WITH EAKINS :

Gauguin and Eakins, Driven but Worlds Apart (ROBERTA SMITH, September 2, 2002, NY Times)

Eakins, the American realist, studied in Paris for three years (1867-70) with Jean-Léon Gérôme, the leading French academic painter of his time. He then returned to Philadelphia to live out his life in his parental home, becoming increasingly determined to revitalize the tradition of academic painting by using the camera, by choosing distinctly contemporary American subjects and also by radically intensifying the study of the anatomy at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he began to teach in 1876. The scandals caused by his insistence on using nude models in life-drawing class, and by requiring students to study cadavers, cost him this prestigious job and made him for a while an exile in his own land.

In a letter home from Paris Eakins summed up his devotion to painting as a way of measuring and knowing the world. Describing nature as a large vessel that the painter sails beside in a small canoe, he wrote that if the painter "ever thinks he can sail another fashion from nature or make a better shaped boat, he'll capsize or stick in the mud."

By Eakins's standard Gauguin qualified as a man who willfully threw himself overboard. For his part Gauguin seemed to feel that artists like Eakins never got their feet wet. "How safe they are on dry land, those academic painters with their trompe l'oeil of nature," Gauguin wrote dismissively in 1888. "We alone are sailing free on the ghost-ship, with all our fantastical imperfections."

Which puts us in mind of this, from William Steig's excellent children's book, Dominic :

'[E]verywhere I look I see beauty. If I can see a lovely landscape, just as lovely as one painted by Manfred Lyon, only by looking out my window, why would I want to own a painting done in that style? It's the same as what I can see wherever I turn.'

'I've considered that,' said the mouse, 'and this is my answer: When the landscape is covered with snow, can you see leaves? In the midst of a dreary winter, when you are longing for the spring, you can look at the daffodils in a painting of mine and be confident that there is such a season as spring and that it will come again. When you are suffering in summer heat, you can encourage yourself by looking at a cold winter landscape painted by Manfred Lyon. You can keep in a sort of contact with an absent friend or loved one through a portrait by me. Anyway...I dislike theorizing. I'd rather paint than think. Painting is fun, but thinking hurts my brains.'

Give us Eakins and the mouse. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 2, 2002 8:04 AM