Art: In Love with the Specific Philadelphia celebrates its realist genius, Thomas Eakins

Philadelphia celebrates its realist genius, Thomas Eakins

A As from this week, through Aug. 1, anyone interested in realist painting must go to Philadelphia. American artists who call themselves realists should, if necessary, be dragged there by the collar; the experience waiting for them will be salutary and humbling. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is having a commemorative show of Thomas Eakins. It marks no particular date of his own. Eakins was born in 1844, and he died in 1916. But he passed his whole life, except for four years of European study, in Philadelphia, and his genius—hardly too strong a word, this time—is a proper thing to celebrate in that city's 300th anniversary year.

Eakins is the greatest realist painter America has so far produced. He never successfully idealized a subject. When theatrical, which he rarely was, he tended to look silly. He was pragmatic, cussed, inquisitive, thoroughgoing, relentlessly observant, and plain of pictorial speech: a Yankee to the last finger bone. He was so in love with the specific that one scholar managed to compute, from the sun's angle, the time and date of the scene depicted in one of his paintings of rowers training on the Schuylkill, The Pair-Oared Shell; they went under the bridge, give or take a few seconds, at 7:20 p.m. on either May 28 or July 27, 1872.

In order to fix the facts he loved—the blurred motion of a spoked wheel, the tilt of a catboat beating to windward, the awkward play of a naked boy's legs as he dives—Eakins produced a mass of preparatory work, in many mediums. Convinced that the camera was truth, he took photographs and worked from them; he was one of the first American artists to do so. He made drawing after drawing, from mere thumbnail sketches to stupendously elaborate perspective studies that include notes on such minutiae as eight cross sections of an oar from loom to blade, or the reflection of a distant bush in a ripple of water. To get the muscles of horse and man right, he modeled them in wax.

All this output cannot go in one show; it would have been burdensome to even the most dedicated Eakins student. Instead, the exhibition's curator, Art Historian Barrel Sewell, has intelligently chosen some 150 paintings, studies and photographs to provide a thematic, rather than a chronological approach. There are certain broad categories of imagery in Eakins. There are the rowing and sporting and sailing scenes. There are the paintings of medical and scientific inquiry. There are the horse pictures, the portraits, and so on. By sampling each of these, Sewell hoped to build up a convincing picture of Eakins' main preoccupations, and of the growth of his style.