Thomas Eakins

His father, Benjamin, taught penmanship and calligraphy in Philadelphia and did well enough at it to support his son's ambitions for most of both their lives. Thomas showed a gift for mechanical drawing at Central High School, then trained not just at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts but in the dissecting rooms of Jefferson Medical College, learning to cut into cadavers before he learned to paint them. Four years in Europe followed — under Jean-Leon Gerome in Paris, then six months in Spain studying Velazquez and Ribera — and he came home in 1870 already fixed on the method that would define and damage him: paint the body the way the scalpel and the camera actually saw it, not the way convention wanted it seen.

Eakins built his reputation on precision: the exact geometry of a scull's wake in Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, the exact procedure of a surgeon's hand in The Gross Clinic, finished in 1875 and rejected by the Centennial Exhibition's art jury as too grim for a public gallery. He photographed obsessively — some 800 images, many of them motion studies made independently of Eadweard Muybridge — and used the camera as a working tool the way other painters used sketches. He taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1876, rose to director by 1882, and was forced out in 1886 for removing a male model's loincloth in a coeducational class. Drexel Institute dismissed him for the same offense in 1895. He kept painting rowers, surgeons, and musicians, earning almost nothing for it.

The 1886 resignation from the Pennsylvania Academy was framed publicly as one incident — stripping the loincloth off a male model in front of women students — but the record behind it was thicker. When a student named Amelia Van Buren asked him about pelvic movement, Eakins undressed in his studio to demonstrate it on himself. Rivals on the academy's board used incidents like that to force him out, and his own family split over the fallout, in-laws siding publicly against him. Drexel Institute fired him for the same offense in 1895. The Gross Clinic, the painting now considered his masterpiece, sold during his lifetime to Jefferson Medical College for $200 — a price that reflected exactly how little the art world of his day thought the work, or the man, was worth.

Recognition came late and mostly after he was gone: a memorial retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in 1917, another at the Pennsylvania Academy the same year, and by the mid-twentieth century a critical consensus that ranked him among the strongest realist painters the country had produced. The clearest measure came in 2006, when the Gross Clinic — bought for $200 by the medical college that used to display it near a stairwell — sold for $68 million to the National Gallery and the Crystal Bridges Museum, until Philadelphia patrons raised the money to keep it in the city, where it now hangs at two institutions in rotation.

Thomas Eakins's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Max Schmitt in a Single Scull artwork 1871
• The Gross Clinic artwork
  Rejected by the Centennial Exhibition's art jury; sold to Jefferson Medical College for $200 1875
• Motion-study photographs artwork
  Roughly 800 images, some made independently of Eadweard Muybridge's contemporaneous work 1885
• The Swimming Hole artwork 1885
• The Agnew Clinic artwork
  His largest commission 1889

• July 25, 1844 aged 0 Born in Philadelphia
• 1861 aged ~17 Enrolls at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
• 1864 aged ~20 Takes anatomy and dissection courses at Jefferson Medical College
• 1866 aged ~22 Leaves for Paris to study under Jean-Leon Gerome
• 1875 aged ~31 Completes The Gross Clinic
• 1884 aged ~40 Marries Susan Macdowell
• 1886 aged ~42 Forced to resign from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
• 1895 aged ~51 Dismissed by Drexel Institute for the same offense
• June 25, 1916 aged 71 Dies in Philadelphia

• Walt Whitman 1819–1892
  Poet whose Leaves of Grass celebrated democracy, nature, and the human body in free verse. painted his portrait
• Mary Cassatt 1844–1926
  Impressionist painter and printmaker who depicted the intimate bonds between mothers and children. trained alongside at the academy
• Winslow Homer 1836–1910
  Painter and illustrator whose seascapes and scenes of American life captured the nation's spirit. the other unsparing American realist
• Edward Hopper 1882–1967
  Realist painter whose depictions of urban isolation, like Nighthawks, became iconic American images. called him the greatest American painter