The Revenge of Thomas Eakins (review)

The life of no other nineteenth-century American painter has been scrutinized so much as that of Thomas Eakins (1844–1916). His proclivity for nudity (his own and that of friends, students, and studio models) and his artistic and pedagogical methods (including dissection), unconventional for their time and place, have garnered at least as much attention as his stunning paintings of sport, leisure, family, and the Philadelphia elite. As Kirkpatrick demonstrates in his thorough, lucid, and engrossing biography of the artist, such scrutiny is justified; Eakins was a complicated and fascinating man who can provoke sympathy, bewilderment, and repulsion in a single instant. An account of Eakins' life (and, secondarily, his art) from birth to death, Kirkpatrick's biography brims with anecdote and incident—from the artist's struggles as a student in Paris to his irreverent response to being awarded a gold medal, late in life, by the previously dismissive Pennsylvania Academy (he exchanged it for cash)—even as it offers an expansive and reasoned view of what made Eakins tick, from his dedication to the facts of human anatomy to his attempts to reform American art pedagogy and his use of the knowledge and methods of science in his teaching and his art.

Kirkpatrick's book does not so much present a new or deeper understanding of Eakins as it gives him a good scrubbing, washing off the dirt flung at the artist by other scholars, most notably Henry Adams in his Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist (New York, 2005). Kirkpatrick critiques Adams' account of depravity, repression, and desire throughout (and at times justifiably, although something like an interpretive middle ground, a warmer embrace of speculation, or at least a greater willingness to push observation and fact toward interpretation or conclusion would have been welcome). The book also permits a view of Eakins in context. Indeed, one of the chief merits of Kirkpatrick's study is its attention to the world in which Eakins lived and how it shaped his life and art. This is not to say that other writing on Eakins has failed to adopt a contextual approach (the best of it has, often combining it with other critical tools, including psychobiography). But Kirkpatrick's is the first strictly biographical (rather than art-historical) account of Eakins to concentrate in such a sustained fashion on extrabiographical, more broadly historical material that, according to Kirkpatrick, constituted a large part of what influenced Eakins. To his credit, Kirkpatrick offers an account of Eakins that combines an art- historical and biographical methodology with the tools of the historian such that the artist emerges as an idiosyncratic malcontent, a man perpetually ahead of his time but also, and emphatically, of his time.

It is unfortunate that Kirkpatrick frequently only hints at or implies the connections between art and context, between what happened in the studio and what was happening on the street, without exploring them more deeply. For example, after describing Philadelphia's response to the outbreak of war in 1861, including the enthusiastic enlistment of hundreds of young men, Eakins' friends among them, Kirkpatrick writes that Eakins' decision not to fight must have been difficult for him. Yes, but what of this difficulty? The chapter ends without exploring this insight and the point is dropped entirely, despite numerous occasions when further discussion may well have illuminated Eakins' actions as well as his art.

What emerges is a narrative, albeit fluid and gripping, that is constituted by parallel tracks of analysis—biography, art history, social history, and the history of science—rather than a fully integrated, interdisciplinary account. This is a missed opportunity, for sure, but, in signaling the importance of looking at Eakins through the lens of multiple disciplines, Kirkpatrick pays tribute to a growing body of genuinely interdisciplinary work on the artist.