Eakins in Philadelphia.(Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)(Brief Article)

This autumn devotees of the American artist Thomas Eakins will want to make haste to Philadelphia where two impressive exhibitions of his work are on view. As a native son of Philadelphia, Ealtins was selected as the subject of a large retrospective exhibition organized to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The first large show devoted to Eakins in nearly twenty years, it comprises 70 paintings along with watercolors, drawings, sculptures, and 120 photographs (by Eakins and his circle). Entitied Thomas Eakins: American Realist, it is on view at the museum from October 7 to January 6, 2002. The exhibition will then travel to the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and later to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The second exhibition, a perfect complement to the first, is on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Eakins was a student, professor, and finally the director of the school, until an acrimonious dispute ended in his dismissal. It is on view from October 6 through January 6, 2002, and is entitled Process on Paper: Works from Charles Bregler's Thomas Eakins Collection. The show features more than thirty drawings and oil studies from Bregler's collection of hundreds of objects, including oil sketches, drawings, plaster sculptures, albums of photographs, diaries, letters, account books, and glass negatives by Eakins, his wife Susan Macdowell Eakins, Samuel Murray, Bregler himself, and other members of Eakins's circle. Oral tradition has it that Bregler, who studied at the academy under Ealtins, had rescued this material, all of which had been slated to be burned upon the death of Eakins's widow The Bregler Collection was accessioned by the academy in 1985.

The paintings that form the centerpiece of the Philadelphia Museum exhibition span Eakins's career and include examples of his various subjects: his hauntingly perceptive portraits; his engaging depictions of athletes rowing, sailing, fishing, playing baseball, and boxing; and his group portraits, the most famous of which are The Gross Clinic and The Agnew Clinic. Photographs play a major role in the show, and as the catalogue relates, while Susan Eakins long insisted that her husband did not typically use photographs as a point of departure for his paintings, the discovery of the photographs in the Bregler Collection suggests otherwise. Eakins in fact used a combination of photographs, drawings, oil sketches, and occasionally small wax models when painting in oil. In preparation for this exhibition Mark S. Tucker and Nica Gutman, both conservators at the Philadelphia Museum, discovered two more techniques that Eakins used in order to transfer photographic studies onto canvas. ...