Clumsy brush strokes mar picture

THOMAS EAKINS created some of the most iconic images of American art. Even people who shun museums recognize the nobly lighted forehead of a surgeon turning to speak to a gallery of students while his fingers hold a bloody scalpel. You can buy a mouse pad with the glorious image of Max Schmitt sculling on Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill River. Eakins was of the generation of another American original, Winslow Homer. Both came of age at about the time Ralph Waldo Emerson sounded his clarion for a youthful American art that would transcend the elderly conventions of our mother countries.

Eakins’ latest biographer, William S. McFeely, wrote several books on U.S. history, most of them concerning 19th century figures as diverse as Frederick Douglass and Ulysses S. Grant. His biography of Grant won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982. For “Portrait: The Life of Thomas Eakins,” McFeely researched the artist in detail, clearly out of enthusiasm for his work and life. The book is rich in anecdotes about the young artist’s travels, his student days at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, his cowboy experiences in the Dakotas and his rise and fall as a professor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Unfortunately, McFeely’s research is wed to a slovenly writing style, an unhappy partnership that results in a confusing and disappointing text. His metaphorical title invites a response in kind: This new biography is less a portrait than a jumbled sketchbook, filled with details that never coalesce into a unified picture. It conveys the impression of work by someone who hasn’t mastered the medium; there are even doodles in the margins.

McFeely’s first paragraph describes Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X. We are primed to learn of this great painting’s influence on Eakins. But no, the second paragraph says that Eakins could not have seen it while visiting the Prado in 1868, but would have been influenced by the artist’s other works there. Often there are confused and irrelevant asides, such as this one on Eakins and depression: “[I]t seems to me that you can cook up a good case of depression without more than a dash of genes.”

The jolting pace and unevenness of “Portrait,” its vague pronouncements and inappropriate asides, are disconcerting. In places, the duel between the author’s similes and metaphors becomes positively hallucinatory: “Like toy soldiers on parade, stalagmites of pigment crowded the table to his left.”

If McFeely had hidden a perceptive analysis of his subject in this tangled undergrowth, a common problem with academic texts, a reader might be willing to machete through to it. But after laboring through McFeely’s monologue on Eakins’ painting “Swimming,” for example, one is rewarded with inanities: “The picture is so good, so inviting, that Eakins seems only to be saying come on in, the water’s fine.... ‘Swimming’ is a great painting. Eakins, the artist, the man, has given us his pictorial sonnet.” McFeely often repeats himself, even placing Eakins’ famous portrait of pianist Edith Mahon in both the first and last chapters.

It also is frustrating that McFeely devotes so much space to Eakins’ sexual orientation, suggesting that the artist “may well have” had sex with men. Although the author notes that “[t]raditionalists hold that Eakins either wasn’t gay or never succumbed to temptation,” he adds, “there is little doubt” that the painter of many male nudes was attracted to men at a time before the term “homosexuality” was used. “That word, despite our somewhat self-righteous liberality, still sprinkles itching powder over any discussion of Eakins.... The noun and all of its synonyms, ancient and contemporary, sound like a malignant growth.” Male nudity alone seems to derail McFeely. An Eakins photograph of art students in a nude tug-of-war leads the author to speculate that soon each man “would inevitably be pressing his penis against the buttocks of the person in front.”

Although historical research is supposed to be McFeely’s strength, he can’t resist speculation. Many of his asides begin with such phrases as “It would seem certain.” Near the book’s end, he casually suggests that a relationship between Eakins’ widow and another woman was sexual, although he begins the sentence saying, “There is no evidence, of course.... “ Such blather undermines our faith in the author’s research and sabotages the flow of his narrative. Sadly, “Portrait” is unworthy of its subject.

Michael Sims is the author of “Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form” and editor of “The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel.”