July 25, 1844– Thomas Cowperthaite Eakins is one of the American painters that I admire the very most. I am quite enamored of late 19th and early 20th century American painters and Eakins epitomizes everything I love about the American Realist Movement.

Eakins was unsuccessful as an artist in his lifetime, but he is now thought to be one of the most influential and important figures in American Painting and Photography. He is also especially noted for his teaching methods and for his insistence on teaching men and women together in the same classroom, which was groundbreaking and controversial in his era.

I don’t know if you kids have noticed, but something is going on this very day in the great city of Philadelphia, where Eakins was raised and educated. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy Of Fine Arts, plus he spent several years studying in Paris and Spain. He returned to the Pennsylvania Academy as an instructor in 1876 and became its Director in 1882. His teaching was unsettling for many at the time, especially his interest in instructing his students in all aspects of the human figure. There were tensions between Eakins and the Academy’s Board of Directors throughout his teaching career. He was finally fired from the Academy in 1886 for removing the loincloth of a male model in a class where female students were present. That’s right, he got the axe for showing the girls a penis and it wasn’t even his own.

Deeply disturbed by his dismissal, Eakins’ later paintings concentrated on formal portraiture, usually of friends and family. This work was realistic but with a technique that went beyond just pure representation. He was greatly influenced by early photographers and did many of his own photographs as studies, including many male nudes. I find his photographic work to exceptional, equal to the paintings.

Eakins was married three times, but they were very difficult, unsuccessful relationships. Out lasting the marriages, Eakins constant companion was the handsome sculptor Samuel Murray. He certainly had problems relating to women, and he had a documented interest in exhibitionism, S and M, and voyeurism. He was also depressed, arrogant, and filled with despair at not selling his work, and for his conflicted desires about the men he painted.

A reader recently took me task saying that I “made everybody gay”. This has some truth, but after decades of my favorite figures being de-gayed in film treatments, biographies and history books, it seems only fair. Eakins’ gayness is disputed, but the paintings and photographs speak volumes. Eakins worked hard to create convincing illusions, and long before it was fashionable, he used his photography to further his goal. He often succeeded all too well. His male nudes, his close friendship with Walt Whitman (he was infamous for his full frontal nude photographs of Whitman), and his belief that a naked woman was the most beautiful thing in nature “except a naked man” are a bit of a giveaway, says me.

Always ingenious, Eakins found ways to put naked or nearly naked people in many of his paintings. He was a real art world rabble-rouser, depicting a savage crucifixion scene, a group of naked men at a swimming hole, and classical figures with and without their togas. On two occasions he depicted surgical patients on the operating table, and throughout his career he painted barely clothed male athletes. In 1876, Eakins portrayed world-renowned surgeon Samuel Gross in the middle of an operation. He then submitted the painting to the art competition at the United States Centennial Exhibition. But the judges simply saw a gruesome documentary and sent the painting to a building showing medical instruments. Today The Gross Clinic is considered Eakins masterpiece.

A decade later, Eakins presented one of his major patrons with a painting of an idyllic scene with a group of six men and a big red dog swimming in a river, but the patron politely sent it back, requesting a painting that he could donate to an art museum someday. The Swimming Hole is now Eakins’ most famous and popular painting. One of the guys appears to be Eakins himself. Most of his portraits of women have them looking intelligent and unhappy. His paintings of men show them looking like objects of desire.

130 years ago, The Swimming Hole was probably seen an expression of the wholesome joys of male companionship. Now when gayness is part of mainstream culture, the painting, and Eakins’ photographic studies that show the same setting and subjects, seem to indicate Eakins’ own sexual preference. I like to claim him as one of our first gay American artists.

No one knows if he was actually gay or not, but I like to think he would like the association. More than anything else, Eakins enjoyed having his art to make people uncomfortable, even angry. Remember, Eakins demanded that his students draw and paint from live nude models, and he even asked the students to pose nude for one another.

Then there is the question of the photographs. In Eakins’ era, photography was not considered an art, but rather a science. In our own century, we have galleries dedicated to photographs and pictures can go for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Eakins’ paintings look “photographic”, but now using photographs to paint from is no longer considered a cheat. The photographs that outraged in his time now seem charming. I enjoy the game of searching for the photographic pose that Eakins put in a painting. His naked male pals look wholesome and sweet, as they stand on the river bank, posing like Greek gods. Eakins posed nude himself, and there are plenty of photos of him full frontal. Google away.

I have seen many of his works in museums and I have a large “coffee table” book of his work that has given me much pleasure. Along with John Singer Sargent and James Whistler, Eakins gave birth to my passion for American Art. For more about his life, try the excellent Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life Of An American Artist (2005) by Henry Adams.