Product Details
Hardcover
212 pages
Smithsonian Institution Press
Published 1994
From Publishers Weekly
Eakins (1844-1916) painted portraits of scientists, surgeons, writers, teachers, musicians and sportsmen, figures who, as Wilmerding notes, "all relied on the sensitive coordination of intelligence and action, of mind and body, of brain and hands." In this rewarding catalogue of an exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery, essays by 30 scholars provide fresh perspectives on the American realist's uncompromising vision. Eakins often projected his own anxieties and feelings into his pictures, as in a remarkably candid portrait of his wife Susan Macdowell, or the devastating images of patrons who appear vain and heartless. His portraits of female nudes, Roman Catholic clerics, his favorite sister Margaret, African American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner and Walt Whitman reflect the diverse interests of this anti-impressionist. Wilmerding is professor of American art at Princeton.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Eakins's subjects gaze intently at the world before them and, even more so, at their inner visions. These are the "warts and all" of the soul of Philadelphia society in the aftermath of the Civil War. Published on the occasion of a unique show at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the first there of a "great foreign artist who did not practise in (indeed never visited) this country," this work is the most complete study available of a provocative and penetrating genius. It combines the... read more |
LuminousLint 
@LuminousLint
