Master Craftsman.(artist Thomas Eakins)

Born in Philadelphia in 1844, Thomas Eakins is one of America's few indisputably great painters. His friend Walt Whitman-the subject of a splendid 1888 portrait by Eakins-insisted that he was not so much a painter as a "force": high praise from the cosmic bard. Today, many critics conclude that Eakins's later portraits-searingly frank yet also gentle, respectful, affirmative-have earned him a place alongside such 19th-century masters of psychological realism as Courbet, Manet, and Degas.

The comprehensive exhibition of Eakins's work now up at the Philadelphia Museum of Art-it includes some 200 objects-amply confirms that judgment. The son of a writing master, Eakins from the beginning pursued his art with a deliberate, workmanlike mastery of craft. He once said that the studio of his friend William Merritt Chase was "an atelier" whereas his own studio was "a workshop."

Eakins's passion for exactness and technical precision is evident throughout his oeuvre, from the perspectival and anatomical studies he did as a student through his meticulous paintings of boaters and other sportsmen to his late experiments in serial photography (on some of which he collaborated with Eadweard Muybridge). It is no accident that some of Eakins's most famous pictures are of men of science, especially surgeons.

Like all genuinely original artists, Eakins was deeply traditional. That is to say, his originality issued from his fertile assimilation of certain artistic conventions and techniques. In 1866, after studying briefly at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Eakins departed for Paris, where he studied with Jean-Leon Gerome at the Ecole des Beaux- Arts. Excursions to Madrid and Seville brought him into contact with the work of Velazquez and Ribera, the two old masters whose tenebrist palettes and unflinching exploration of character most decisively influenced the aesthetic temperature of his work.

Because Europe was the inescapable source of artistic tradition in the 1860s, Eakins apprenticed in Paris. But unlike such popular society portraitists as John Singer Sargent, who became a professional expatriate in London, Eakins found his vocation as a distinctively American painter. "If America is to produce great painters," he wrote late in life, young artists should "remain in America to peer deeper into the heart of American life." In 1870, Eakins returned to Philadelphia, never to set foot in Europe again.

It was in the matter of peering "deeper into the heart" that Eakins differed most profoundly from painters like Sargent and Chase, whose slick technique and tendency to flatter their clients made them both rich. Eakins never flattered his sitters. His art is a masculine art: unfussy, blunt, direct. He preferred to explore the truth of what he saw, which is not to say that he did not discover beauty or dignity in his contemplation. Some of his portraits-The Concert Singer (1890-92) and Maud Cook (1895), for example-are positively ravishing; none lacks dignity.

Yet the critic who observed that Eakins was an "annihilator of vanity" was right. Even when he preserves a facade, Eakins glimpses the human melancholy behind it. Many clients complained that he made them look older than they were. In fact, Eakins painted very slowly and tended not to talk much while painting; this often lulled his sitters into a meditative ...