Painting: Portraiture with a Scalpel

"I never knew but one artist who could resist the temptation to see things as they ought to be, rather than as they are, and that's Tom Eakins." Walt Whit man was one of the few people who had anything good to say about the cold-eyed and ruthlessly honest Philadelphia realist. Aside from the poet, whom Ea kins portrayed in 1888 as a twinkling old sage, few people could stand having their character laid bare with the visceral objectivity that Eakins brought to portraiture. He used his brush like a surgeon's scalpel, exposing old wounds, concealed ambitions, ill manners. The commissions he did receive often ended unpleasantly; his studio was littered with rejected portraits. One fashionable lady, dismayed at what was taking shape on canvas, asked if her maid might finish the sittings.

Rock-Bottom Honesty. Society, to be sure, was not Eakins' forte. He admired people of accomplishment, preferred to portray doctors, professors, scientists. In 1900, he became acquainted with several Roman Catholic clergymen at the St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in the Philadelphia suburb of Overbrook, and eagerly seized the opportunity to portray four clerics as well as a prominent Catholic layman. For Eakins, it was a rare chance to examine various personalities within a close-knit group. For this reason, the pictures have long held a special fascination for those who knew of their existence. But in the cloistered halls of the seminary where they hung, few people ever saw them.

This summer, for the first time, the clerics' portraits have been put on public display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where they are supplemented by loans from the Jefferson Medical College and the museum's own large Eakins collection. The series remarkably underscores the rock-bottom honesty that Whitman had observed. Eakins plainly was not inhibited, even by men of the cloth, in his relentless pursuit of pictorial truth. Though his portrayals are sympathetic, he uncovered strain, doubt, fear, pettiness and self-pity —qualities that belied the traditional view of the priesthood as a calling above and apart from everyday frustrations.

Eakins came to his insight the hard way—through his own dashed hopes and disillusionments. His distinguished teaching career at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts had ended abruptly when he insisted on the need for students to draw from nude models. His great medical pictures, The Agnew Clinic and The Gross Clinic—which would serve as touchstones for a later generation of realists—had been greeted with critical jeers. He rarely sold a painting, subsisting on a small private income. The year before he met the clerics, his father had died. Eakins himself was an agnostic, but in the intellectual companionship and quiet monastic atmosphere of the seminary, he found both solace and inspiration. Sundays, he and a young protege named Samuel Murray would ride their bicycles out to St. Charles, spend the day chatting with the priests.