KAREN WILKIN
At the Galleries
I
rrelevant as it sometimes seemed in the face of September I Ith's
horrors, exhibitions continued to open as the fall art season pro–
gressed. Some, like the Metropolitan Museum's ravishing extrava–
ganzas of Mughal jewelry and Islamic glass, offered respite from daily
realities by transporting us to cultures and eras far removed from this
troubled time. One not-to-be-missed show, the Philadelphia Museum of
Art's tribute to its native son, Thomas Eakins, removed us from the quo–
tidian by immersing us not in exotica, but in an earlier America, seen
through the eyes of our most uncompromising and inventive realist.
Eakins is something of an anomaly. Born in I844, he was a contem–
porary of the Impressionists, but despite spending four years in Europe,
mostly Paris, between I866 and I870-a crucial period for the advent
of adventurous painting-he was untouched by Modernist ideas. A stu–
dent of the academic painters Jean-Leon Gerome and Leon Bonnat,
Eakins steadfastly adhered to his teachers' principles of meticulous
replication of the seen, although he substituted a quest for plainspoken
truth for the academy's pursuit of the ideal.
The Philadelphia Museum's retrospective presented Eakins whole. A
comprehensive selection of celebrated and deservedly well-known works,
including portraits (both commissioned and intimate), sporting scenes,
and genre images, offered vivid evidence of both his virtuosity and his
love of things as they are. Eakins's efforts to enhance the truthfulness of
his pictures were documented by his perspective drawings, illustrated
research notes, casts of dissected body parts, sculptural study models,
and photographs. Especially photographs . Eakins, who came from the
first generation to grow up with photography, became a skilled practi–
tioner who used the medium as both a way of examining the world and
a tool, like drawing, to help him and his students make irreproachably
accurate images. The exhibition draws heavily on a recently discovered
cache of photographs by Eakins and his circle that make clear how
delighted they were by the camera's ability to freeze the transient for
careful study and to reveal things that escaped ordinary vision. The show
revealed how profitably they employed the new technology; there is even
