A Born Realist

...His last outdoor subject before he turned almost exclusively to his somber portraits was a strikingly handsome depiction of two cowboys riding in the Dakota badlands...

...Artists like Courbet and Daumier leveled elites, discovered heroism in the quotidian...

...Only facts interested him...

...11 came naturally to American artists, beginning before the Revolution with the strong, severe portraits of John Singleton Copley...

...Repeatedly, Goodrich relates how disappointed the artist was when one of his masterpieces failed to find favor with the public because of the harshness of his Realism...

...Though Eakins never spelled out his social views, he obviously believed that the good democratic society needed artists just as it required shoemakers and butchers...

...Industrialization bred a nouveau-riche aristocracy with its own notions of art...

...Some achieve greatness by innovating, some by fulfilling...

...Such a personality, stern, rational, down-to-earth, the embodiment of the Protestant ethic, would seem to have been more suited for a career in banking than art...

...One might go so far as to say that he was unhealthily nonvoyeuristic...

...Nor can Goodrich find any evidence of misconduct in Eakins' private life...

...Precisely for this reason, in the United States Realism could not be the rallying cry it was across the At lan tic...

...In 19th-century Europe, Realism's content derived in large part from its choice and handling of subject matter...

...He never stooped to story-telling or sentimentality...

...Shining through them is the strength of Eakins' convictions, his utter certainty, his intense " Americanness...

...No taint of Bohemianism attached to his choice...

...Descended from a long line of craftsmen, he became a painter much as someone else might become a tailor...

...Democracy, Realism, truth, rationality, science, all were linked together in his mind as a kind of secular religion that harkened back to such Founding Fathers as Benjamin Franklin (a Philadelphian, like Eakins), and for which his paintings were natural visual correlatives...

...He had the full and lifelong support of his father...

...That he was neglected and unappreciated by his Philistine, materialistic contemporaries is hardly surprising...

...Courbet, Manet and Degas he does not mention in his letters...

...The country's foremost expert on the man who is, arguably, the country's foremost painter, Goodrich has spent over half a century investigating his subject...

...For any number of reasons, Thomas Eakins was not capable of pursuing this expansive, richly evocative theme...

...While studying in Paris after the Civil War, he remained blissfully, perhaps willfully, unaware of the painters who were most daring and original...

...Probably there is no single answer, though we can look first to Eakins' naivete...

...He was a native wasp, portraying scenes out of middle-class life...

...Realism, said Courbet, is "democracy in art...

...Even the one sexual scandal Eakins was involved in tends to fit this mold...

...It certainly had a rootedness the craftsman Eakins could understand...

...Similarly, and no less important, he seems to have been born to his vocation...

...Near the end of his life he said of Impressionism, Futurism, Cubism and the other Modernist currents then revolutionizing painting: "They are all nonsense, and no serious student should occupy his time with them...

...No doubt the suggestive insolence of Ma-net's whore in Olympia, Courbet's lesbians, or Degas' near-pornographic brothel sketches, had he been aware of them, would have shocked him as much as one of his own works shocked the benighted art critic of the New York Times (who complained that the presence of clothes beside a naked woman "makes one think about the nudity—and at once the picture becomes improper...

...his canvases became prettier—and less beautiful...

...His long hours giving instruction in dissection show he was a Realist down lo the bone, interested in the human form purely as an object for representation...

...But neither is art...

...Realism by its very nature presents certain problems for a serious artist...

...Eakins' dates (1844-1916) span America's Gilded Age, a period as inimical to the arts as any in our nation's history...

...w T Thy, then, was Eakins neglected by his countrymen...

...Eakins' attitude toward the body was apparently wholly desensualized, as neutral as a physician's...

...Where other artists prettified or flattered, Eakins insistently showed the blood on the knife, the wrinkle in the face...

...In rejecting myth and history to present the ordinary events of everyday life unsentimentally, Realists were at once subversive and progressive—subversive because they challenged established hierarchies and orthodoxies, progressive because the values implicit in their paintings were egalitarian, even socialistic...

...To paint a trompel'oeil picture, accurately recreating on canvas something that is "out there," is little more than an exercise in technique, admirable in the same way that the accomplishment of Uno, the circus acrobat who stands on one finger, is admirable: Both display skills few people possess that have been developed after years of hard work...

...He produced a pioneering study of the artist in 1933, when Eakins' reputation was not yet established...

...Conviction carries with it its own form of incomprehension...

...Another late painting is still more suggestive of the potential available to artists other than himself...

...There is no depth, no meaning beyond what is on the surface, no content...

...He once wrote: "The working people from their close contact with physical things are apt to be more acute critics of the structural qualities of pictures than the dilettanti themselves...

...Eakins was too homespun...

...Delacroix he reviled as "abominable...

...The new proletariat might have been a more appropriate audience...

...I f Goodrich has not exhausted Eakins—psychology is shortchanged and, to my mind at least, he undervalues the later portraits—all future analyses will nonetheless begin with these volumes...

...Moreover, they had a limited interest in painting, reserving their enthusiasms for the music hall, the theater and the movies...

...It captures the American West in all its rugged beauty and forbidding, lonelygrandeur...

...They were recently arrived immigrants, generally Catholic and Jewish, who went directly into the factories...

...When it was not purchasing Old Masters, it wanted the chic bravura of a John Singer Sargent...

...This world [of Eakins' paintings] had a unity within which all elements were contained...

...What may come as a shock to Goodrich's readers is that Eakins, far from being some sort of eccentric esthete, was as devoted to the standards of his day as any of his neighbors, even possessing the taste of a thoroughly conventional conservative...

...Never before had an American Realist been so accomplished, so equipped to record a national vision, never again would one be so self-assured...

...a friend said after his death that "his whole life had been one of untiring industry...

...In later years, although his opinions broadened somewhat, hecontinued to B0DI^l# praise his teacher, the academician Gerome, as the greatest painter of the 19th century...

...As Goodrich demonstrates, Eakins had practically an obsession with nudity that manifested itself in various ways: photographs of himself and his students unclothed, naked romps in the woods, persistent albeit futile efforts lo persuade his proper, middle-class female sitters to pose for him without their clothes on...

...In a few prizefighting pictures completed late in his career, Eakins demonstrated that the immigrants' world, while not his to articulate, was not entirely closed to him...

...Yet this avenue was blocked by his background and subject matter...

...Eakins did not have to decide to be a Realist...

...Critics complained about his "lack of poetry...

...One suspects that compromise was impossible for him, not only because he was a man of principle but also because he wouldn't have known how to bend...

...Yet these activities are not quite the liberations from prudery they might at first appear to be...

...Hisart was fundamentally Edenic?including the later melancholic, ineffably touching portraits that intimate a paradise lost...

...he was born one...

...70.00 until December 31, $90.00 thereafter) is a major event of this publishing season...

...In 1886 he was dismissed from his teaching position at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, his sole secure source of income, for revealing a male model's genitals to his female students in a life class...

...His sexual values, like his other beliefs, seem to have been totally mainstream...

...Instead, he lingered behind it, a naif whose old-fashioned virtues were the source of his singular genius...

...In an excellent concluding summary, Goodrich describes a man in harmony with the universe, sensing no gap between himself and some alien Other...

...But John Ford was...

...To this one must add that the America Eakins painted for was not the America then in the process of being born...

...Eakins himself used to relax by doing calculus...

...The truth is that Eakins was never ahead of his time in behavior, taste or outlook...

...What Eakins fulfilled was the promise of Realistic painting in America...

...Painting was for him an exercise in problem-solving, not an opportunity for inspiration or expression, and he advised his students to study mathematics as a means of improving their work...

...Sober to a fault, he was adamantly literal, with no sensitivity to abstract questions of theory or esthetics...

...When Copley moved to England, he gained elegance at the expense of power...

...He disliked novels...

...The new work, four times as long as the earlier one, skillfully weaves biography, history, criticism, and personal memoir into a lush and moving depiction of a solitary, courageous genius who personified much that was best about the America of his era, and suffered for it...

...Indeed, it is entirely consistent with our notion of the artist as outsider: t he embattled, prophetic figure at odds with the values of his society...

...His approval went to Salon hacks...

...Nowhere does Eakins display a feeling for eroticism as such...