"Fascination with the uncommon man

...He had the imagination and technical freedom to portray "the heroism of modern life" in very different terms, to show it in amateur athletes, artists, musicians, doctorspeople for whom intelligence and selfdiscipline rather than money-making were most important...

...The first is that Eakins had an income from his father and could paint what was significant to him...

...In The Gross Clinic (1875) he used theatrical rather than natural lighting to dramatize the science of modern surgery...

...The achievement is one that has prompted Eakins's most renowned critic, Lloyd Goodrich, to describe him as the "most profound realist in nineteenth and early twentieth century American art" and to declare, "His realism was total: with rare exceptions, every subject was drawn from the world around him, every figure was a portrait of an individual, every scene a real place, every object an actual one...

...Thus in his early masterpiece, Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871), Eakins felt free to place himself in a racing scull as authoritative witness to Schmitt's skill...

...The second is that, while Eakins was by contemporary standards a realist, he was not exclusively so...

...He could afford to be a portraitist who did not rely on commissions...

...What Johns contends—and establishes—is that Eakins was anything but a pure realist in subject matter or technique...

...Johns's view of Eakins seems at first glance to depart from orthodoxy on such narrow grounds that only a handful of Eakins scholars would appear to have reason to concern themselves with it...

...Nicolaus Mills IN the 1870s when Thomas Eakins began to do his first great work, the Hudson River School and its preoccupation with the American wilderness still exerted the dominant influence on painting in the United States...

...What follows from this picture of Eakins and his fascination with the "uncommon man'' is an understanding of his work richer and more incisive than any we have had to date...

...Eakins's art flew in the face of the romanticism of the Hudson River School, and in turning to the middle-class, urban world of Philadelphia from 1870 to 1910, he demonstrated, as no other figure of his era, the capacity of a new realism to capture the changes occurring in post-Civil War America...

...Johns's point is that what distinguishes Eakins from the society portraitists of his era is that he was not committed to celebrating the new business class...

...Her argument rests on two points...

...But the reverse in fact is the case...

...With the publication of Elizabeth Johns's Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life, that is no longer the case...

...There are large areas in his canvases where his technique sacrificed objectivity in order to be free, experimental, and on occasion deliberately clumsy...

...It explains why, Commonweal: 24 despite his technical virtuosity, Eakins achieved so little popularity with the Philadelphia establishment of his generation and why in an era such as ours, when the heroism of modern life once again seems to need defining, he should spark such interest...

...It is a view that has become the standard wisdom on Eakins, and with the publication of Goodrich's massive two-volume study of Eakins in 1982, the last word seemed to have been given on Eakins's "pure realism...

...And in William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the SchuylkiU River (1877), he created an entirely fictional scene in the life of a sculptor who had been dead for over forty years in order to make his own case for the importance of an artist working directly from the nude...