A True American Original.(Philadelphia Museum of Art, Thomas Eakins)(Brief Article)(Correction Notice)

When Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) was finally awarded a gold medal in painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1904, he said to the academy president, "You've got a heap of impudence to give me a medal." (Eakins had been dismissed from the school's faculty in 1886.) He immediately bicycled down to the U.S. Mint where he redeemed the gold for $73. But that sort of cranky, principled practicality was no fluke. The painter had once said his purpose was "to peer deeper into the heart of American life," and he meant to do it with much more than the unaided eye. Eakins had long advocated an artist's using everything possible to make a realist painting better: anatomy (from observing dissections), perspective (plotted with an engineer's precision) and, above all, photography. Yes, Eakins often "cheated" by tracing projected photographs to start a painting. Nevertheless, the just- opened Eakins retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (through Jan. 6, then moving to the Musee d'Orsay in Paris before returning to New York's Metropolitan Museum in June) gathers some 60 oil paintings along with many sketches, a few sculptures and 120 photographs, to make an implied case that Eakins is arguably the greatest painter America has ever produced.

The son of a prominent Philadelphia calligrapher, Eakins was an excellent student at a local high school renowned for its drawing classes. In 1864 he paid the standard $24 fee to avoid being drafted into the Union Army during the Civil War and, two years later, sailed for France to study with the big-time academic painters. There his instructors taught him to painstakingly research costumes, obtain exactly the right props and do study after study before committing to a large canvas--all of which became part of his obsessively workmanlike method when he returned, for life, to Philadelphia in 1870.

Rowing was a hugely popular professional sport in late-19th-century America, and nowhere was the competition fiercer than on the Schuylkill River that runs through the City of Brotherly Love. It's only natural that Eakins's most famous series of pictures are of scullers. In "The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake Boat" (1873), Eakins displays all his considerable talents. The figures are incisively drawn and daringly modeled with a flinty, dramatic light. ...