‘Eakins and the Photograph’ Reveals a Lesser-Known Side

Funny how our views of great artists change over time. It’s equally curious how, in changing, they stay the same. Thomas Eakins, currently the subject of an exhibition at the Huntington’s Scott Gallery, offers a case in point. He’s long been regarded as America’s great, once-neglected genius of modern realist painting, a kind of Yankee Manet. His only competition for this honor might be Edward Hopper, but the two stand at such different points in the stream of time the choice is a wash.

By coincidence, recent scholarship has revealed similarly unpleasant facts about both men. Each, it appears, was capable of rather egregious personal behavior, treating friends and loved ones in ways that were heedlessly egotistical if not downright sadistic. Learning grim things about our heroes may be disillusioning, but in the end should not surprise us. After all, genius has never offered any assurance that its possessors are not as capable of bad behavior as everybody else.

The Huntington exhibition addresses another lesser-known aspect of the Philadelphia master artist, which is contained within its title, “Eakins and the Photograph.” The show is being proudly circulated by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the institution where Eakins taught and from which he was sacked in 1886 for refusing to cover nude male models’ genitals in life drawing classes that included female students.

Organized by curator Susan Danly, it consists of about 30 vintage albumen and platinum prints. They were drawn from the Charles Bregler collection, a trove of 1,200 photos and related materials lovingly preserved by the former Eakins student.

A honey of a little show, it’s fleshed out with a valuable 235-page catalog including some telling images, such as one humorous shot of Eakins in the buff lugging an equally nude female like a triumphant caveman.

Eakins is not entirely unknown as a photographer. He pursued the calling with quiet persistence over some 20 years but was never particularly anxious to show the work except in his inner circle. Nonetheless it became known and has been used in a supplemental way in exhibitions of his painting. Even, however, if it had remained completely unknown this show could not take us altogether by surprise. His painting is so photographic only the very naive could believe the camera played no part in it. At least two images on view are masterpiece photographs that clearly served as the basis for great paintings, namely “The Swimming Hole” and “Portrait of Amelia Van Buren.”

What distinguishes Eakins from other painters who employ photography as a source is that his camera works have intrinsic merit. In other words, Eakins could make photography painterly. Any former art student will recognize that even the most prosaic of Eakins’ pictures was lit and posed to approximate drawing or painting. This is no mean trick.

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Probing an artist and his work in this depth has the value of nuancing previous knowledge and confirming hunches. Three photo portraits of Eakins himself are on view. They seem to have been taken about 10 years apart, probably by his wife, Susan MacDonald Eakins, a talented photographer in her own right. In the earliest the artist looks like a puppy--eager, charming and innocent. The next is dark, brooding and edgy. He is graying slightly. The photograph looks surprisingly contemporary, like something from the age of Existentialism. The last is a full-length image in the studio. He’s gained weight. The pose has a defensive bravura but he looks tired and resentful.

We see a perceptive, vulnerable man of many moods mingling the romantic with the detached. That image is exactly in sync with his own pictures. One is a gently humorous photo of his pet dog leading his pet horse by holding the reigns in his mouth. The horse looks resigned. Then there is an image of a reclining female nude from the back that rivals Velasquez. Then a shot of two nude males wrestling. Eakins admired Eadweard Muybridge, whose serial photography included a set of such intertwined figures.

The sheer proliferation of frankly graphic nudes in the exhibition and catalog prove Eakins a man determined to pursue an obsession forbidden by contemporary social mores, a man prepared to take a radical position.

* Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, through March 31, closed Mondays, (818) 405-2141.