Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity (review)

In the past fifteen years alone more than a dozen books treating some aspect of the life and work of Thomas Eakins have been published. These range from staid scholarly monographs to sensationalist biographies, from volumes of poetry to popular mystery. Yet all of these, Alan Braddock suggests, share an essentially anachronistic viewpoint because they perpetuate the hagiographic "modernist-nationalist approach" (39) adopted by the artist's earliest biographers. By persistently characterizing Eakins as a uniquely "American" nonconformist who depicted his subjects in an ostensibly "truthful, pluralist, and even egalitarian manner" (3), scholars have overlooked or oversimplified the ideological climate within which the artist worked. Too often, Braddock notes, Eakins becomes "a kind of deus ex machina, immune in particular to the dominant nineteenth-century American discourses on human difference" (23) when it was precisely these discourses, Braddock argues, that informed Eakins's artistic achievement. The author's project is to situate the artist's work more firmly in its own time "while acknowledging its location on the threshold of a new social vision of human diversity and experience" (40).

That "new social vision" was the relativist theory of human "culture" advanced by anthropologist Franz Boas and his followers, replacing the biologically determinist social Darwinism—championed by such thinkers as Hippolyte Taine, Matthew Arnold, and Herbert Spencer—that had dominated nineteenth-century thought. Inspired by Brad Evans's study of late nineteenth-century American literary genres, Braddock sets out to show that Eakins's works are best understood within a "premodern" epistemological framework that preceded Boas's discrediting of racialist evolutionary theory. As Evans asserts, "a concept of 'culture' or 'cultures' became necessary once race, nationality, and even language could no longer adequately account for the complex ways in which human identity formed and transformed in relation to circulating objects."¹

Throughout this erudite and thought-provoking book, Braddock seeks to understand how Eakins's expanding study of human diversity in his portraits and genre paintings might reflect the artist's own interrogation of the older ideology. He asserts that Eakins's approach to group difference was not a function of his sensitivity to other "cultures," as many scholars have assumed, but was, rather, "aesthetically astute and professionally strategic." Like most middle-class white male artists of his generation, Braddock argues, "Eakins saw himself as occupying a different—and frankly superior—position to that of people belonging to other, especially nonwhite, groups in the existing social hierarchy" (22).

Braddock's study is somewhat diffuse, more a collection of linked essays than a tightly crafted critical biography. In an extended introduction, the author sets up his argument with a perceptive formal and iconographic analysis of the 1878 watercolor of African-American musicians now called The Dancing Lesson to reveal the complexity of Eakins's attitudes to racial difference. Braddock takes issue with scholars who interpret this composition as a reflection of Eakins's sensitivity to African-American "culture" by pointing out that the concept of culture as it is understood by present-day writers did not gain circulation until after the turn of the twentieth century. "Eakins's own verbal observations," Braddock notes, "suggest a more complicated perspective, alternately marked by positive curiosity and mild, even strong, disdain toward people and customs that he deemed different" (3).

In the first chapter proper, Braddock goes back in time to show how the artist's "ethnographic" interest in themes of racial and ethnic difference emerged as early as his student works, thanks in large part to the example of his teacher Jean-Léon Gérôme and the putative influence of Taine. Braddock then argues in the second chapter that, upon his return to Philadelphia, Eakins built on the study of "national character as a function of race, history, and environment" in such major works of the 1870s and 1880s as The Champion Single Sculls and Swimming as well as the series of Gloucester shad fishing pictures.

In the third chapter, Braddock treats Eakins's response...