the sixth-most-populous city in the United States and the most populous city in the state of Pennsylvania, with a 2020 population of 1,603,797.[6] It is also the second-most populous city in the Northeastern United States, behind New York City. Since 1854, the city has had the same geographic boundaries as Philadelphia County, the most-populous county in Pennsylvania and the urban core of the eighth-largest U.S. metropolitan statistical area, with over 6 million residents as of 2017.[9] Philadelphia is also the economic and cultural center of the greater Delaware Valley along the lower Delaware and Schuylkill rivers within the Northeast megalopolis. The Delaware Valley’s 2019 estimated population of 7.21 million makes it the ninth-largest combined statistical area in the United States.[10] Philadelphia is one of the oldest municipalities in the United States. William Penn, an English Quaker, founded the city in 1682 to serve as capital of the Pennsylvania Colony.[4][11] Philadelphia played an instrumental role in the American Revolution as a meeting place for the Founding Fathers of the United States, who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 at the Second Continental Congress, and the Constitution at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. Several other key events occurred in Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War including the First Continental Congress, the preservation of the Liberty Bell, the Battle of Germantown, and the Siege of Fort Mifflin. Philadelphia remained the nation’s largest city until being overtaken by New York City in 1790; the city was also one of the nation’s capitals during the revolution, serving as temporary U.S. capital while Washington, D.C. was under construction. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Philadelphia became a major industrial center and a railroad hub. The city grew due to an influx of European immigrants, most of whom initially came from Ireland and Germany—the two largest reported ancestry groups in the city as of 2015. Later immigrant groups in the 20th century came from Italy (Italian being the third largest European ethnic ancestry currently reported in Philadelphia) and other Southern European and Eastern European countries.[12] In the early 20th century, Philadelphia became a prime destination for African Americans during the Great Migration after the Civil War.[13] Puerto Ricans began moving to the city in large numbers in the period between World War I and II, and in even greater numbers in the post-war period.[14] The city’s population doubled from one million to two million people between 1890 and 1950. The Philadelphia area’s many universities and colleges make it a top study destination, as the city has evolved into an educational and economic hub.[15][16] As of 2019, the Philadelphia metropolitan area is estimated to produce a gross metropolitan product (GMP) of $490 billion.[17] Philadelphia is the center of economic activity in Pennsylvania and is home to five Fortune 1000 companies. The Philadelphia skyline is expanding, with a market of almost 81,900 commercial properties in 2016,[18] including several nationally prominent skyscrapers.[19] Philadelphia has more outdoor sculptures and murals than any other American city.[20][21] Fairmount Park, when combined with the adjacent Wissahickon Valley Park in the same watershed, is one of the largest contiguous urban park areas in the United States.[22] The city is known for its arts, culture, cuisine, and colonial history, attracting 42 million domestic tourists in 2016 who spent $6.8 billion, generating an estimated $11 billion in total economic impact in the city and surrounding four counties of Pennsylvania.[23] Philadelphia is also a biotechnology hub.[24] Philadelphia is the home of many U.S. firsts, including the nation’s first library (1731),[25] hospital (1751),[25] medical school (1765),[26] national capital (1774),[27] university (by some accounts) (1779),[28] stock exchange (1790),[25] zoo (1874),[29] and business school (1881).[30] Philadelphia contains 67 National Historic Landmarks and the World Heritage Site of Independence Hall.[31] The city became a member of the Organization of World Heritage Cities in 2015,[32] as the first World Heritage City in the United States.[16]

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