Art

...Born in Philadelphia to an affluent family, his father a writing master and professional calligrapher, Eakins began his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy...

...And whereas Kathrin animatedly teases a kitten in her lap with her free hand, Amelia wearily leans her head on hers...

...Eakins was summarily driven out of the academy for violating a recent school ruling when he defiantly removed a loincloth from a male model in front of a class of women students: the scandal multiplied the innuendos his unconventional behavior had already spawned and impeded his career...

...Yet the accusation that must have devastated the artist came after the suicide of twenty-four-year-old Ella Crowell, Eakins's mentally unstable niece, when years later her family started the rumor that Eakins had seduced her...

...In the tumultuous aftermath, people rushed to regain their accustomed attitudes...

...22: 14 February 1992 Commonweal...

...He would have spurned his English contemporary Ruskin's notion of sight as moral faculty...

...A general alarm spread thrillingly through Philadelphia society, and by the time of the loincloth incident, Eakins had become the target of so many rumors and insinuations that some of his women students had to join in the general attack to protect their own reputations...

...Yet there is always the possibility, improbable as it was in Eakins's small social world, Commonweal 14 February 1992: 21 that the artist did everything his detractors said he did...

...a naked light discloses Amelia's dispirited gaze...

...Amelia stares into space...

...The mystery obscuring Eakins's life persists in the mysterious melancholy that haunts his sitters' faces in his powerful late portraits...

...LEE S I EGEL Lee Siegel, a frequent contributor to Commonweal, is a freelance writer living in New York...

...Warming to the camera's new promise of verisimilitude, he used photographs to make scientific studies of motion and snapped shots of his students and himself posing nude—he is probably the only nineteenth-century artist to have preserved on film images of himself in the buff...

...Under the electric glare a scandal's disruptive particulars settle back into a hallucinatory order, a decorum-in-reverse...

...The vacant space revealing the back of the chair in Kathrin's portrait just needs to be occupied by the absent lover—until then the kitten will do...

...Leonardo's motto—sapere vedere, know how to see—was closer to his disenchanted, scientific temperament...

...Both women are sitting in the celebrated chair...

...But whether his sitters were close to him or not, Eakins often painted them as if they were inwardly borne along on the dim tide of some unappeased wanting, starved by an outer deprivation...

...Amelia is barely touching a closed fan that rests in the crumpled folds of her dress...

...But it was especially his intense emphasis on the live nude as an object of study and his insistence on having his female students model nude for himself and for each other that roused concern about his morality...

...Her gaze is objectless, her body limp, and for Eakins, an artist and amateur scientist who exalted seeing and doing, eyes not fastened on an object and bodies without the potential for movement must have meant a falling away from the liaison between nature and humankind, his modem equivalent of a spiritual crisis...

...In these late portraits the artist's empathy feeds on his outrage, a finely rendered indictment is flung at an oppressive emptiness...

...Having remained indifferent to the impressionists' explorations in subjectivity, and rejecting the romantic belief in the artist's superior powers, Eakins returned home with a Renaissance faith in the artistic adherence to nature's laws...

...He wanted, he had declared in a letter to his father, to paint landscapes where "you can see what o'clock it is," to depict figures that would convey "what they are doing and why they are doing it...

...In Eakins's day appearances were more easily shattered, but they were reasserted with a less elaborate technique...

...Indeed, the story of Eakins's turbulent relations with Philadelphia society forms one episode in a larger drama that runs both comically and tragically through American life: The Drama of Respectable Appearance...

...Some, like Amelia Van Buren, were devoted former students who had gotten caught up in the scandal that never stopped swirling around the artist...

...Fourteen years before the scandals began, he painted Kathrin (1872), a portrait of his fiancée, who died of meningitis in 1879 before the two could be married...

...Neither that charge nor any of the others was ever proven, but charges kept coming, ranging from lewdness to exhibitionsim...

...The shadows cupping Kathrin's face partially conceal a shy, self-conscious smile...

...Eakins pressed what he knew about the emotional and psychological consequences of his society's secrets and taboos onto the faces of his subjects...

...No doubt Eakins, in affirming nakedness as the essence of artmaking, divested a provincial American gentility of the pleasing conception it had woven of art as the highest achievement of good manners...

...The contrast between the two paintings suggests a clue to the puzzling aspect of many of Eakins's late portraits which are so similar in mood and symbolism to the atmosphere in Amelia...

...With his diabolical reputation, Eakins became, in turn, a blank canvas of sorts onto which those who couldn't keep their composure were able to project their worst fears and most fantastic impulses...

...James P. Turner, standing in Philadelphia's Cathedral of Sts...

...Many of them belonged to a small community of family and friends who loved Eakins and remained loyal to him...

...By all accounts Stephens's jealous hatred of Eakins and vindictive backstabbing approached insanity (he backed down when Eakins's lawyer challenged him and never made his charges public...

...Eakins did not believe that seeing clearly what was there to be seen was inherently good or bad...

...What hurt Eakins most was that the leader of the forces against him was his erstwhile student and now brother-in-law, George Frank Stephens...

...Now the documentation of that incident and its surrounding circumstances is bringing viewers through the academy's doors—how much poetry lies buried in a culture's transformation of an instance of intolerance into an investment in the future...

...A welcome illumination of this enigmatic figure, who ranks as one of America's greatest painters and its most affecting portraitists, is the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts' "Thomas Eakins Rediscovered: At Home, at School, at Work" on view in Philadelphia until April 5. Consisting of items from the collection of one of Eakins's former students, the show presents previously unexhibited preparatory oil sketches, drawings, photographs, letters, and memorabilia alongside better known finished work...

...Peter and Paul...

...Eakins's European experience hardened his Yankee resolve...

...He made the obligatory sojourn to Europe, studied with the famous French academician JeanLéon Gérôme, and in Spain experienced Velazquez's naturalistic and psychological truth as a revelation...

...As a result, though he was an American realist who had no use for modernist absolutes, Eakins found himself more isolated and embattled than most European artists in the cultural vanguard...

...Throughout his career, he placed his sitters in the same English-style armchair (on display), with red-velvet upholstery, armrests, and a wooden scroll topping the back...

...The fan Kathrin holds is completely open...

...The young Kathrin is leaning to the right, exposing almost the entire back of the chair, while the somewhat older Amelia has shifted herself the same distance to the left...

...Nowadays, when some20: 14 February 1992 Commonweal one's respectable veneer unravels, the ensuing media spectacle is society's way of reconstituting fallen appearances...

...Though the exhibition is modest in quantity, its cumulative effect is to bestow on the curious visitor a new perspective on Eakins...

...Back in Philadelphia, Eakins eventually became head of the academy and began pushing the French academy's rigorous concentration on anatomy to socially unacceptable extremes...

...Only the decorous back of a proper chair fills the blank expanse in Amelia, weighing on the sitter with its gloomy tedium...

...As Rembrandt—one of Eakins's aesthetic forebears—grew older, and as his suffering ripened, his face in the self-portraits seems wryly heavy with the world's woes...

...others were patrons like the prominent Catholic clergymen who offered Eakins commissions toward the end of his career (the exhibition includes a forceful portrait of Msgr...

...Nearly twenty yeras later, Eakins executed Miss Amelia Van Buren (1891), one of his most moving works...

...In 1886 Eakins (1844-1916) was forced on moral grounds to resign as director of the Pennsylvania Academy...

...He regarded it as a physiological necessity, the essential function of wakefulness as dreaming might be the essential function of sleep...

...Kathrin looks down at the kitten...

...As his vision evolved, Eakins's symbolism changed in complex ways...

...Not least among those who fretted were several of his assistants who coveted his position, as well as the academy trustees who faced a reddening ledger and seemed hankering for an occasion to renege on an earlier promise to double Eakins's salary...

...His dissections of cadavers, his focus on perspective to the exclusion of aesthetic theory, his strictness and sometimes arrogance as a teacher were controversial...

...Think of the hymns to temperance in Poor Richard's Almanack—the work of another famous Philadelphian and its author's advice in a letter to a Parisian woman friend that "the most effectual way to get rid of a certain Temptation is, as often as it returns, to comply with it...