The invention of the nude in America

According to the ultimate Eakins book, Darrel Sewell's "Thomas Eakins," published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University, it's likely that some of the girls contemplated suicide. After Eakins de-loinclothed the model, Eakins' brother-in-law claimed that his own daughter -- Eakins' niece -- had killed herself after her uncle had forced her to paint portraits of naked men. (Supposedly this brother-in-law also claimed Eakins had sex with his dead sister Margaret.)

"Eakins' third sister and brother-in-law were his biggest supporters when he was fired from the academy," explains Sewell. "They had a child who wanted to be an artist. Her parents said, 'We would rather not have our daughter study the nude figure.' Eakins said, 'That's what I do.' The niece was a kind of a temperamental soul given to hysteria. There was a strain of mental instability in the Eakins family. His mother died of 'exhaustion arising from mania.'"

Sewell continues, "A number of papers have come to light that show the sister and brother-in-law sent their daughter to live with Eakins because she was disrupting the home. Then the girl decided not to study art and became a nurse. And she accidentally poisoned a patient with an overdose of medicine. So she then took the medicine herself as an act of contrition, but didn't die. She then lived at home and eventually did commit suicide. I don't know if Eakins had an incestuous relationship with her or not. Like many things, it's a complicated story. It's hard to know what that scandal was about."

In the end, a Philadelphia newspaper article reported that Eakins had revealed the "absolute nude" to those girls. James Claghorn saw to it that Eakins was fired. Many students protested. They marched in front of the art academy with large letter E's attached to their chests. They formed an art student league, and invited Eakins to teach there. Eakins went on to have a fairly respectable career as a painter until he died in 1916.

While most now respect Eakins as a painter, there is controversy over his place as a photographer. Historian Esten doesn't believe Eakins considered photography an art: "He only did it to help his painting." Jeff Rosenheim disagrees: "Eakins had a profound understanding of the poetics of photography during the late 19th century."

In the end, do Eakins' photographs make him a pornographer? "I think the primary purpose of all of these images is not the erotic charge that we see in them," Darrel Sewell says. "I think they are serious aesthetic investigations." Then he adds, "There are no photographs of naked men and naked women together except for one of Eakins holding a naked female." Then he points out that "the photographs of [naked] children [Eakins took] would be hard to justify in today's morality. One of the photographs shows children posing nude and there is a woman in a black dress just standing by -- a chaperone. A lot of Eakins' photographs show one naked man or one naked boy. If you see other photographs, there were a whole group of little boys."

Was Eakins more obsessed with the nude than other artists? "Good question," says curator Rosenheim. "Kind of complicated to answer. He lived with the nude in a different way. There are very few artists who taught as extensively as Eakins did. After he established the Pennsylvania Academy, it very quickly became the most radical and renowned teaching program in the country. Life drawing is an essential component of art study. He brought that tradition from Europe. He was obsessed with understanding the human figure clothed and unclothed more than any artist of his time. Is Lucien Freud 'obsessed' with the nude?" (Unfortunately, yes. But that's another story.)

Was Eakins an exhibitionist? "Well, he liked to take his clothes off," Rosenheim says. "He also had a very modern belief, a feminist ideal, that you cannot expect a woman to take her clothes off before a life drawing class of men if the men were not willing to take off their clothes for a class of women. He demanded that his students pose for each other. And he couldn't demand that his students pose for each other if he wouldn't pose for them himself. I think you're projecting an early 21st century idea of what an 'exhibitionist' is supposed to be on a small number of occasions when he got naked." He pauses. "But he did take his clothes off a lot. He liked to take them off. Not just for academic reasons."

"Eakins might have been an exhibitionist, I don't know," Sewell says. "He was such a fascinating person. Outrageous. People try to place him about a generation younger than he was. The Ashcan School was a group of artists who started in Philadelphia and then went to New York painting the seamy side of daily life. They were politically liberal and believed in free love. Eakins was a whole generation earlier than that. He lived in the same house where he grew up. He had a dignified side to him that was very real. I don't think he was outrageous and in favor of free love in the same way the next generation of artists was. He rejected the idea of the artist as a society figure that grew exactly at the same time."

Darrel Sewell is then asked, "Do you think you would have liked Eakins?"

"Yes," he answers. "I think I would have found him very fascinating. He was a self-invented personality. He was an artist who chose to be what he was and he had the financial means to do that. From his very early days you can see him taking a stand about what he thought was important. I think that would make him a very interesting person to know and try to figure out as we're trying to figure him out today."

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