Thomas Eakins

Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993. Hardcover. VG/VG. Black cloth/color DJ. 212 pp. 49 color, 106 bw plates. Originally published in Great Britain, on the occasion of the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from Oct. 8, 1993 to Jan. 23, 1994. In his lifetime, Eakins's artistic reputation suffered from his uncompromising attitude toward convention in art, teaching and society. Now he is acknowledged as one of the greatest of all American painters. Thomas Eakins assesses the full breadth of his genius in its American and European context. The turmoil of his career and his extraordinary authority as a painter are explored through his vivid and often haunting portraits of his family and contemporaries. Eakins's strong commitment to the development of a uniquely American art never wavered, although his painting was influenced and informed by his studies in Paris and his admiration for Velazquez and Ribera. He devoted his career to creating a penetrating series of portraits of professional and artistic society in Philadelphia. Edited by John Wilmerding, Thomas Eakins is an epitome of our present understanding of this profound and highly original artist and embraces the full scope of Eakins studies today. Thirty scholars currently working on Eakins examine individual paintings or groups of paintings in a series of essays, and the results of their most recent research are published here for the first time. While focusing in detail on the most important paintings of Thomas Eakins, the book also discusses the considerable impact of photography on his work, and reproduces for the first time a series of recently rediscovered photographs taken by the artist.