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EAKINS, THOMAS COWPERTHWAITE

(1844-1916)

American painter, sculptor, photographer, and

teacher

Eakins was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and

began his career by assisting his father, Benjamin, as a

calligrapher and teacher of penmanship. His interests

in draftsmanship extended beyond decorative writing,

however, and from 1862 until his departure for Paris in

1866 Eakins studied drawing and anatomy at the Penn-

sylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and Jefferson

Medical College in Philadelphia. In Paris, he enrolled at

the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts and became a pupil

in the ateliers of Jean-Léon Gérôme and Léon Bonnat.

Although he likely had gained exposure to photography

before traveling to Europe, there Eakins learned about

the documentary and artistic value of using photographs

as study tools with which to compose and add subtle

details to paintings. He also came to believe that an

understanding of the mechanics and structure of the

human body was the true basis for creating art.

Returning to Philadelphia in 1870, Eakins later joined

the PAFA staff as an assistant instructor. In 1878 he was

approached by the school’s Chairman of Instruction,

Fairman Rogers, to help him solve a visual puzzle. When

Eadweard Muybridge publicized his motion photographs

of racehorses, the size, lack of detail, and inconsistent

intervals of the serial images kept Rogers from testing

them for accuracy of movement. Rogers hired Eakins

to produce drawings of the photographs with which the

artist would reconstruct the horses’ positions in a con-

sistent series. The two men could then test the results

by “reanimating” the photographs in a zoetrope. Eakins

applied his results to painting, depicting Rogers riding

with his own team of horses in A May Morning in the

Park (Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand) (1879–80).

Muybridge later continued his Animal Locomotion

project at the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1884

Eakins joined him in his work. The two men outfi tted

a track with a series of cameras whose shutters were

tripped at regular intervals as an animal or human subject

walked, ran, or jumped through the space in a full period

of motion. Rejecting Muybridge’s use of sequenced

negatives, however, Eakins instead recorded successive

exposures of motion on a single negative. In photographs

such as “History of a Jump” (1885), he adapted Etienne-

Jules Marey’s invention of a spinning slotted disk that

regularly admitted light to a single point on the open lens

of the camera. Muybridge published his photographs in

Animal Locomotion in 1888 and included a summary of

Eakins’s research in Professor William Marks’s essay,

“The Mechanism of Instantaneous Photography.”

Eakins had purchased his own camera by 1880 and

soon produced photographic sketches of his family

members at home and on the beach at Manasquan,

New Jersey. Becoming director of the schools at PAFA

in 1882, he captured students posed in period clothing

and photographed Margaret Harrison in preparation for

his painting, Singing A Pathetic Song (1881).

By 1881, Eakins employed a magic lantern or an-

other device to project his photographic images onto

his painting supports. In his earliest attempts, he traced

the outlines of the projected forms in pencil but later

abandoned this underdrawing technique and used the

projections to incise tiny reference marks onto his can-

vases. In two versions of Shad Fishing at Gloucester

on the Delaware River (1881), he utilized multiple

projected photographs to compose his paintings with

marks made during the various stages of the painting

process. (See Tucker and Gutman in Thomas Eakins,

2001, Further Reading.)

Beginning about 1883, Eakins undertook three

photographic studies of the nude for use in his painting

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