Born July 25: Thomas Eakins

 

Last November, Pulitzer Prize winning biographer William McFeely, now 76, published Portrait: A Life of Thomas Eakins, which extended the debate about the painter’s homoerotic work and the degree of his homosexuality.

Publishers Weekly:

Eakins (1844–1916) had a fortunate early life, with art studies in Paris and Spain, a sympathetic wife and a promising career at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Nevertheless, he suffered from a sense of failure, bouts of depression and conflicted feelings about his attraction to men. McFeely sees the painting Swimming [top], in particular, as indicative of Eakins's unfulfilled longings, but also of more than that: the image of the artist and five of his male students swimming in the nude embodies Eakins's Thoreauvian conviction that happiness can be found in freedom from society's constraints, in living at one with nature. Eakins never achieved this freedom, however. In 1886, he was asked to resign from the academy, probably because of his homosexuality and his insistence on using nude models in his life drawing classes, and his life became one of increasing despair.

Booklist:

McFeely sees a tragic figure who, after glimpsing possible fulfillment as an open homosexual in Paris, returned to his hometown of Philadelphia and a closeted life. Not quite convincingly, McFeely argues that Eakins' interest in the nude male figure--which reached its zenith in his most famous painting, Swimming--was less an expression of homoerotic desire than a function of his yearning for a transcendent freedom of the kind imagined by Thoreau.

Note that Eakins’s titles for this most famous work, Swimming then The Swimmers, emphasize action and people, but the painting has come to be called The Swimming Hole, merely a place. [Since 1990, the painting has been in the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth.] Eakins painted himself into the picture as the man treading water looking up at the youths. 

Despairing though he may have been, Eakins was not alone. He was friends with Walt Whitman, he photographed and painted him [below], and it was a section of Song of Myself that inspired Swimming.

One of the earliest painters to use photography, he left more than 800 photos, the majority of them nude studies, including many of himself [below, by boat].