A Force

In Manhattan last week, the Knoedler Gallery honored the 100th birthday of one of the finest U.S. artists.

Thomas Eakins (rhymes with makin's) lived & died (1844-1916) without enjoying or soliciting artistic honors. In last week's show he was commemorated in 88 of his works, chiefly oils plus four of the little wax figures he made to help him with his sculptural paintings, and a few of the charming, swift sketches he always made in oil, even for his watercolors. One of these paintings, Salutat, represented his famed boxing series, which he painted before gentlemen were supposed to profess an interest in pugilism. Another, The Biglen Brothers Turning the Stake, represented his equally famed rowing series. The Artist and His Father Shooting Reed-Birds, attested Eakins' artistic mastery, his lifelong love of the outdoors. The Swimming Hole (see cut) established Eakins as a superb U.S. painter of nudes.

Deep and Simple. In a season devoted largely to the abstract, the distorted, the subjective, Eakins' devoutly objective work looked solid, sober and durable as life itself, a testimonial to the best in his country's deep and simple honesty (as well as to the limitations of that honesty). People who had once thought Eakins scientific, dull, dogged, could scarcely fail to warm to the depth and humaneness of his perceptions; his heads, in particular, had an inward life, like well-banked fires. People who had once thought of him as an uninteresting, restricted colorist could not fail to see that in his taciturn, tender palette range he was as superb a colorist as Brahms was in music. Even those who spoke, with some justice, of Eakins' lack of interest in design, could scarcely fail to note the monumentally simple success of his portraits, the linked flow of limbs and bodies in The Swimming Hole, the crisp, frugal elation of the 16 horses' legs in The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand.

Primitive's Eye. Born into a Philadelphia family of Quaker tinge (though he himself was agnostic), Thomas Eakins lived his whole life at 1729 Mt. Vernon St. By the time he left high school, Eakins was already a master of perspective.

In Paris Biographer Goodrich observes that Eakins developed no special interest in the Renaissance masters, none at all in his venturesome Impressionist contemporaries. He admired Rembrandt, but only for his realism. Velasquez, the least imaginative of great painters, was his idol, but not an influence. Eakins remained about as free from influence, good or bad, as an artist can ever be. Most artists perceive and paint the world refractively, in reference to the work of other artists. Thomas Eakins' eye was "as innocent as that of a primitive."

Things As They Are. Dedicated to things as they are, Eakins sometimes eliminated nonessentials, but he never distorted, never worked from memory or imagination, and seldom failed to reveal the person, the object, in its own essential poetry. His lovely Concert Singer is as full of ardent voice as a vase is of flowers. To achieve this effect Eakins carefully studied his model's mouth and throat every morning as she sang Mendelssohn's 0 Rest in the Lord. Even the directing hand which thrusts into the picture was that of an accomplished conductor. When, after two years' work, the model could pose no longer and Eakins had only one shoe to finish, he draped the shoe in the model's dress as she had stood.

His studies of the nude led him into another field. In assisting Eadweard Muybridge (who was using 26 cameras for the job), Eakins contrived a camera which would photograph a moving body in series. To all intents and purposes, he had invented the motion picture camera.

Said Walt Whitman of Eakins: "He is not a painter, he is a force."

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