Introduction "The value of these works is permanent. They have nothing to do with passing or evanescent Art moods. They are outside of fad or fashion".--Cecilia Beaux Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) drafted this appreciation of the work of fellow Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins on the occasion of the memorial exhibition held in his honor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1917. Although Beaux had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts while Eakins was teaching there, she claimed to have avoided his "magic circle" of student devotees, preferring to watch him "from behind staircases, and corners." Beaux respected Eakins''s realist work and yet found it "deeply alien" to her own temperament. Indeed, the two artists had completely different careers. Beaux, hailed in her day as the "greatest living woman painter," became a successful portraitist particularly sought after for her elegant depictions of society women.

Eakins was a portraitist too, but he had far fewer commissions and a number of dissatisfied sitters. Yet Beaux understood that Eakins''s failings as an artist, marked by his lack of financial and sometimes critical success, were the products of a man who sought to become what he called a "big painter," an artist who transcended "evanescent Art moods" in order to establish a permanent legacy. Unlike many of his peers, Eakins never painted to earn a living. He did not come from wealth but had an unusually supportive father in Benjamin Eakins, who encouraged his only surviving son to become a painter. Benjamin made Eakins''s career possible by supplementing his son''s meager income and providing him with room and board. Eakins lived in his father''s house for most of his adult life and remained there after his father''s death in 1899. Benjamin funded Eakins''s artistic education in France at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts between 1866 and 1870. He subsidized Eakins''s unpaid teaching posts at the Philadelphia Sketch Club and the Pennsylvania Academy and was no doubt proud when his son eventually became the director of the Academy''s schools in 1882.

With Benjamin''s support, there was no need for Eakins to paint within the confines of "fad or fashion." This circumstance, coupled with what Beaux called his "integrity of purpose," sent Eakins in artistic directions that few others pursued. He painted scenes from contemporary life: doctors performing surgery, men rowing on the Schuylkill River, baseball players, and the like. He painted these not only because they were part of his world but also because he believed that all great artists depicted their own time. And it is these images that most resonate with today''s viewers. However, Eakins also painted and sculpted historical subjects throughout his life. The focus of these images on the past has frequently set them apart in larger evaluations of his career. As a result, these projects have often been viewed as anomalous episodes in an otherwise realist career, but they constitute a crucial aspect of Eakins''s worldview as an artist.

If great artists depicted their own time, they also took on epic themes that linked them to their predecessors. Since his death, Eakins has become an American Old Master largely because of realist images such as The Gross Clinic , which depicts the Philadelphia physician Samuel D. Gross surgically removing a piece of dead bone from a young patient''s leg. Indeed, when Jefferson Medical College controversially decided to sell the painting in 2006, Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., termed it "America''s Night Watch "--referring to Rembrandt''s well-known masterpiece in the Rijksmuseum. Although Eakins''s contemporaries acknowledged the power of the painting, they also found it disturbing.

However, Eakins valued his historical images as much as, if not more than, the portraits and contemporary genre pictures that we admire him for today. For example, in 1900, when Eakins wrote to John W. Beatty of Pittsburgh''s Carnegie Institute that he intended to send his "best painting" to the institute''s upcoming exhibition, he referred to Crucifixion (1880), his largest history painting and the only overtly religious work that he ever completed. Modern observers might find Crucifixion an unusual choice for "best painting" in a career so devoted to realism, but Eakins created this painting with the same ambition with which he painted The Gross Clinic . Eakins painted both The Gross Clinic and Crucifixion without the certainty of any financial reward, as he had not received a commission for either of these large pictures. However, in the case of The Gross Clinic , Eakins clearly hoped that his daring and monumental image would appeal to Jefferson Medical College and that it also might bring him patrons appropriately desirous of such ambitious work. In this case, Eakins was able to find a home for the painting when the alumni association of Jefferson Medical College raised a meager two hundred dollars for its purchase a few years after its completion. Crucifixion was quite a different matter.

In spite of the religious subject, Crucifixion is no church altarpiece. In fact, Protestant and Catholic viewers alike could find reason to object to Eakins''s audacious reinvention of the centuries-old iconography. Many critics found the work as displeasing as The Gross Clinic for its representation of a realist Jesus, with clawlike hands, dirty feet, and caked-on blood. Eakins sent the work to numerous exhibitions conscious that it did not meet contemporary expectations for religious art. The painting never sold and often encountered negative press, yet Eakins maintained that it was his best work. Crucifixion , like many of his historical works, allowed Eakins to engage in a dialogue with the art historical past, and he hoped that it would one day be recognized as his masterpiece. This book explores Eakins''s complex reasons for choosing historical themes. More specifically, it proposes that he used these subjects to advance some of his most deeply held professional aspirations.

Historical subjects were part of what he called "big painting"--timeless works that engaged with the art historical tradition. Through these works, it is possible to see how his consciousness of the art historical tradition influenced his teaching as well as guided the trajectory of his career. With respect to this tradition, he felt that a core set of artistic beliefs bound all great artists together--past, present, and future. Eakins''s insistent placement of the historical works in major exhibitions alongside his powerful images of doctors and rowers reflects his desire to carve out a place within this tradition. Moreover, his partiality for these historical images makes clear that he envisioned his artistic legacy in different terms than those by which twentieth-century art historians have typically defined his art. In keeping with his historical subject choices, Eakins developed a meticulous working method rooted in some of the oldest recorded artistic practices. For example, at a time when many of his peers were achieving success with bravura brushwork, he crafted tightly composed images that often built on a perspectival grid worthy of a Renaissance master. His technique was the result of many years of study.

However, he would only realize the importance of such time-honored methods when he traveled to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. It was there that Eakins began to feel the depths of the tradition that had shaped the artistic profession for centuries. In Europe, he came to appreciate the work of the Old Masters and began to focus on producing the best work that he could "outside of fad or fashion." But he would not rely exclusively on tried and true artistic practices; he sought to integrate modern ideas into both his technique and his teaching--notably through the use of photography. Eakins felt that these innovations were critical to the continuing development of the art historical tradition into the modern age. The following chapters examine how Eakins explored historical subject matter throughout every decade of his career in order to present his beliefs about his profession and his relationship to the art historical past. These subjects engage with the past in myriad ways, and my use of the term history will necessarily be fluid. As Randall Griffin has proposed, even in historical images "Eakins deliberately confronted the popular view that American themes were provincial and less interesting than foreign ones.

" As a consequence of this overarching belief in American subjects and in order to better integrate the historical subjects into Eakins''s career, this study will include images of contemporary themes that relate to his historical works. Eakins''s historical projects, like most of his works, are starkly different from those of his American contemporaries. The themes he chose were frequently obscure, sometimes requiring explanation. His method could seem at odds with his subject matter, as in the case of his Arcadian images, which are Greek in subject but almost anticlassical in style. Even when he chose a familiar theme like the Crucifixion, he created such an unusual composition that it sparked a great deal of criticism and debate in its own time and remains a bit of an enigma today. This volume begins with Eakins''s first fully realized history painting, William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River . When Eakins began the painting in 1875, he was primarily known for his contemporary genre scenes and for his portraits. Although admired for these works today, critics in the 1870s often regarded Eakins''s attraction to these contemporary subjects as eccentric.

Such critics typically acknowledged Eakins''s tremendous ability as a draft.