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EASTLAKE, SIR CHARLES LOCK
in their drive for artistic professionalism. These bonds
were maintained in the display and production of nude
photographs at the Art Students’ League after Eakins’s
forced departure from PAFA in 1886.
From the 1890s until his death in 1916, Eakins’s in-
terest in photography appears to have diminished as he
concentrated his efforts on painting portraits. His work
would infl uence the work of Eva Watson-Schütze and
other pictorialist photographers, however. In tribute to
his work as a photographic pioneer, members of the pic-
torialist Camera Club of New York included two images
of bathers by Eakins in their 1899–1900 exhibition.
Meredith Key SolesBiography
Thomas Cowperthwaite Eakins was born to Benjamin
and Caroline Cowperthwaite Eakins on 25 July 1844
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He fi rst studied drawing
at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA)
before enrolling at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris
from 1866 to 1869. Returning to spend his career in
Philadelphia, he became an instructor and, in 1882,
the director of schools at PAFA. He married one of his
students, Susan Hannah Macdowell, in 1884. Eakins
was dismissed from his director’s position in 1886 after
he removed the loincloth from a male model posing for
a class of female students. Thereafter, he continued to
lecture at the Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Art
Students’ Leagues, the Women’s Art School of the
Cooper Union, and the National Academy of Design.
Although he showed his painting and sculpture nation-
ally and internationally, the only recorded exhibitions
of his photographs were the 1886 display of “History of
a Jump” in the Philadelphia Photographic Society an-
nual at PAFA and that of two bathers at the 1899–1900
New York Camera Club exhibit. Eakins was active as
lecturer and portrait painter until shortly before his death
in Philadelphia on 25 June 1916.
See also: Muybridge, Eadweard James; Motion
Photography: Pre-Chronophotography to
Cinematography; Marey, Etienne Jules; and
Pictorialism.Further Reading
Danly, Susan and Cheryl Leibold, Eakins and the Photograph,
Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press for the Penn-
sylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1994.
Foster, Kathleen A., Thomas Eakins Rediscovered: Charles
Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection at the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale
University Press, 1997.
Goodrich, Lloyd, Thomas Eakins (2 vols.), Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press for the National Gallery of Art, 1982.
Hendricks, Gordon, The Photographs of Thomas Eakins, New
York: Grossman, 1972.Homer, William I., Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art, New York:
Abbeville, 1992.
Johns, Elizabeth, Thomas Eakins, The Heroism of Modern Life,
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Luxenberg, Alisa, “Inventing Thomas Eakins the Photographer”
in History of Photography, 19/3 (Autumn 1995), 247–51.
Photographer Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia: Olympia Galler-
ies, 1981.
Thomas Eakins: His Photographic Works, Philadelphia: Penn-
sylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1969.
Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001
(exhibition catalogue).EASTLAKE, SIR CHARLES LOCK
(1793–1865)
British patron
Born 17 November 1793 in Plymouth, England, Charles
Lock Eastlake was, “the fi rst, and perhaps still the great-
est, of that tribe of cultural bureaucrats who...were
to become the most signifi cant manipulators of taste
and controllers of artistic power...” Sir Charles Lock
Eastlake is easily confused with his nephew, Charles
Locke Eastlake (1836–1906). The younger Eastlake,
also a Victorian taste-maker, was author of two widely
known works, Hints on Household Taste (1868) and A
History of the Gothic Revival (1872). Eastlake’s initial
ambition was to become a painter and to this end, he
studied in France, Greece and Italy from 1816 to 1830.
During these years, Eastlake was increasingly infl u-
enced by a newly emerging German approach to art
scholarship that sought to apply a scientifi c basis to art
criticism. He undertook a second career as an art critic
and historian culminating in his immensely infl uential,
annotated translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s
Zur Farbenlehre (1810) as Goethe’s Theory of Colours
(1840)—a publication challenging Newton’s seven-
color theory with one based on three primary colours.
Eastlake’s other publications included the fi rst volume
of Materials for a History of Oil Painting (1847) and
a collection of articles entitled Contributions to the
Literature of the Fine Arts (1848).
While abroad, Eastlake’s painting and writing at-
tracted the attention of his fellow expatriates and London
critics to the extent that he was elected, in absentia, as
an Associate to the Royal Academy, becoming a full
Academician shortly after his return to England. In
1841, Eastlake was appointed Secretary of the Fine Arts
Commission, followed in 1842, by an appointment as
Librarian of the Royal Academy and in 1843, as Keeper
of the National Gallery. Forced to resign from the Gal-
lery in 1847 over the mistaken purchase of a forged
Holbein, Eastlake was nevertheless appointed President
of the Royal Academy in 1850. In 1855, he returned to
the National Gallery as its fi rst Director, maintaining that
post (as well as his Presidency of the Royal Academy)Hannavy_RT72353_C005.indd 461 7/5/2007 11:18:04 AM