History of Photography



Introduction  
History of Photography

A World History of Photography

The Story Behind the Pictures 1827-1991

Photographers' Dictionary









 

Chapter 5

 

PHOTOGRAPHY AND ART:


 

THE FIRST PHASE


 

1839-1890

 

....of all the delusions that possess the human breast, few are so intractable as those about art. Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, 1857   When photography was invented artists thought that it would bring ruin to art but it is shown that photography has been an ally of art, an educator of taste more powerful than a hundred academies of Design would have been... . "Photography and Chromo-lithography," 1868

"Is PHOTOGRAPHY ART?" may seem a pointless question today. Surrounded as we arc by thousands of photographs of even' description, most of us take for granted that in addition to supplying information and seducing customers, camera images also serve as decoration, afford spiritual enrichment, and provide significant insights into the passing scene. But in the decades following the discovery of photography, this question reflected the search for ways to fit the mechanical medium into the traditional schemes of artistic expression. Responses by photographers, which included the selection of appropriate themes and the creation of synthetic works, established directions that continue to animate photography today. And while some photographers used the camera to emulate the subjects and styles of "high" art, graphic artists turned to photographs for information and ideas. The intriguing interplay that ensued also has remained a significant issue in the visual arts. Photographs that reproduce art objects also have had a profound effect on the democratization of public taste and knowledge, changing public perceptions of visual culture and making possible the establishment of art history as a serious discipline.

The much-publicized pronouncement by painter Paul Delaroche that the daguerreotype signaled the end of painting is perplexing because this clever artist also forecast the usefulness of the medium for graphic artists in a letter to Francpis Arago in 1839. Nevertheless, it is symptomatic of the swing between the outright rejection and qualified acceptance of the medium that was fairly typical of the artistic establishment. It was satirized in a group of cartoons by Nadar (pi. nos. 240-241) depicting an artistic community that denied photography's claims while using the medium to improve its own product. Discussion of the role of photography in art was especially spirited in France, where the internal policies of the Second Empire had created a large pool of artists, but it also was taken up by important voices in England. In both countries, public interest in this topic was a reflection of the belief that national stature and achievement in the arts were related. In central and southern Europe and the United States, where the arts played a lesser role, these matters were less frequently addressed.

 

	240-241. NADAR (GASPARD Felix TOURNACHON). TWO cartoons. "Photography asking for just a little place in the exhibition of fine arts." Engraving from Petit journal pour rire, 1855. "The ingratitude of painting refusing the smallest place in its exhibition to photography to whom it owes so much." Engravings from Le journal amusant, 1857. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

From the maze of conflicting statements and heated articles on the subject, three main positions about the potential of camera art emerged. The simplest, entertained by many painters and a section of the public, was that photographs should not be considered "art" because they were made with a mechanical device and by physical and chemical phenomena instead of by human hand and spirit; to some, camera images seemed to have more in common with fabric produced by machinery in a mill than with handmade creations fired by inspiration. The second widely held view, shared by painters, some photographers, and some critics, was that photographs would be useful to art but should not be considered equal in creativeness to drawing and painting. Lastly, by assuming that the process was comparable to other replicatable techniques such as etching and lithography, a fair number of individuals realized that camera images were or could be as significant as handmade works of art and that they might have a beneficial influence on the arts and on culture in general.

Artists reacted to photography in various ways. Many portrait painters—miniaturists in particular—who realized that photography represented the "handwriting on the wall" became involved with daguerreotyping or paper photography; some incorporated it with painting, as in the case of Queen Victoria's painter Henry Collen, while others renounced painting altogether. Still other painters, the most prominent among them Ingres, began almost immediately to use photography to make a record of their own output and also to provide themselves with source material for poses and backgrounds, vigorously denying at the same time its influence on their vision or its claims as art. While there is no direct evidence to indicate that Ingres painted from daguerreotypes, it has been pointed out that in pose, cropping, and tonal range, the portraits made by the painter after Daguerre's invention virtually can be characterized as "enlarged daguerreotypes." Yet, this politically and artistically conservative artist was outspoken in contesting photography's claims as art as well as the rights of photographers to legal protection when their images were used without permission. The irony of the situation was not lost on French journalist Ernest Lacan, who observed that "photography is like a mistress whom one cherishes and hides, about whom one speaks with joy but does not want others to mention."

The view that photographs might be worthwhile to artists—acceptable for collecting facts, eliminating the drudgery of study from the live model, and expanding the possibilities of verisimilitude—was enunciated in considerable detail by Lacan and Francis Wey. The latter, a philologist as well as an art and literary critic, who eventually recognized that camera images could be inspired as well as informative, suggested that they would lead to greater naturalness in the graphic depiction of anatomy, clothing, likeness, expression, and landscape configuration. By studying photographs, true artists, he claimed, would be relieved of menial tasks and become free to devote themselves to the more important spiritual aspects of their work, while inept hacks would be driven from the field of graphic art. Wey left unstated what the incompetent artist might do as an alternative, but according to the influential French critic and poet Baudelaire, writing in response to an exhibition of photography at the Salon of 1859, lazy and "unendowed" painters would become photographers. Fired by a belief in art as an imaginative embodiment of cultivated ideas and dreams, Baudelaire regarded photography as "a very humble servant of art and science, like printing and stenography"—a medium largely unable to transcend "external reality." For this critic as well as for other idealists, symbolists, and aesthetes, photography was linked with "the great industrial madness" of the time, which in their eyes exercised disastrous consequences on the spiritual qualities of life and art. Somewhat later, the noted art critic Charles Blanc made the same point when he observed that because "photography copies everything and explains nothing, it is blind to the realm of the spirit."

Eugene Delacroix was the most prominent of the French artists who welcomed photography as helpmate but recognized its limitations. Regretting that "such a wonderful invention" had arrived so late in his lifetime, he still took lessons in daguerrcotyping, made cliche verve prints, joined the recently established Societe beliographique, and both commissioned and collected photographs. These included studies of the nude made by the amateur Eugene Durieu (pi. no. 242), with whom the artist collaborated on arranging the poses. Delacroix's enthusiasm for the medium can be sensed in a journal entry noting that if photographs were used as they should be, an artist might "raise himself to heights that we do not yet know."

The question of whether the photograph was document or art aroused interest in England also. A Popular Treatise on the Art of Photography, an 1841 work by Robert Hunt, emphasized processes rather than aesthetic matters, but noted that "an improvement of public taste," which had devolved from the fact that "nature in her rudest forms is more beautiful than any human production," already was discernible because of photography. The most important statement on this matter was the previously mentioned unsigned article by Lady Eastlakc (pi. no. 243), "Photography." Concerned with the relationship of "truth" and "reality" to "beauty," she contended that while depictions of the first two qualities were acceptable functions of the camera image, art expression was expected to be beautiful also. And beauty was a result of refinement, taste, spirituality, genius, or intellect—qualities not found in minutely detailed super-realistic visual descriptions made by machine. This formulation was addressed to collodion-albumen technology and enabled her to exempt the "Rembrandt-like" calotypes of Hill and Adamson from her condemnation. In addition to the broadly handled treatment seen in her own portrait or in The Misses Binny and Miss Monro (pi. no. 52), for example, Hill's and Adamson's images expressed the refinement of sentiment that Lady Eastlake considered an artistic necessity. She concluded that while photography had a role to play, it should not be "constrained" into "competition" with art; a more stringent viewpoint led critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton to dismiss camera images as "narrow in range, emphatic in assertion, telling one truth for ten falsehoods."

These writers reflected the opposition of a section of the cultural elite in England and France to the "cheapening of art," which the growing acceptance and purchase of camera pictures by the middle class represented. Collodion technology made photographic images a common sight in the shop windows of Regent Street and Piccadilly in London and the commercial boulevards of Paris. In London, for example, there were at the time some 130 commercial establishments (besides well-known individual photographers like Fenton and Rejlander) where portraits, landscapes, genre scenes, and photographic reproductions of works of art could be bought in regular and stereograph formats. This appeal to the middle class convinced the elite that photographs would foster a taste for verisimilitude instead of ideality, even though some critics recognized that the work of individual photographers might display an uplifting style and substance that was consonant with art.

John Ruskin, the most eminent figure in both English and American art at mid-century, first welcomed photography as the only 19th-century mechanical invention of value, and then reversed himself completely and denounced it as trivial. He made and collected daguerreotypes as well as paper prints of architectural and landscape subjects, and counseled their use to students and readers of his Elements of Drawing. Both academic and Pre-Raphaelite painters, among them William Frith, John Millais, Ford Madox Brown, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the American Pre-Raphaelite William Stillman, employed photographs of costumes, interiors, models, and landscapes taken from various vantage points as study materials. While they insisted that their canvases were painted strictly from nature. some of their productions seem close enough in vision to extant photographs to suggest "that the camera has insinuated itself into the work. English painters may have been even more reticent than the French about acknowledging their use of photographs because of the frequent insistence in the British press that art must be made by hand to display a high order of feeling and inspiration.

242. EUGENE DURIEU. Figure Study No. 6, c. 1853.
Albumen print. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

Jean Louis Marie Eugene Durieu  (see collection)

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Jean Louis Marie Eugène Durieu (1800; Nîmes, France – 1874; Paris, France) was an early French photographer of nudes, known for making studies for Eugène Delacroix. Some of Durieu's nudes were used by Delacroix to creating his own paintings and drawings.

EUGENE DURIEU. Draped female nude

 

EUGENE DURIEU. Draped female nude
 

see also: The Story Behind the Pictures 1827-1991  Eugene Durieu/Eugene Delacroix. Nude from Behind
 

The 20 years following the introduction of collodion in 1851 was a period of increased activity by the photographic community to advance the medium's claims as art. Societies and publications were founded in England, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States, with the Photographic Society of London (now the Royal Photographic Society) and the Societe Frangaise de Photographic, established in 1853 and 1854 respectively, still in existence. Professional publications, including La Lumiere in Paris, the Photographic Journal in London, and others in Italy, Germany, and the United States, were in the vanguard of discussions about photographic art, devoting space to reviews of exhibitions of painting as well as photography.

Between 1851 and 1862, individual photographers, among them Antoine Claudet, Andre Adolphc Disderi, and numbers of the now-forgotten, joined artistic photographers Rejlander, Henry Peach Robinson, and William Lake Price in publishing articles and letters to the professional journals that attempted to analyze the aesthetic similarities and differences between graphic works and photographs and to decide if photography was or was not Art. Notwithstanding their long-winded, often repetitious contentions, the photographers and their allies evolved a point of view about the medium that still forms the basis of photographic aesthetics today. Summed up in a piece by an unknown author that appeared in the Photographic Journal at the beginning of 1862, ostensibly it addressed the immediate question of whether photography should be hung in the Fine Arts or Industrial Section of the forth-coming International Exposition. The author observed that "the question is not whether photography is fine art per se—neither painting nor sculpture can make that claim— but whether it is capable of artistic expression; whether in the hands of a true artist its productions become works of art." A similar idea, more succinctly stated, had illuminated the introduction by the French naturalist Louis Figuier to the Catalogue of the 1859 Salon of Photography (the exhibition that apparently inspired Baudelaire's diatribe). Figuier was one of a number of scientists of the era who were convinced that artistic expression and mass taste would be improved by photography, just as the general quality of human life would benefit from applied science. He observed that "Until now, the artist has had the brush, the pencil and the burin; now, in addition, he has the photographic lens. The lens is an instrument like the pencil and die brush, and photography is a process like engraving and drawing, for what makes an artist is not the process but the feeling."

The leading French painters of landscapes and humble peasant scenes—known as the Barbizon group—as well as the Realists and Impressionists who concerned themselves with the depiction of mundane reality, accepted photographs more generously than Ingres and the Salon painters, in part because of their scientific interest in light and in the accurate depiction of tonal values. A number of them, including Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, and Jean Francois Millet, collected calotypes and albumen prints, apparently agreeing with Antoine Claudet that when a painter desires to imitate nature, there could be nothing better than to consult the "exacting mirror" of a photo graph. These artists considered the camera a "wonderfully obedient slave," and while not all of them painted from photographs directly, such camera "notes" had an important effect on their handling of light and tonality.

243. DAVID OCTAVIUS HILL and ROBERT ADAMSON. Portrait of Elizabeth Rigby, Later Lady Eastlake,
c. 1845. Calotype. National Portrait Gallery, London.

see also: David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson (collection)
 

Frequenting the forests around Arras and Fontainebleau, the haunt also of a number of photographers, Barbizon painters became acquainted with cliche verre a drawing on a collodion glass plate that is a hybrid form—part drawing, part photographic print. Known since the early days of photography and included in both Hunt's treatise and a French work on graphic art processes, it was taught to many artists visiting the region by Adalbert and Eugene Cuvelier. It could be used as a sketching technique, as in a set of Five Landscapes (pi. no. 244) by Corot, or to yield a more finely detailed print, exemplified by Woman Emptying a Bucket (pi. no. 245), an 1862 work by Millet. Cliche verre seems to have been exceptionally congenial to painters working in and around Barbizon, but an American artist, John W. Ehninger, supervised an album of poetry illustrated by this technique. Entitled Autograph Etchings by American Artists, it included the work of Asher B. Durand (pi. no. 246), one of the nation's most prominent mid-century landscapists. In England, its primary use was as a method of reproduction (called electrography) rather than as an expressive medium.

The effect of photography on the handmade arts be-came irreversible with the spread of collodion technology. Besides using camera images as studies of models and draperies and for portraits that were to be enlarged and printed on canvas, painters began to incorporate in their work documentary information and unconventional points of view gleaned from familiarity with all sorts of photographs. The high horizons, blurred figures, and asymmetrical croppings visible in many Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, which seem to establish a relationship between these works and camera vision have been discussed by Scharf, Van Deren Coke, and others. To cite only one of numerous examples of the complex fashion in which painters incorporated camera vision into their work, an 1870 collaborative painting by the Americans Frederic E. Church, G. P. A. Healy, and Jenis McEntee, entitled The Arch of Titus (pi. no. 247) makes use of a studio portrait of the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his daughter Edith (pi. no. 248) as a focal point. But in addition to this obvious usage, the extreme contrast between monochromatic sky and the dark under portion of the arch, the transparency of the shadow areas, and the pronounced perspective of the view through the arch all suggest the close study of photographs. Artists using photographs in this way usually did not obtain permission or give credit to photographers, and it is not surprising that a number of court cases occurred involving better-known photographers who contested the right of painters to use their images without permission, a situation that has continued to bedevil photographers up to the present.

248. UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER. Longfellow and Daughter in the Healy Studio in Rome. 1868-69.
Albumen print. Marie de Mare Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C

While painters were using photographs and critics were arguing the merits of this practice, how did the photographers themselves feel about the medium's status as art? Coming from a spectrum of occupations and class positions, and approaching the medium with differing expectations, they displayed a range of attitudes. Several, among them Sir William Newton, a painter-photographer who helped found the Photographic Society of London, and the fashionable society portraitist Camillc Silvy, were out-spoken in claiming that the medium was valuable only for its documentary veracity. Others, including Fcnton, Edouard Denis Baldus, and Charles Negre, endeavored to infuse photographic documentation with aesthetic character in the belief that camera images were capable of expression, while still others, notably Rejlander and Robinson, not only emulated the conventional subject matter of paintings but manipulated their photographs to produce "picturesque" images.

Starting in the early 1850s, photographic prints were shown in exhibition rooms and galleries and selected for inclusion in expositions where problems of classification sometimes resulted. For instance, nine Le Gray calotypes, submitted to the 1859 Salon, were first displayed among the lithographs and then, when their technique became known, were removed to the science section. For the remainder of the century, photographers attempted to have camera images included in the fine arts sections of the expositions, but indecision on the part of selection committees continued. On the other hand, exhibitions organized by the photographic societies in the 1850s at times included many hundreds of images that were displayed according to the conventions of the academic painting salons, eliciting criticism in the press and eventual repudiation in the late 1880s. "How is it possible," wrote an English reviewer in 1856 "for photographs, whose merit consists in their accuracy and minuteness of detail, to be seen to advantage when piled, tier upon tier, on the crowded walls of an exhibition room?" As if in answer to this criticism, photographers turned to the album as a format for viewing original photographs.

Photography and the Nude

That camera studies of both nudes and costumed figures would be useful to artists had been recognized by dagucrreotypists since the 1840s; Hermann Krone's Nude Study (pi. no. 249) is typical of the conventional Academy poses produced for this trade. A calotype of a woman with a pitcher, by former French painter Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (pi. no. 251), exemplifies the numerous studies on paper of models costumed as domestic servants—designed to serve the same clientele—that probably were inspired by the work of French painters like Francois Bonvin; these simply posed and dramatically lighted figure studies continued a tradition of painted genre imagery with which photography—on the occasions when it was judged to be art—was invariably associated. Even well-known photographers provided studies of all aspects of the human figure for artists, as can be seen in Rejlander's Study of Hands (pi. no. 252).

Predictably, photographs of nudes appealed to others besides graphic artists. Indeed, soon after the invention of the medium, daguerreotypes (followed by ambrotypes. albumen prints, and stereographs, often hand-colored to increase the appearance of naturalness) were made expressly for salacious purposes (pi. no. 250). Photographic journals inveighed against this abuse of the camera, and some studios were raided as a result of court findings in Britain and the United States that photographs of nudes were obscene, but erotic and pornographic images continued to find an interested market. More to the point is the fact that to many Victorians no clear distinctions existed between studies of the nude made for artists, those done for personal expression, and those intended as titillating commercial images. In a milieu where people were scandalized by realistic paintings of unclothed figures except in mythological or historical contexts, where Ruskin was allowed to destroy J. M. W. Turner's erotic works, it would have been too much to expect that the even more naturalistic camera depiction of nudity would be accepted, no matter what purpose the images were designed to serve.

This was true even when such images were conceived with high artistic principles in mind, as with Rejlander's Two Ways of Life (pi. no. 253), to be discussed shortly. The same Victorian moral code no doubt accounts for Lewis Carroll's decision to destroy the negatives of his own artistically conceived images of nude young girls which he realized "so utterly defied convention," and to have the photographs of the daughters of his friends, including Beatrice Hatch (pi. no. 334), painted in by a colorist who supplied the fanciful outdoor decor. In this context, a comparison between the painted and photographed nudes by the American painter Thomas Eakins, who made some 200 such camera studies, is instructive. Photographs of a group of swimmers (pi. no. 254)—made by Eakins or a student—for the painting The Swimming Hole (pi. no. 255) capture movement and anatomical details with lively accuracy. Nevertheless, the painter, apparently concerned with avoiding anything that his Philadelphia patrons and critics might find offensive, discreetly (but unavailingly) rearranged the poses of the nude boys in the final work.

249. HERMANN KRONE. Nude Study, c. 1850.
Daguerreotype. Deutschcs Museum. Munich.

250. UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER. Nude, 1870s.
Albumen print. Private Collection

251. JULIEN VALLOU DE VILLENEUVE. Woman with Pitcher, c. 1855.
Calotype. Bibliotheque Nationalc, Paris.

JULIEN VALLOU DE VILLENEUVE  (see collection)

(1795-1866)

French lithographer, photographer and painter. From his debut at the Salon of 1814 as a painter he regularly exhibited lithographed images of daily life, fashion, regional costumes and erotica, many done after the work of English and Dutch artists. He also published his own lithographed compositions, mostly 'female types'. With Achille Deveria and others he contributed to the compendium of romantic erotica called Imagerie galante (Paris, 1830), which provocatively updated an erotic mode found in 18th-century engravings. The subjects were pictorial versions of stock characters from popular novels and plays.

JULIEN VALLOU DE VILLENEUVE. Female nude, standing

 

JULIEN VALLOU DE VILLENEUVE. Female nude, reclining, ca. 1853

252. OSCAR GUSTAV REJLANDER. Study of Hands, c. 1854.
Albumen print. Gernsheim Collection, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin.

OSCAR GUSTAV REJLANDER  (see collection)

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Oscar Gustave Rejlander (Sweden 1813 – Clapham, London on 18 January 1875) was a pioneering Victorian art photographer.
His exact date of birth is uncertain, but was probably 1813. He was the son of Carl Gustaf Rejlander, a stonemason and Swedish Army Officer. He studied art in Rome where he saw photographs of the sights, and then initially settled in Lincoln, England. He abandoned his original profession as a painter and portrait miniaturist, apparently after seeing how well a photograph captured the fold of a sleeve. Other accounts say he was inspired by one of Fox Talbot's assistants.
He set up as a portraitist in the industrial Midlands town of Wolverhampton, probably around 1846. Around 1850 he learned the wet-collodion and waxed-paper processes at great speed with Nicholas Henneman in London, and then changed his business to that of a photography studio. He undertook genre work and portraiture. He also created erotic work, using as models the circus girls of Mme Wharton, street children and child prostitutes - his Charlotte Baker series remains notorious.
Rejlander undertook many experiments to perfect his photography, including combination printing from around 1853, which it is possible he may have invented. He was a friend of photographer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better know by the nom de plume Lewis Carroll), who collected Rejlander's early child work and corresponded with him on technical matters. Rejlander later created one of the best known & most revealing portraits of Dodgson.
His early work only slightly sullied his later reputation, and he participated in the Paris Exhibition of 1855. In 1857 he made his best-known allegorical work, The Two Ways of Life. This was a seamlessly montaged combination print made of thirty-two images (akin to the use of Photoshop today, but then far more difficult to achieve) in about six weeks. First exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, the work shows two youths being offered guidance by a patriarch. Each youth looks toward a section of a stage-like tableaux vivant - one youth is shown the virtuous pleasures and the other the sinful pleasures. The image's partial nudity was deemed 'indecent' by some - and those familiar with Rejlander's more commercial work might also suspect that prostitutes had been used as cheap models. But the 'indecency' faded when Queen Victoria ordered a 10-guinea copy to give to Prince Albert.
Despite this royal patronage, controversy about The Two Ways of Life in strait-laced Scotland in 1858 led to a secession of a large group from the Photographic Society of Scotland, the secessionists founding the Edinburgh Photographic Society in 1861. They objected to the picture being shown with one half of it concealed by drapes. The picture was later shown at the Birmingham Photographic Society with no such furore or censorship. However the Photographic Society of Scotland later made amends and invited Rejlander to a grand dinner in his honour in 1866, held to open an exhibition that included many of his pictures.
The success of The Two Ways of Life, and membership of the Royal Photographic Society of London, gave him an entree into London respectability. He moved his studio to Malden Road, London around 1862 and further experimented with double exposure, photomontage, photographic manipulation and retouching. He became a leading expert in photographic techniques, lecturing and publishing widely, and sold portfolios of work through bookshops and art dealers. He also found subject-matter in London, photographing homeless London street children to produce popular 'social-protest' pictures such as "Poor Joe" and "Homeless".
He married Mary Bull in 1862, who was twenty-four years his junior. Mary had been his photographic model in Wolverhampton since she was aged 14.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson visited Rejlander's Malden Road studio in 1863 and was inspired to set up his own studio. Around 1863 Rejlander visited the Isle of Wight and collaborated with Julia Margaret Cameron.
Some of Rejlander's images were purchased as drawing-aids to Victorian painters of repute, such as Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema. In 1872 his photography illustrated Darwin's classic treatise on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
He became seriously ill from about 1874. Rejlander died in 1875 with several claims on his estate, and costly funeral expenses. The Edinburgh Photographic Society raised money for his widow on Rejlander's death, and helped set up the Rejlander Memorial Fund.
Rejlander's ideas and techniques were taken up by other photographers and this, to some extent, justifies labelling him as the father of art photography.
 

253. OSCAR GUSTAV REJLANDER. Two Ways of Life, 1857.
Albumen print. International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y.

OSCAR GUSTAV REJLANDER. Two Ways of Life, 1857.
 

Thomas Eakins  (see collection)
 

(b Philadelphia, PA, 25 July 1844; d Philadelphia, 25 June 1916).

American painter, sculptor and photographer. He was a portrait painter who chose most of his sitters and represented them in powerful but often
unflattering physical and psychological terms. Although unsuccessful throughout much of his career, since the 1930s he has been regarded as one
of the greatest American painters of his era.
 

254. THOMAS EAKINS OR STUDENT. Eakins's Students at the Site of "Tbe Swimming Hole," 1883.
Gelatin silver print. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

255. THOMAS EAKINS. The Swimming Hole, 1883.
Oil on canvas. Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.

Thomas Eakins Carrying a Woman, 1885. Photograph, circle of Eakins

THOMAS EAKINS. Untitled.

THOMAS EAKINS. Boys Boxing in atelier

Thomas Eakins and J. Laurie Wallace at the Shore, ca. 1883

THOMAS EAKINS. Boy in Artelier

Vintage photo nude woman


(see collection)