Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (review)

Except for nearly four years of European training in the late 1860s, Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) lived his entire troubled but productive life in Philadelphia. He received relatively little public acclaim during his own time and had to endure charges of homoeroticism and homosexuality, exhibitionism, voyeurism, incest, painting over photographs, and deliberately wishing to shock his viewers. In 1878, three years after painting one of his most famous canvases, The Gross Clinic, he sold it to the Jefferson Medical College for a mere $200. Fourteen years later, the students at the University of Pennsylvania paid him $750 to paint their retiring Professor of Surgery, D. Hayes Agnew. For this very large painting, finished in a mere three months, Eakins received the largest fee of his entire career. All of this has long been known, as there have been about a dozen books about his painting and photography.

So imagine how Eakins might have reacted to the events of the last three years, in which four new, book-length studies have appeared, and in which a Wal-Mart heiress offered Jefferson University $68 million dollars for The Gross Clinic. With much newspaper publicity and civic pride, the City of Philadelphia and its Museum of Art and Academy of Fine Arts managed to raise the money to counter the offer from Alice Walton and prevent the painting from going to her museum in Arkansas. This last event in the Eakins drama occurred after these latest books appeared, but Amy Werbel has nevertheless given us the richest context for Eakins's life and work of any study so far. Her book is as much about the cultural climate of Tom Eakins's city as it is about his life and work.

Historians of medicine have long been interested in Eakins, primarily because his grand surgical scenes tell us much about the history of surgery in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Of the many Eakins books now available, Werbel's speaks most directly to our field, because she discusses the teaching of anatomy by Eakins and the professors in the Philadelphia medical schools and covers and uncovers the many notions about nudity and the body in Eakins's time. Victorian sexuality is hardly a new field, but Werbel uses Tom Eakins as an interesting case study of both attitudes and practices.

Eakins studied anatomy at the Jefferson Medical College in the 1860s before he went to Paris to study art. On his return to Philadelphia in 1870, he began a long career as a teacher of anatomy for art students. In one of her most affecting chapters, Werbel describes the two public "trials" Eakins had to endure. One occurred in the mid-1880s, when he was fired from his faculty position at the Academy of Fine Arts for exposing nude male models to a women's drawing class. A decade later, he was accused by a brother-in-law of having caused the suicide of a niece because Eakins had allegedly made sexual advances to her some years earlier when she was living in his house. Werbel describes these very public events and compares Philadelphians' reactions to them with their reactions to the London trial of Oscar Wilde for homosexual behavior and to the trial of Jefferson's Professor of Anatomy, Thomas Forbes, for abetting the robbing of graves in an African American cemetery to provide cadavers for his medical school class. These were trials, as Werbel points out, ". . . for infraction of rules governing human bodies. For Eakins, the bodies were nude and female (the supposedly offended group), for Forbes they were dead and black, and for Wilde young and male" (p. 126).

This, then, is not merely another book about a great painter's life and work. Werbel has managed very effectively to portray Eakins in the Philadelphia traditions of Charles Willson Peale and Benjamin Franklin, of Gross, Agnew, and Forbes. She has also...