PORTRAIT: The Life of Thomas Eakins

In 1904, American artist Thomas Eakins gave us a painting of a beautiful woman, rich in ineffable sadness. Deftly with a small brush and the marriage of colour he painted her lustrous eyes, the right one in the light, with a hint of a tear forming. Edith Mahon is said not to have liked the picture and she herself was a talented English pianist and part of a circle of musicians Eakins knew. In the early indoor pictures of his sisters Frances and Margaret, painted soon after his return from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the Luxemborg Garden and Spain, there is a foretelling of the strength and anguish that he would find later in his career. When he went outdoors, the young man and the athlete took part in the sports he depicted - men on boats under sail, at bat, or bent to the wonderful exhaustion of rowing. Eakins' father Benjamin was a second-generation Irish American who moved to Philadelphia from rural Pennsylvania, a calligrapher and writing master who managed to provide his artist son with a lifelong where-with-all to paint without regard to whether he sold a canvas or did not. With almost photographic quality, some of the most striking images are reproduced in the book, some in colour plates such as the Gross Clinic of 1875 showing a bloody operation, the Cello Player, a Portrait of Walt Whitman, Baby at Play and photographs of Eakins and his friends in his studio or sailboats racing on the Delaware. His paintings offer an uncertain vision of the changing times, from the shadow of his mother's depression to his fraught identity as a married man with homosexual inclinations, to his failure to sell his work in his day. Eakins was a man marked equally by passion and by melancholy and his biographer defines the artistic moments and key relationships, with his wife Susan MacDowell, his subject and friend the writer Walt Whitman, and with several of the leading scientists of his time to shed brilliant light on his motivations as one of the founders of American Realism. The book is a powerful testament to the lasting vision of a man ahead of his time. 237pp, paperback with dozens of images and colour plates.