Patrick Bade
American Realism: Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer

Patrick Bade - American Realism: Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer

- I’m talking tonight about two very remarkable artists who are both, I would say, very distinctively American. They couldn’t be anything else, but at the same time, they belong to, I would say, a broader movement in Western Art of Realism with a capital R. So they are Thomas Eakins on the left and Winslow Homer on the right. And here is works by them. Again, it’s Eakins on the left, his rower called Max Schmitt. And on the right-hand side, women bathers by Winslow Homer. So these are both everyday real subjects and Realism, with a capital R, is really about engagement with the real world, world of everyday, the world around us. It’s a movement that begins in the middle of the 19th century, and continues to the end of the century. And I would stress that it’s a movement, not a style. There are many artists who belong to this movement who paint in different ways. So it’s a range of subject matter as we’ve seen, everyday, ordinary subject matter rather than fantastic or heroic subject matter and it’s a particular approach towards this subject matter. And it’s a literary movement and a philosophical movement as well as a movement in the visual arts. And it’s connected with the materialist and positivist ideas that were dominant in the middle of the 19th century. And the high priests of Realism with a capital R, the Emile Zola, the novelist on the left-hand side, and the painter, Gustave Courbet. Any definition you want of Realism, and I emphasise with a capital R, ‘cause real, realistic, Realism, they can have different meanings for different people. But I’m talking about a specific historical movement.

And as far as the visual arts, there are various important factors. It’s painting directly from life rather than from fantasy or imagination. And something that greatly enabled this or helped with this, was the invention of the collapsible metal tube of paint in the 1840s. This certainly made plein air painting, painting in the open air from life much, much easier. And on the left you have all the kit that is necessary really if you want to paint landscape out of doors, the sunshade, the collapsible easel, the box of paints in metal tubes. And this is a painting by Winslow Homer dating, or from 1868, which says, “Lots of people,” with exactly the kit that we’ve just seen painting out of doors. It always brings a smile to my face, this picture, 'cause I think of the famous Degas quote, Degas was very against plein air painting. He didn’t like it. And he said that he would like to have set up a special squad of police whose job it was to shoot, on site, any artists they caught painting in the open air. A very important influence on all of this is the great poet, Baudelaire, and his essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” that came out in 1863 that encapsulated ideas that he’d been developing in his Salon reviews over several years. And he said, let’s stop painting ancient Rome, ancient Greece, Middle Ages or Renaissance or whatever, let’s look around us for our inspiration. And particularly he said, Paris is the great modern city and it’s full of wonders and that’s what artists should be concentrating on. This painting by Manet is almost a kind of manifesto picture. He was very close to Baudelaire, Baudelaire influenced him. And he shows himself, on the extreme left of this picture, as a kind of dandy, a cooley, observing the world as a journalist does.

And that was the role that Baudelaire set out for the artist, that he should be a kind of visual journalist. And as we shall see, that’s exactly what Winslow Homer started out as. Another very important factor for both the artists I’m talking about tonight is the invention photography in the 1830s. This photograph by Daguerre dates from 1839 and it’s believed to be the first ever, or certainly the first surviving photograph of a city street. Seems to be deserted apart from the one man who’s in the bottom foreground, who’s having his shoes shined. And the only reason he’s there is 'cause he’s immobile for a minute or so, while his shoes are being shined. Everybody else is moving. And because of the slow exposure time with these early cameras, they’ve all disappeared and the city looks deserted. Now, in around about this time you have the introduction of mass circulation illustrated periodicals and they play an important role in all of this. As I said, Baudelaire said the artist should be like a journalist. And Winslow Homer started his career working for these magazines, “Harper’s Weekly,” “Ballou’S Pictorial,” and so on. And this also coincided with dramatic historical events, the American Civil War, which lasts from 1861 to '65. I think you’ve been hearing about that from William already this evening, some of you. And so this is how Homer began his career, recording battles and army life in the American Civil War. Of course, he was on the Unionist side.

And there’re several wars around this time in the 1850s and the 1860s, which changed people’s attitudes to warfare. Well, of course, at the moment, we’re all incredibly distressed and horrified at the images that we’re being bombarded with. Every time you switch on your television or you switch on your computer, war is being brought right into our living rooms. But this process started really with photography and with new methods of communication like the telegraph and mass circulation newspapers, including these illustrated magazines I’ve already talked about roundabout this time. And the man you see on the left, he’s called Roger Fenton, and he took a mobile photographic studio, a van, with him to the Crimea in the 1850s. So in fact, I mean, the Crimean War has a rather nasty reputation for being grubby and brutal and awful. And it’s not necessarily that it was any worse than any earlier war, it’s just that we have a lot more visual information about it because of Roger Fenton’s photographs. And this is a photograph of the Crimean War on the right-hand side and yet another. And these photographs, 'cause they rarely show the heat of the backlog, they show the banality of everyday life in the war of a soldiers’ life. And this is also very much the theme of many of Winslow Homer’s illustrations. Now these were very, very successful and won a lot of praise, and they encouraged him and he didn’t have, at this point, a formal academic art training, but he was ambitious. He wanted to be a serious Artist with a capital A. And so he actually translated the images that he created for magazines into oil paintings. So this is an illustration as it appeared in the magazine, and then he turned it into a painting and he exhibited these paintings with considerable success.

This was really his first very big success, dating from 1866, so actually just after the end of the American Civil War, and it shows a northern soldier on the right-hand side with the defeated southerners who’ve been taken prison. We see that on the left-hand side. And the title of this picture is “Prisoners are at the Front,” but many other pictures, as I said, that show that the everyday banal side of warfare, soldiers resting or preparing for the battle. And so at exactly the same time as the American Civil War, a war was going on in Italy. This is the War of Unification. And this is a painting that I happened to see when I was travelling with a friend in Italy a couple of weeks ago. We went to Milan and I saw this picture by Giovanni Fattori, and it shows the aftermath of the Battle of Custoza in 1866. So it’s exactly contemporary with Winslow Homer’s painting of the defeated Confederate soldiers, and very, very similar. I mean, so strikingly similar really, although I think this is not the case of influence, I think it’s pretty well impossible that Fattori and Winslow Homer could have known each others work at this point. It’s a question of zeitgeist, the spirit of the time. So the Civil War over, and Winslow Homer earning his first successes as a serious artist, of course he thinks he has to go to Europe for study. And if you remember from the last talk I gave, in the first half of the 19th century, American artists were likely to go to Germany.

Dusseldorf was the mecca for American artists in the 1830s and ‘40s. But by the '60s, this has changed and Paris is where all the American artists want to go to. In 1867, the year that Winslow Homer came to Europe, was the year of the second Paris world exhibition. So that would’ve been a sort of added attraction for him. And there were huge art displays in that exhibition that would’ve certainly been of great interest to him. He was still at this point working for “Harper’s Weekly.” So I suppose this trip paid for itself because he was making images like this of the Bal Mabille, a popular dance hall in Paris in 1867. This would’ve been decidedly risque image for his readers back on the east coast of America, these ladies kicking their legs in the air, exposing their lower legs and ankles. This would’ve been shocking stuff in 1867. Here’s another image he produced of artists copying in the Louvre. This is the Grande Galerie of the Louvre. And until, I don’t know when this stopped, maybe 20, 30 years ago, but up until then, there was always a day in the week where artists could make copies in the Louvre. And all the great 19th century artists did it. It’s where Manet and Degas, for instance, met with one another while copying in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre. One of the artists who was particularly celebrated in the 1867 exhibition was Millet. And this painting of gleaners was in that show. And Winslow Homer certainly saw it, and he would’ve been very interested if only because of the subject matter of a peasant life, rural life. But the painting you see on the right-hand side of a very similar subject, of a reaper rather than a gleaner, is actually, I think, quite different from Millet. It looks like it was either painted out of doors directly or made from studies that he made on the spot. And it also has a slightly photographic look to it.

Oh yes, that was something I wanted to say earlier when talking about photography, is that the camera changed the way that artists see the world. And when you’re going through a great museum of Western Art, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, 18th century, Neoclassical, romantic, there comes a point where you look at the pictures and you see, ah, yes, these artists have seen photographs, even if they’re not using photographs, even if not painting after photographs, they know how the world looks through the lens of a camera. And I would say that is a difference between the Millet on the left-hand side and the Winslow Homer on the right. And again, here’s a comparison of Millet’s most famous painting, course immensely, immensely famous and popular painting in the 19th century, the “Angelus,” and I think Winslow Homer could hardly have painted that subject without having the “Angelus” in mind. As I said, it was so widely reproduced and famous. But for me, the differences are more striking, actually, than the similarities. Again, it has this naturalism, this almost photographic quality. It looks like it’s been painted out of doors, and it completely lacks the kind of pathos and sentimentality of the Millet image. Now here’s another intriguing comparison. The painting on the right-hand side is by Claude Monet, “Women in the Garden.” He actually posed his wife, she posed all the figures in this and he painted it in his back garden. H dug a trench and he had a sort of contraption so that he could raise and lower the canvas.

He wanted to paint it all directly from life. And so he’s already, although it’s not really an impressionist painting, it’s pre-impressionist, but you can see he’s already very, very concerned with capturing outdoor lighting effects, sunlight and so on. And the Winslow Homer, it just, it’s so strikingly similar. You know, one is tempted to say, “Oh, well, of course, I mean, he could have seen the Monet, it was exhibited in Paris in 1867, that this is his response to Monet.” But actually, no, because the Winslow Homer was painted the year before. And again, it’s a question of artists interested in the same kind of things at the same time, quite independent from one another. And here’s another example of the same. This dates from 1870, so it’s actually three years later. This is the Italian artist Silvestro Lega, which is also a kind of pre-impressionist painting, isn’t it? It’s clearly painted out of doors and he’s very interested in light filtering through the foliage and so on. So neither Winslow Homer nor Thomas Eakins ever really embraced the fundamentals of impressionism. They both stopped short of the full-blown impressionist style, although they are interested in sunlight and outdoor effects. I see quite a striking similarity here between this Renoir of the late 1860s, again, it’s a pre-impressionist picture shows his girlfriend Lise, and he’s posed her in the back garden, but at this point, he’s not… It’s a couple of years after this that he dares to paint the effect of a broken light filtering through the trees onto the human figure.

And with the Winslow Homer, again, he’s quite careful to position this girl in the hammock so that we have all the open art effect of light and foliage, but it’s not breaking in patches on the figure as it does, of course, in this very famous Renoir of the swing on the right-hand side, which dates from 1876, when it’s Winslow Homer on the left approaching Impressionism, but not quite going there. And here again, this is 1870, he’s back in America when he paints this, elegant ladies on the seashore. And here I think it is actually quite likely that he was influenced by Eugene Boudin. He would’ve certainly seen his work in Paris in 1867. This is a work of the mid-1860s showing the Empress Eugenie and her ladies on the beach at Trouville. Both of the works, I would describe, that they’re plein air works, but I’d describe them as pre-impressionists rather than really impressionists, as is the case with this picture I’ve shown you already of these young ladies and wearing the customary bathing costumes. Bathing in the sea, Bathing in the rivers was a fairly new thing in the middle of the 19th century and at the time, modesty required that they should wear these very capacious bathing costumes. This is already perhaps a little bit daring in the way that the girl is lifting her skirts to reveal her lower legs. So back in America, the United States is now united, the Civil War is over and it’s a period of optimism and expansion. And I think he wants to celebrate this and he wants to explore it. And this painting has quite a pointed title. It’s called “Veteran in a New Field.”

So he’s clearly… It’s not just any old worker in a field. This is a veteran of the Civil War and it’s a new field. So I think there are actually political connotations to the title of this picture. And so in the 1870s, I think he wants to celebrate American life, American rural life. This is, of course, one of his most popular pictures, I’m sure it’s very familiar to you. “Snap the Whip” dates from 1872, and it’s a picture that always makes me think of Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn. Again, it’s not actually directly inspired by Mark Twain. Mark Twain was writing those books as he painted this picture. They hadn’t actually been published when he painted this picture. They were published a couple of years later. But it’s very much the spirit, isn’t it, of Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer. This is a very politically and emotionally charged picture of the post-Civil War period, and the title is “A Visit from the Old Mistress.” It dates from 1876. So you have the richly dressed, but, you know, sober, she’s wearing black but very expensive lace. This is the former mistress of these Afro-Americans who were slaves. And well, it’s a, as I said, a highly charged picture. There’s a real sense, I suppose, of confrontation in a way between the former slaves and the former owner. But I think he allows you to read what you want to into this picture. He doesn’t, as so many English Victorian artists would do, cross the T’s and dot the I’s and tell a very obvious story. And it’s been pointed out that the composition is almost a repeat of his first famous civil war picture of the confrontation between the soldiers of both sides in the Civil War. And throughout his career, he’s very interested in Afro-American life and former slaves and paints very, very sympathetic pictures of them, like this one of Black Americans preparing for a carnival and this one of young girls picking cotton.

And looking at a picture like this, you might think, “Yes, did the end of slavery necessarily always benefit the former slaves?” They were often, of course, in very tough and terrible economic situation. Now they needed to earn their living to survive. And of course, the end of slavery certainly did not bring about total freedom or liberty for African Afro-Americans. Now, in 1881-2, he comes back to Europe, but instead of staying in France this time, he spends most of his time in Britain and he lives in a coastal fishing village in Northumberland. And this brings about quite a marked change in his style and his palette of colour. It’s much more sober palette of colour, a much more dark and gloomy mood. I think he’s very interested in the harshness of the life of the fishing communities in the north of England. There are paintings that are full of drama, A big theme for him from now on actually is the battle between man and the elements, between the fishermen and the sea. And he paints quite a number of pictures of rescues going on. This was a shipwreck that he actually witnessed and painted from memory. Back in America, 1890, the sea is very, very important to him for the rest of his career. This is an enigmatic picture, a rather romantic picture with a big R and a small R, I would say, with this couple dancing on the beach in the moonlight. But in the latter decades of his life, he spends a lot of time in the Caribbean, and this, once again, brings about a big change in his palette, particularly his watercolours. He’s a superb technician in the very, very difficult medium of watercolour painting with tremendous verve and freedom. And again, very often, fascinated by the lives of the inhabitants of the Caribbean of African origin. And memories here with the cannons of the old colonial times. And there are a whole series of watercolours and drawings made of wrecked boats floating on the ocean, often surrounded by sharks.

Here’s a pencil drawing of an abandoned wrecked boat and Caribbean fishermen. And these culminate in perhaps his most famous picture, which is called “The Gulf Stream,” and dates from 1899 that shows a black fisherman on his boat. The mast has broken, he can’t control it. You’ve got a water spout or a tornado in the distance, and he’s surrounded by sharks. So he is in a very, very perilous situation. And of course, there’s been a huge amount of commentary on this picture. What’s he saying here? What does it mean? And certainly on one level it’s this very romantic thing. Going back to Romanticism with a capital R, we have artists like Caspar David Friedrich and Turner who are very interested in the battle between man and nature, the helplessness of man in the face of the power of nature. When he was in England in the 1880s, he certainly studied Turner very, very closely. This is an early painting by Turner on very much the same theme of the inexorable power of nature and the helplessness of man in the face of nature. And a painting that he knew well, and he actually writes about in his letters, is the Turner painting. It’s actually, by this time it was in America, it’d been bought by an American collector. And this is Turner’s, slavers throwing overboard, the dead and the dying. So I think that’s a picture that would’ve fascinated Winslow Homer on several levels. I mean, it’s obviously a very powerful statement against the horrors and the brutality of slavery and also very much a painting about the inexorable and cruel part of the sea.

And so people have made many, many interpretations of this picture, as they have, of course, of another famous image of man versus nature, the Jericho “Raft of the Medusa,” quite early on in the 19th century. The historian initially, he declared all France is on that raft. So for him it was a metaphor about the helpless rudderless state of France in the middle of the 19th century. Other people have seen both of these pictures as a metaphor for the helplessness of humanity. I mean, you could see it if you want to. You could see it as a painting about our own situation at the moment with climate change and nature taking its revenge upon the human race. Other people have seen it as being very specifically political, as some kind of statement about the plight of African Americans. And other people have wanted to take a more personal interpretation that it’s actually Winslow Homer himself who’s identifying with the figure on the boat, helpless in the face of the elements. I’m going to move on to my second artist, Thomas Eakins. This is a self-portrait of him. Well, Winslow Homer did not always have an easy time with the critics, but I would say Thomas Eakins had a much tougher time. He was very, very controversial throughout his career and his work deeply offended the puritan sensibilities of the Philadelphia of his day and he was often in trouble for reasons of perceived immorality. And ironically, this hasn’t really changed. I think many aspects of his life and his work are offensive to the new kind of puritanism we have of the PC variety. So he was born in Philadelphia to the son of a fairly prosperous weaver and and he was of English, Scottish, Irish and Dutch descent and enormously talented and trained. Unlike Winslow Homer, he had a proper academic training at the Philadelphia Academy of Art.

And it was evident from the start that he was technically brilliant and the obvious thing to do in his time was to go to Paris, and so he went to Paris 1866 to 1870. He spent nearly five years there and he enlisted with the French academic painting, Jean-Leon Gerome, who you see here, rather crusty, very conservative character. And he also spent time in the studio of Leon Bonnat, who painted this wonderfully ludicrous painting of the “Martyrdom of St. Denis,” which is inside the Pantheon in Paris. And it always makes me giggle this painting because the style, of course, is, in inverted commas, “realist,” but the subject matter is fantastic saint being martyred and picking up his head and walking off with it. So it always looks a bit sort of Monty Python to me, this picture, I think there’s a mismatch between the style and the subject matter. But what I find really fascinating is that Eakins completely learns this very conventional French academic realist style. I mean, his style is formed by Gerome and Bonnat, but he’s so much more interesting than either of them. And I think it’s this elusive quality, I don’t know quite how you define it, really, of truth that it seems to me that he has, and it does seem to me, a quality that crops up again and again in American art. I mean, he respected Gerome and talks about him with admiration in his letters later on, but he was not fooled by the slick insincerity of this kind of French academic painting.

And this here is a quote from one of his letters. He says, “The female nude is the most beautiful thing in the world, except the naked man. It would be a godsend to see a fine man painted in the studio with bare walls alongside the smirking goddesses of waxy complexion amid the delicious arsenic green trees and gentle waxy flowers and the purling streams running melodiously up and down the hills, especially up. I hate affectation.” That could be, of course, a perfect description of the picture you see on the screen, which is by another leading French academic artist of this period, William Bouguereau, the waxy news, the smirky smiles, the slickness, the insincerity of the whole thing. And this makes I think a very interesting comparison. Here is a painting by his master, Jean-Leon Gerome, on the left-hand side. It’s called “Phryne devant l'Juge,” and it’s based on a story of ancient Greece of a famous courtesan who is accused of immorality and she’s sent before a court and she simply takes off her clothes and all the judges are so spellbound by her beauty that they let her off. Now that is a really pervy, creepy painting in my view, the Gerome one on the left-hand side, you know, inviting the viewer to a kind of voyeurism really, isn’t it? I mean, they’re all looking up at her front. We can only see her back. But it’s almost, this painting on the right-hand side by Eakins of the studio of the sculptor William Rush and he’s carving a statue from a naked figure. Just compare the two, that sense of gritty truthfulness that you get with Eakins, which is completely absent from Gerome. So he makes quite a good career for himself, despite getting a lot of negative reviews and not always able to sell his work. This is his house in Philadelphia. In fact, it was his father’s house and his father, who constructed a studio at the top for Eakins.

Back in Philadelphia in the 1870s, he paints a magnificent series of oarsmen. There are several of these paintings. He was very sporty character himself, very physically active with sports and very interested in sports throughout his career. One of his most famous pictures belongs to this series of rowers and it has a very photographic quality to it. The Max Schmitt, the boatsman looks round and, to me, it looks like he’s looking at the camera that has taken a photograph of him. And it’s quite likely the painting was indeed based on photographs and there’s certainly, we know that there are many paintings like this one by Eakins, which are directly taken from photographs that he took. Also in the 1870s, he paints quite a lot of domestic scenes like this one and this very delightful one of a little child. You’ve heard me before talking about how irritated I am often with very cutesy, sentimental paintings of small children. But this seems to me again, like Chatard, like Liotard to be, it’s touching because he doesn’t try to be touching. It’s sincere. It’s truthful. He’s very musical as well. Lots of paintings of people, lots of paintings of musicians and paintings of people making music. Have a look at this detail 'cause although his technique is an academic one and it’s quite, in inverted commas, “finished.” You can see from this detail, it’s not a kind of slick, smooth finish as you would find in many French academic paintings. Now when he was in his 40s, he married a much younger woman called Susan Macdowell, who is in fact one of his students at the Philadelphia Academy.

And so there was a, I think, probably many people regarded that as there was an element of impropriety in that, the fact that he married one of his students and he was rumoured to have had improper relations with students, both female and male. And of course, in the end, in a famous scandal in 1886, he was sacked from his teaching position at the Philadelphia Academy for allowing female students in his class to see a male corpse with the loin cloth removed. And you can see this two ways, I think. You could say, yes, he was fighting against hypocrisy, against prudery and all that kind of thing, but I think actually he might be in bigger trouble today for his behaviour than he was in the 1880s. Now, the marriage, it seems to have been a happy one. It was childless, they didn’t have children, but she remained very, very devoted to him through all the controverties that surrounded him. There was another scandal when a niece who had been entrusted him to look after committed suicide. And of course there were rumours that there’d been some impropriety there that had caused the suicide. So this is a comparison which I find intriguing. Again, I’m sure he knew this picture, very famous portrait of Sarah Bernhardt by the artist Georges Clairin. And it’s a cliche, really, of late 19th century painting to show a woman with an animal. I mean, it’s often a cat actually or a panther. And here, of course in both cases, it’s a dog, where the animal almost seems to be part of the female figure. But how fresh and straightforward and again, in inverted commas, “truthful” Eakins portrait looks compared to this wonderful, wonderfully artificial piece of confectionary of Clara on the right-hand side. Here is a later portrait of his wife. She doesn’t look happy, does she?

But then actually, almost none of his female portraits look happy. And I think he’s a wonderful portrayer of women, exceptional again, because, and I’m thinking back to Liotard actually. He’s not ever trying to present them as sexy or pretty. He doesn’t prettify them. And he’s, I think, very interested in their state of mind, in their psychology and paints them very sympathetically. And I would make it a comparison too, with not all the portraits of Sargent, because Sargent can be a terrific flatterer and paint women in a very sexy way. But there are paintings by Sargent where I think he does probe into the psyche of his women citizens and they often have a slightly distressed quality, as I think the portraits of Eakins have. This is a woman called Alice Kurtz. In certainly, most of you, he’s a very, very prolific portraitist. But more often than not, these were portraits that he chose to paint. They weren’t commissioned portraits. And it’s also very often the case that his sitters actually didn’t like their portraits. It’s a bit like, you know, the famous story about Pope Innocent X telling Velazquez that his portrait of him was , it’s too true. And I think these portraits were often too true. Now, Alice, this was a portrait that he made as a gift, in fact, to her mother. And I think what interested him about her, she was very sporty and she was rather androgynous in her figure.

And a typical piece of Eakins truthfulness, I don’t know how well it comes across to you in this image on your screens, but he makes it very clear that her face, the skin colour of her face is very different from the face of her neck or her arms. And the reason for this was that she was a very keen tennis player, but after the fashion of the time, she kept herself covered up right up to the chin. So the sun had bronzed her face, but not her skin. And this is something I can hardly think of another artist who would’ve recorded this, at least in a portrait of a woman. But I do think this marvellous portrait by Sargent of Lord Dalhousie, who spent all his life out and about in the fields of his estates with a gun, shooting things, but wearing a hat. And you can see the little strip of pale skin at the top of his head and the rest of the face more bronzed. Another one, his female portraits, they’re wistful, they’re really quite sad. This is a woman called… What was her first name? Mahon was her second name. Edith Mahon, that’s her name. And she, again, she was a musician and he made this painting as a gift for her, but she didn’t like it and never hung it and had it faced to the wall for most of her life. But again, it’s, I think, melancholy in a troubled psyche that we see here. As I said, he paints many pictures of musicians, and this was a singer called Weda Cook. And you can see he’s showing her in mid concert. And a rather intriguing detail that is very typical of this kind of desire to give you a little slice of truth, is this is mid concert. There’s obviously an orchestra and we actually see the conductor’s hand intruding at the bottom of the image. It’s the sort of thing that Degas would’ve done.

And here is the Degas ballet scene where you can see the tops of the double bases intruding into the image at the bottom of the picture. And once again, an interesting comparison between Eakins and the much, of course, more fluent painterly technique of Sargent on the right-hand side, again, of a singer in mid concert. His portraiture culminates in this great masterpiece, maybe his greatest picture, called “The Gross Clinic.” And it shows a demonstration of surgery. This was a picture that was really not liked at all at the time. It’s a huge picture, a very impressive picture. But it was a bitterly criticised and thought to be tasteless and far too real for comfort. Here one of his sketches for these kind of pictures. I mean, it gives you the impression of being a snapshot of a moment in time. But as Degas said, you know, “A picture has to be planned as carefully as a crime.” And this is certainly a picture that was very, very carefully thought through and planned and many, many studies for it, including this one. And you could paint with tremendous verve and freedom. Some years later he painted another anatomy lesson. This one was actually a commission from students of a very distinguished surgeon called Agnew. And there you see the students in the background. And this is a picture where you, of course, you are aware that there is a very, very famous precedent for both these anatomy lessons. And that is, oh, here’s the detail, of “The Agnew Clinic” and of course the inspiration, the ultimate inspiration for both of these medical pictures is the great group portrait by Rembrandt, “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp” dating from the mid-17th century.

And I can’t resist showing you this 'cause this is a contemporary, a French contemporary of Eakins, very much the same kind of background, academic training. This is Henri Gervex. And this is so French, isn’t it really? That instead of having a male corpse, well, I suppose she’s… I think she’s probably still alive actually. But this is a demonstration of anatomy, which has a decidedly sort of sexy pinup element in it that would’ve been very appealing to French audiences in the late 19th century. So I mentioned that, well, this is the second version of his painting of William Rush carving a statue. an allegorical statue of a river in his studio. Both of these pictures, notice that there is a chaperone. So he’s actually paying lip service, 'cause he knew that people in Philadelphia would be very shocked by a nude female figure in a painting. But the chaperone who’s knitting or doing crochet or something like that, gives a certain respectability to the picture. But there is a very piquant detail that would’ve been probably the most shocking thing in this picture for contemporary viewers, and that is the pile of her clothes in the foreground. And, again, I think he would’ve been, he certainly would’ve been familiar with this picture by Henri Gervex, again, on the right-hand side, which, even in France, this was considered a scandalous picture.

And it shows… It’s actually based on a narrative poem and it tells the story of a young man who’s ruined himself with fast living and fast women and he spends his final money on a night with this gorgeous woman and he takes one look at her before throwing himself out the window. But this caused quite a scandal when it was shown in Paris in the 1870s. But it was a . But the most piquant detail that everybody commented on that was really exciting was the pile of clothes in the foreground. And of course it’s suggesting, you know, wild passion, which they’ve ripped off her clothes to have wild, mad sex. And actually, interestingly, that piquant detail was suggested to Gervex by Degas. He said that he thought this would be an interesting addition to the picture. And again, the other version of William Rush in his studio with the fig leaf of respectability given to the picture by the lady chaperone knitting on the left-hand side. So there’s an odd tension really, I think, in Eakins work between the desire to get rid of sexual inhibitions and hypocrisy, but also paying lip service in a drawing like this, for instance, which is a life drawing, it was in Paris. This was absolutely standard. Every artist training in Paris, as he had done, would’ve been drawing from the female nude at this time. But the lip service here to American prudishness is the mask that is given to the woman. I think from our point of view, it actually makes a painting more disturbing and gives it a slightly perverse sexual quality. And I would make a comparison here with the famous photographs by Bellocq made around 1900 in New Orleans brothels, where the prostitutes, these are pinup pictures, I suppose, of the early 1900s, but in several of them, either the face is rubbed out or the women are wearing masks. He was a great photographer and photographer of the nude, or not great but prolific, did many of these photographs.

This clearly intended for some painting that I presume was never carried out. And like his contemporary, Eadweard Muybridge, he’s interested in using photography to capture movement. This is not by Muybridge. This is actually by Eakins. And as I’ve said before, he’s very, very interested in sport and that resulted, towards the end of the century, in a series of boxing pictures. This guy became a very close friend. It was called “Billy Smith.” That’s Billy Smith. And in this, this actually, again, it records an actual event, although the painting is obviously very carefully conceived and constructed in which Billy Smith was actually defeated in a boxing match. And this brings me to a controversy, another controversy about Thomas Eakins, about, much discussion among academics, about his sexuality. As I said, his marriage lasted, his wife stuck by him. They didn’t have any children and there’s been a lot of speculation that he was either homosexual or bisexual, had very intense relations with his male students and particularly with this man over a period of many years. He was a sculptor called Samuel Murray, and it was Eakins who took this nude picture of him on the left. And certainly correspondence shows an extremely intense emotional engagement with this young man. And I think we can pick up an element of homoeroticism in quite a few of the paintings. This is Eakins on the left where there’s a suggestion of some kind of classical iddle with this boy playing the flute. And it’s a painting that reminds me of the contemporary photographs of Baron von Gloeden. Baron von Gloeden was a German aristocrat.

He went down to Sicily in Naples and he found young adolescent boys and he posed them in classical ruins or with vases or with classical connotations. And they were, oddly enough, they were much more accepted then, I think, than they would be today. You know, somebody wanting to publish photographs today like this, there’d be a lot of raised eyebrows and I think the images likely to be suppressed. But particularly in the Anglo, or the French would call, the Anglo-Saxon countries, the English speaking countries, there was an acceptance of the male nude. I think it comes from looking back to classical culture, Greek literature and so on. And for instance, Baron von Gloeden, his photographs were very, very widely published and they were in very respectable magazines and they were treated as high art and very seriously. This is a painting called “The Swimming Hole” by Thomas Eakins. And of course, in England at the Royal Academy, the female nude more or less disappears, you could say between 1850 and the 1890s. It was extremely rare to find the female nude exhibited Royal Academy Summer exhibitions. If you’ve taken the boat train to Paris at the same time for the Paris Salon, it was floor to ceiling, frame to frame female nudity. It was very, very different. On the bottom right here is an artist called Henry Scott Tuke, who long lived, over many, many decades every year to the Royal Academy Summer exhibition, he sent nothing but pictures of adolescent boys with no clothes on, and nobody thought anything of it. It was perfectly accepted at the time in the most respectable circles. So here is my final image, a picture of Eakins that was actually taken by his long suffering wife, Susan. Right, I’m going to see what we have in the way of questions.

Q&A and Comments:

“Greetings from Rita.” Thank you. “Look into Samuel Morse as an American in Paris.” Thank you.

Q: Monty Golden, “If the camera change painting, will smartphones and computers introduce?”

A: Yes, I’m sure they do. Well, look at David Hockney for a start. Yes, as Hannah has pointed out. Benjamin, “Eakins was a calligrapher, not a weaver.” May be right, I’m not sure. Certainly, I think he was both actually. I think he probably started off as a weaver and became a calligrapher.

Q: “The painting of the nude with her back to us, bottom left hand is a woman knitting, any comment?”

A: Well, I did make comments, so presumably you picked up those.

“Both corpses in the anatomy lesson are female with definite breasts.” Not according to an exhibition catalogue I’ve just been reading, but I’ll have another look at that.

“None in the room is a French in the French 'Anatomy Lesson’ with the female patient.” Oh, yes, that is interesting, isn’t it Margaret?

“Surgery paintings, before the realisation of the necessity of sterile kind conditions.” Actually, no. It’s in early days of knowing that, but actually, you know, Lister and Pasteur. So it took a while, of course to really sink in with a lot of surgeons and there’s a huge scandal of corporal fever with the doctors, you know, over decades. It was known, well, some people knew that you needed to wash your hands between delivering babies, but doctors continued to follow the old practise.

Madeleine, “In his later career, he seemed to be much more abstract and less realistic, faces more blurred.”

Right, well, I think that’s it for today. Thank you very much and I’ll be back with you on Wednesday for Early American Modern Art.