THOMAS EAKINS

توماس إيكنز
תומס אקינס
Томас Икинс

Motion Study: George Reynolds nude, pole-vaulting to left, 1885

source:

“Individualist, nonconformist, truth-teller,” and both “hero and outcast” to American art historians–so Kathleen A. Foster characterizes Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) in the catalogue for the retrospective of his work, which closed last September at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Eakins was all those things, and accounts of his life make for absorbing reading. But it is his paintings, ultimately, that make him the distinctive figure he is, so to Foster’s list I would add painter of pure thought.
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source: deyave

Thomas Eakins

1844-1916

Painting Pure Thought

by Louis Torres

Eakins is one of my favorite painters, I should say at the outset. I had missed the previous retrospective of his work in 1982, and greatly looked forward to attending this one, as there would be much to enjoy and learn. Even before I set foot in the Metropolitan, however, two nagging issues had lodged in my mind. An article in Lingua Franca (October 2001), had carried the rather ominous title “Doubting Thomas: A Legendary Painter’s Methods Are Finally Exposed,” along with this teasing sidebar: “Thomas Eakins is suspected of tracing many of his paintings from photographs.” Then there was the insistence by some that photographs which Eakins and his students had made of each other posing nude (for teaching purposes)–as well as his painting Swimming, which features nude male figures–were expressive of homoeroticism. I will return to both these issues below, following a brief account of Eakins’s early training and a survey of some of the best work from the first decade of his career. Finally, I will conclude with a consideration of what many regard as his greatest works–the late portraits.

At the Academy

In 1862, Eakins, then eighteen, embarked on a course of study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia with the intention of becoming a painter. His training there consisted of learning to draw from antique casts, then of lectures in anatomy and classes in drawing from life. Later he would attend advanced lectures in anatomy at the city’s leading medical school, showing such enthusiasm that it was thought he might become a surgeon. As for painting, it was not yet part of the curriculum at the Academy. He would have to wait to paint, and patiently wait he did. Eakins–whose unflinching realism, broad range, and sensitive renderings of the human psyche have justly led many to consider him America’s greatest painter–would not touch brush to canvas until five years later, in Paris, and would not begin his first completed painting, A Street Scene in Seville (on which he worked for three months), until he was twenty-six.

How times have changed. Compare Eakins’s training to the way most young people prepare for a career in “art” nowadays–as at one university, where students in the art department can “engage in contemporary issues, ideas, and new technologies” and “start out as a painter, later get excited about sculpture, and then, after taking a course in digital multimedia, integrate all three in an interactive video sculpture” in the university’s own art museum. No dusty antique casts or tedious life-drawing classes and anatomy lectures at this progressive institution!

The First Decade

Following his years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Eakins attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts, in Paris, where he trained from 1866 to 1870 under the renowned French academic painter Jean-Leon Gérôme [two unusual portraits: Head of a Peasant / Portrait of a Young Boy], who would remain a lifelong influence–as would such old masters as Velázquez, whose paintings Eakins studied during side trips to Spain. After four years abroad, Eakins returned to Philadelphia, never to visit Europe again. Although he had absorbed much there, the young painter would forge a distinctive American identity out of the experience and attain excellence as both a painter and a teacher.

Many of Eakins’s paintings from the 1870s reflect his youthful interest in sports and outdoor activities–in particular, scull racing and sailing, as well as boxing and baseball. One of his earliest and best-known works–The Champion Single Sculls (1871) long known as Max Schmitt in a Single Scull–is from this period. In closely observed detail, this expansive painting depicts a bright afternoon on a still river, with a rower (Eakins’s friend, as it happens) sitting in a racing shell in the foreground, peering over his shoulder in the general direction of the viewer. In mid-ground, a much smaller figure is pictured rowing away from Schmitt in a shell bearing Eakins’s signature and the date on its stern–details easily missed by a casual viewer (Eakins himself is the rower!). Further back, to the right, are two tiny figures in single shells, and to the left, three figures in a red rowboat. Still more distant, two bridges span the middle portion of the painting, across one of which a locomotive is crossing. Beyond is yet another racing shell, and a minuscule steamboat spewing white smoke from its stack. Clumps of trees at left midground are reflected in the water below, while dark shadows cover the landscape and scattered trees at the right.

Stephen May, in a review of the Eakins retrospective, characterizes The Champion Single Sculls as “a scintillating, carefully plotted depiction of the artist’s boyhood friend at the site of his rowing victories on the river.” It is, he says, “one of the great images in our art history.” In an earlier review of Eakins’s rowing pictures, he called it “surely one of the finest paintings in American art.”

In What Art Is, Michelle Kamhi and I wrote of this painting that “the aura of tranquility is palpable, and one has the sense that Schmitt, though momentarily distracted, will soon be alone with his thoughts.” Indeed, a kind of solitude seems to pervade this carefully rendered, richly detailed, and immensely satisfying painting. At least two writers would beg to differ. In 1994, New York Times critic Roberta Smith found the portrayal of Schmitt somewhat “sad” and “stiff,” misleadingly describing him as “contemplating his reflection in the glass-smooth water,” while suggesting that he is doing so “with an intensity that is just this side of scary.” Smith’s bizarre interpretation of the painting has no basis in reality, and reveals more about her than I, for one, care to know.

Three years earlier, Henry Adams, curator of American art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, remarked upon The Champion Single Sculls and the event that inspired it. In an article for Smithsonian magazine, he reported that Schmitt had won an important race by a full three lengths, and that Eakins had chosen to depict, not the race itself, but a moment of rest in the training regimen. This, he said, made the painting “a tribute not just to Schmitt’s victory but to the discipline that created it.” True enough, but Adams’s subsequent remark is far off the mark–the painting is “bittersweet,” he asserts, since “triumph is brief and fleeting compared with the long hours that precede and follow it.” In truth, nothing in the painting itself suggests anything of the sort, and Adams is not justified in projecting his cynical view of life onto it. He is not responding to the painting, but to his own sense of the events that motivated Eakins to paint it in the first place. Moreover, Eakins would hardly have painted a tribute to something “fleeting,” as Adams implies.

Other paintings depicting oarsmen–notably The Pair-Oared Shell (1872), The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake-Boat (1873), and John Biglin in a Single Scull (1873-74)–also represent this early period of Eakins’s career, reflecting his interest in the psychological dimensions of physical sport. In each of the rowing pictures, especially the one featuring John Biglin, he portrays a distinct individual, conveying qualities of mental concentration and inner fortitude, not to mention sheer physical strength. The scientific-minded Eakins would make perspective drawings in planning these paintings–two such drawings were displayed near them in the exhibition.

Another human activity admired by Eakins was music-making. His interest in the inner life of solitary musicians is evident in an early painting of a young woman, Elizabeth at the Piano (1875). Dark shadow marks the wall behind Elizabeth, who wears a black dress as she sits in profile at the piano. Muted light from behind catches scattered points in this interior setting–most notably, wisps of white at her collar and cuffs, and a lovely small red flower pinned to her hair behind the ear. Eakins gives the greatest luminosity to the musical score propped on the piano’s music stand, but draws the viewer’s attention to Elizabeth herself–to her face (with the light catching the back of her cheek), eyes cast downward and mouth softly set in concentration (both, intriguingly, in shadow), and to her hands, especially the right (also caught by the gentle light), hovering above a small section of ivory keys at the right, one of which her small finger is about to strike. It is a haunting scene filled with unheard music, the kind of contemplative moment only a painter of Eakins’s skill and sensitivity could render. In later years, there would be other paintings depicting musicians–most notably The Cello Player (1896) and The Oboe Player (1903)–but none, to my mind, as emotionally evocative as this one.

Also in 1875, Eakins completed The Gross Clinic, a monumental painting depicting the distinguished surgeon Samuel D. Gross pausing in mid-operation (he holds a scalpel with his blood-stained hand, having just made an incision in the patient’s thigh), about to address the medical students assembled in the amphitheater around him. According to catalogue essayist Marc Simpson, Eakins’s goal was not to paint a traditional portrait, but to depict Gross in the surgical arena, healing and teaching simultaneously, surrounded by his assistants and his students. Like Eakins’s paintings of athletes, this was at the time a novel subject, virtually unknown in American art and with few precedents even in the European tradition. Viewers may not linger long on the graphic details of the surgery in this work, but the figure of Gross, who was admired greatly by Eakins for his considerable virtues and numerous achievements, invites contemplation.

Thomas Eakins took a second course of anatomy at Jefferson Medical College in 1874 As chair of surgery from 1856 to 1882, Dr. Gross inspired thousands of Jefferson medical students and assistants with his articulate lectures, calm judgment, mechanical dexterity, and contributions to surgical technique. Gross was author or editor of hundreds of articles and many books. His two-volume System of Surgery of 1859, perhaps his best known work, appeared in six editions and in several foreign languages. Gross was deeply involved in local, national, and international medical societies and was a founder and office holder of many. His numerous institutional honors and awards reflect his acclaim as the “Nestor of American Surgery” (a wise leader and patriarch named after the legendary Greek hero). Thomas Eakins was aged thirty-one and had never before attempted such an ambitious composition when he requested Dr. Gross, then seventy years old and at the pinnacle of his profession in 1875, to approve his conception for a portrait of the physician in his surgical clinic. The young artist’s confidence must have stemmed from his knowledge of anatomy and his prior experiences in the medical environment. He hoped to establish his professional reputation by displaying this heroic work in the art gallery of the upcoming Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, which aimed to celebrate American progress and excellence. Gross exemplified these patriotic ideals.

In the same decade, Eakins’s concern with the life of the mind found a very different expression in the delightful Baby at Play (1876). A toddler (his niece) is shown outdoors on a sunny day, seated amidst scattered blocks on a brick patio, focusing mightily on the task of grasping a single block, perhaps intending to place it with others in the red toy wagon pulled by a prancing horse, which is next to her. An intimate work, never intended for public exhibition, Baby at Play is a singular painting in Eakins’s oeuvre–marking the primary business of early childhood, the mental and physical “work” that children do to learn about the world around them and form a sense of self. Only a heart of stone would fail to be captivated by its engaging qualities.

Eakins’s father, a calligrapher, is the subject of one of his most compelling portraits, The Writing Master (Portrait of Benjamin Eakins), completed in 1882. Eakins depicts his bespectacled father in three-quarter view seated at a small wooden table nearly covered by the white parchment on which he works, completely absorbed in his task. The father’s brightly lit bald head forms the apex of the composition, his gently sloping shoulders nearly obscured, and his arms resting on the table. His right hand clasps a wood pen, whose tip barely touches the paper, while the left, just inches away, holds the parchment in place. Here one one can appreciate the wisdom of Eakins’s observation that “a hand takes as long to paint as a head nearly, and a man’s hand no more looks like another man’s hand than his head like another’s.” With anatomical precision tempered by artistic sensibility, he ennobles his father in the loving execution of the older man’s painstaking craft.

In 1872, Eakins had begun to utilize photographs among other reference sources for his paintings, which ranged from live models to costumes, props, and occasional bronze sculptures made for the purpose of study. In an essay for the exhibition catalogue, W. Douglass Paschall notes that it was for a painting of a friend’s dog, Grouse, that Eakins is first known to have employed a technique known as “squaring.” According to Paschall, remnants of a grid incised into the paint indicate that Eakins had exploited the traditional technique of squaring to transfer and enlarge the image of the dog from a photograph. In a later work, The Artist and His Father Hunting Reed Birds (1873-74)–which shows Eakins pushing a long pole downward in the marsh to move their boat forward as his father stands ready to shoot–Eakins utilized the same method of transfer, first posing for a photograph of his head (just 2 x 2″) and then squaring it to match the grid he had prepared.

Paschall notes that such photographs enabled Eakins to depict poses which models could not maintain for long. In his view: “They became the equivalent of study drawings, to be replicated and discarded.” Such a comparison ignores the nature of both photography and drawing, however. A mechanical means of reproduction that indiscriminately records everything in its field is scarcely the same as a process in which every minute detail is observed, selected, and shaped over time by a conscious human being. The term study–implying both attentiveness and the gradual acquisition of knowledge and understanding–is applicable only to drawings. While it is perfectly legitimate for painters to use photographs to supplement sketches made from life, the photographic image lacks a crucial element peculiar to both drawing and painting studies–details shaped by the hand, and mind, of the painter.

In their catalogue essay “Photography and the Making of Paintings,” Marcia Tucker and Nica Gutman note that from its very beginnings, photography influenced both artists and critics, not to mention the general public, regarding “what paintings could and should be”–an odd formulation that inadvertently casts a negative light on the work of painters active before the invention of photography. What attracted Eakins and other painters working in “highly representational academic styles” was “photography’s capacity to reconcile immediacy and perfect accuracy, to ‘preserve records of transient and beautiful effects, of difficult poses, and of unusual combinations of line’ [as one contemporary wrote].” Echoing the point made by Paschall, Tucker and Gutman argue that photography “held the potential to assist with or even substitute for a fundamental practice in academic painting–drawing.” This, they add, would have greatly appealed to Eakins, “who seems to have regarded drawing as little more than a functional necessity.” Perhaps, but it is clear that he had learned it well, and never gave it up altogether.

“Photography begged its use by artists. Indeed, it had in large part been invented for that purpose,” Paschall claims, citing only statements in “prospectuses and announcements” by its two principal inventors, Louis Daguerre and William Henry Talbot. More accurately, photography “begged its use” by applied artists–printmakers, illustrators, diorama painters–“producers, in short, of popular imagery,” as Paschall puts it. “Painters aspiring to more rarefied circles in the fine arts,” he explains, “were generally more circumspect” about the matter. Paschall also suggests that painters in the late nineteenth century “concentrated more and more on reproducing nature–a task at which photographs inherently were considered to excel.” Well, of course. “Reproducing nature” (a mechanical process) is what photographs do in a manner of speaking, but paintings abstract from, and selectively recreate, nature–a subtle but important distinction.

Around 1880, Eakins acquired a camera and began to take his own pictures. As recent studies reveal, he also began the dubious practice of projecting photographic images directly onto his canvases and transferring them by means of tracing, often combining selected details from two or more photographs.

In fascinating pairings, the retrospective displayed photographs by Eakins alongside (or near) paintings he made from them. In one example, details in the photographic images are virtually identical with those in the painting Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River (1881)–a scene picturing an open boat and some thirty fishermen, many in yellow slickers and wearing dark hats, some in the boat, others on the shore. Simpson offers this account of the painter’s method:

Eakins based his composition on two photographs: one of shad fishermen setting a net at Gloucester, selectively edited of bystanders, established the figural group and near shoreline; another photograph provided the steamboat pier to the right, the horizon, and the foreground. By combining and editing his photographs through traced projections on the canvas, and with continual reference to photographic prints for interior forms, he was able to paint the finished painting back in his Philadelphia studio.

For a related painting, similarly titled–this time of eleven fishermen observed by three stylish ladies, a gentleman, and a dog–Eakins copied from three photographs, including one of the fishermen, and another of three women of the Eakins family and a male friend, all of whom are looking away from the viewer at a field. In this photograph, a dog between two of the women turns its head back to the left. It is noteworthy that Eakins altered the composition in the painting by moving the dog to the right of the foursome, apparently borrowing its image from yet a third photograph–in which the dog, too, was looking at the fishermen.

Mending the Net (1881) constitutes a particularly striking instance of Eakins’s practice, for it incorporates images borrowed from no fewer than eight photographs [!]–including one of a fisherman mending a net; another of two fishermen similarly engaged; a pair of snapshots taken on a rooftop (each showing two small children with two women); one of a tree, and another of a gentleman sitting under the tree on a makeshift wooden platform, while holding a newspaper (only slightly visible) and seemingly conversing with a second man (presumably a friend) who stands facing him; and two of white geese feeding on the ground. In the painting, the two children (one from each of the photographs) are pictured next to the two fishermen, watching them at work. The gentleman with the newspaper, now alone (his friend has been edited out) and seemingly absorbed in reading, is set apart from the group of fishermen, which totals six. (Another figure, carrying a basket, enters the scene at the left.)

Regarding the technique of projection used by Eakins, Tucker and Gutman offer this observation: “[It] simplified the process of combining elements from different photographs, an idea of much interest to Eakins.” That may have been, but these paintings–as well as others for which Eakins used a “magic lantern” to project photographs onto primed canvas–do not, therefore, qualify as art (even though he noted color and atmosphere in detailed oil studies made on location), although they appear to the eye to be just that. Anyone familiar with the history of painting knows that artists before and after the invention of photography have depicted single or multiple figures in natural settings without recourse to photographs. Such works include Millet’s Harvesters Resting (1850-53) and A Rainy Day in Camp (Camp Near Yorktown) (1871), by Eakins’s contemporary, Winslow Homer.

Arcadia

In any case, Eakins seems to have limited the practice in question mainly to outdoor paintings of the kind discussed above. It is virtually certain that he never traced from photographs to create the portraits that were his greatest works. According to Tucker and Gutman, moreover, he seems to have abandoned the practice altogether around 1885. As they further explain:

If we consider as a group the paintings that exhibit projection reference marks, a pattern emerges. With a few possible exceptions, the technique has been used only for figures . . . of a small scale, ranging from sixteen inches for the standing figure in Arcadia [1883] to two-and-a-quarter inches for the central pair in Pushing for Rail [1874] . . . . Where photographs are likely to have been used for larger images, such as Singing a Pathetic Song [1881] –scroll down past image of painting], . . . Eakins seems to have preferred traditional “squaring up” to transfer the image, drawing from correspondingly squared photographs.
Singing a Pathetic Song

The latest painting by Eakins on which Tucker and Gutman observed marks indicating painting from projected photographs is Swimming (1884-85), which I discuss below.

Photography as a Teaching Tool

Eakins began taking pictures of his family and friends in various poses, indoors and out, at play or in repose, around 1879 (though never intended for public display, many of these early photographs were included in the exhibition, in the same galleries as the paintings). Soon after, he began to use photography as a teaching tool to supplement the traditional practice of drawing from life. Numerous examples of photographs taken either by Eakins, or by his students or colleagues (identified as “Circle of Thomas Eakins”), provide a rare window for contemporary viewers into the remote world of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Eakins taught. Because models for life classes were expensive and not readily available, he instituted the use of photography for study purposes, and encouraged his students to pose nude for one another in front of the camera. Eakins himself set the example by photographing them, and even by posing himself, alone and with others. He also took nude photographs of his wife, Susan Macdowell Eakins.

In one striking example, Thomas Eakins and John Laurie Wallace, Nude (c.1883), the two figures stand on a pebbly shore, gazing downward, their backs to the viewer. Each is silhouetted against a lake and sky shrouded in mist, and seems lost in thought. (Both a student and a favorite model, as well as a friend, Wallace was sensitively rendered by Eakins in his Portrait of J. Laurie Wallace, c. 1883. He went on to become a successful portrait painter in his own right.)

Other photographs intended for teaching are those of both male and female figures, costumed or nude, taken in modeling classes or in Eakins’s studio. Most obviously intended for pedagogical purposes are those arranged in what are referred to as a “Naked Series,” comprising up to seven side-by-side photographs of a single figure, in profile and from the front and back. Eakins posed for one of these, Wallace for another, and unnamed female models for still others. There are also photographs are of nude children, both girls and boys. A particularly lovely example, presumably taken by one of Eakins’s students, is of a young girl standing half in shadow drinking from a large bowl which obscures her face (children were ordinarily photographed in profile, or from the back). In only one other photograph, that of a teen-aged boy seated on the arm of a couch, is the child model facing outward, his genitals discreetly obscured by his folded hands and a deep shadow. In what seems to be an exception among the images of young subjects, he gazes outward (though off to one side). That prurient interests were not the motive for such photographs is suggested by the fact that the children in question were always accompanied by chaperones (as one of the photographs in the exhibition attests).

Intimations of Homoeroticism

An offshoot of the increasing social acceptance of homosexuality in recent years is the tendency of some writers to allege signs of it in the life or work of well-known figures from the past, often on the basis of little or no evidence. Eakins has drawn such attention. In an insightful article for The New Criterion, Michael J. Lewis alludes to the sort of trepidation on this score that I, too, felt prior to attending the Eakins retrospective (he uses the term “dread”). As Lewis observes (alluding to incidents involving Eakins’s use of male models in all-female classes, and his treatment of female models as well): “In these revisionist times, the temptation to forage for titillating scandal and disgraceful goings-on (usually of a sexual nature) often proves irresistible.” To their credit, none of the various contributors to the catalogue chose to raise this issue. A number of critics have done so, however.

In addition to the photographs cited above, others by Eakins and his circle–of naked men and youths (his students and colleagues all), alone, in pairs, and in groups, occasionally with Eakins present as the sole middle-aged figure–have no doubt inspired the musings of various critics regarding his sexual inclinations. In its review of the retrospective catalogue, Publishers Weekly refers to these photographs as “enigmatic sepia-toned photographic nudes,” adding that “the ‘homotextuality’ of many of them has been the subject of much recent critical inquiry.” In one such photograph, Wallace is standing playing a panpipe in a rustic setting–much like the upright nude figure in Arcadia (1883) for which he posed. In another, Susan (then Eakins’s fiancée) is seen reclining on the grass in the manner of the nude young woman in the painting.

Two other photographs are Male Nudes in a Seated Tug-of-War and Male Nudes Boxing. In the latter, the combatants are circled by four reclining or seated youths, also nude. Eakins’s “motion studies” should be noted as well. These include Male Nude Running, History of a Jump, Male Nude Leaping, and George Reynolds, Nude, Pole-Vaulting (1885).

Less well known are the serial nude photographs of Wallace (not included in the exhibition), which convey the illusion that the subject is walking away from or toward the viewer. For these, Eakins utilized a device called a zoöpraxiscope, after the example of Eadweard Muybridge, who invented the device. Only one of the motion studies is of a female, also walking.

One commentator who claims to discern a homoerotic underpinning in some of Eakins’s painting is New York magazine critic Mark Stevens. In his review of the retrospective, he argues that Eakins “seemed to dramatize nakedness. . . . It may have symbolized for him an Edenic liberation from constraint.” According to Stevens:

[Eakins] was attracted to the “idealism” of manly young bodies, not to the “realism” of aging flesh. Yet there was usually something equivocal in his photographs. It was not just a matter of whether they were sensual or homoerotic. More important, the metaphysical space in Eakins’s art between longing and detachment, analysis and passion, was shadowy and evocatively ill-defined. His joy in the natural body rarely made its way into his major paintings, perhaps because the subject was so personally complex for him. Only in his great Swimming, which shows naked young men at a swimming hole, did he create an American Arcadia. And even there he depicted an older man (himself) swimming toward paradise from the darker edge.
Stevens is much given to pretentiousness. His esoteric reference to “metaphysical space,” for example, may sound important, but what can it possibly mean? In Eakins’s paintings there are no “spaces,” metaphysical or otherwise.

In Swimming (1884-85), Eakins depicts six male nude figures on and near an outcropping of rock at the edge of a remote lake, four of them on the rocky ledge itself, reminiscent of figures on a Greek pediment. Eakins is indeed shown swimming toward the outcropping to join the others–or, as Stevens’s fanciful musing would have it, “swimming toward paradise from the darker edge.”

The dramatic impact of the painting stems primarily from the brightly lit forms of the four principal figures, set against a backdrop of lush dark greenery–in particular, from the upright youth at the apex, whose self-assured pose and meticulously rendered form are indeed striking. Seen from the back in three-quarter view, hands on hips, his head obscured in shadow, he stands peering at the water, perhaps awaiting his turn to dive into the lake.

Like Stevens, Sanford Schwartz, a professor of English at Penn State, makes much–too much– of the naked male bodies in Swimming, calling the painting “a love song to male beauty” in which Eakins conveys “an ardent heroizing desire yet with no trace of lasciviousness.” The painting, in his view, “presents a sense of physical adoration” in which “an older man [Eakins] is seen swimming toward the men on or near the rocks,” giving it a “sexual and narrative tension.” “Being appreciated, at a particular instant, by a singular older man, these beautiful young swimmers become individuals themselves,” he asserts. The painting, Schwartz continues, does not “necessarily reveal that Eakins . . . harbored homosexual longings he couldn’t otherwise express,” and, in any case, “the painter’s actual sexual orientation . . . isn’t the issue.” Of course it is, though Schwartz lacks the courage to say so. What else can one infer after reading that “many contemporary viewers . . . might conclude that the artist was more than passingly attracted to his own sex,” that “certainly, the only sexual heat that percolates from [Eakins’s] pictures is homoerotic,” and that “the sexual excitement, or longing, we sense in Swimming is but part of what makes the painting so central in Eakins’s work”? We? Not the royal or editorial “we,” to be sure, so Schwartz’s pronoun must fall into the category of what might be termed “the pretentious ‘we.'” He must know that all his readers do not sense “sexual excitement” or “longing” in the painting, yet he implies they do. I, for one, do not.

As for the genesis of Swimming, no photographs matching the poses and configuration of the figures in the painting have been found, but they must have existed. The retrospective did include two photographs of male nudes at the site depicted in the painting, including one in which Eakins is about to climb out of the water. Both are in the exhibition catalogue. Two others, one on the Princeton University website, the other on that of PBS, may be viewed online.

Tucker and Gutman report that “the figures [in the painting] exhibit incised marks and datums” (not discernible to the unaided eye), indicating the use of projected photographs–the one exception being the diver, who was painted by Eakins “from a small wax model,” according to testimony by Susan Eakins. A specially prepared image of the painting made by the exhibition curators indicates the locations of incised and pencil-drawn lines made by Eakins which had not been previously detected. In addition, incised lines in such details as the standing figure’s right hand, the reclining figure’s head, and Eakins’s head, were diagramed by the curators. Also exhibited was a “photomicrograph” of the paint surface of the standing figure’s head, showing the intersecting horizontal and vertical incisions. (It is not known if Eakins used only one photograph, selected from among many, or whether he combined images of individual figures from two or more photographs.)

Both Stevens and Schwartz know full well how Swimming was made. And they ought to know that in copying both the composition and the main details of a projected photograph, Eakins employed a mechanical procedure that belies the projection of such deep feelings as “longing,” “desire,” or “passion” on his part. In depicting himself swimming toward the others, for example, he merely reproduced what he happened to be doing at the moment someone else snapped the picture. Eakins, in effect, copied the figures as captured on film–not in the photorealist manner of pseudo artists such as Richard Estes, Chuck Close , or Gerhard Richter, or of David Hockney (another non-artist who paints from photographs, though not a photorealist), however, but as only a master painter who actually knows how to draw and paint from life can.

The photographs related to Swimming conveyed important information and were fascinating to study, though as I examined them I felt at times like a voyeur. Eakins never imagined that his method would one day be discovered by scholars, much less revealed in so public a manner. Indeed, as Tucker and Gutman point out, his desire to conceal signs of the projection process is apparent in the figure of Eakins himself. In examining the painting, they discovered that “one of the incised marks extending into the water to the left of his eyelashes was carefully touched out at a later stage when Eakins deemed it to be too visible.”

What might we have today if Eakins had painted a similar scene primarily from life studies, filtered through the imagination? A true work of art, for one thing–not to mention, a far better painting. Lewis finds this painting “curiously unsatisfying,” despite its “bold attempt to arrange and order a composition of heroic male nudes” (contrary to this view, however, there is no evidence that Eakins invented the composition of the painting, as I noted above). Lewis concludes, finally, that it looks like a “painted photograph,” mistakenly characterizing the diving figure in Swimming as “an exclusively photographic touch”–apparently unaware of Susan Eakins’s report that her husband had painted the figure “from a small wax model” he had made.

The Late Portraits

Portrait of Walt Whitman

Like the deeply introspective late quartets of Beethoven, or the late self-portraits of Rembrandt, the portraits Eakins produced late in life are intensely private works, and represent the artist at the peak of his creative powers. In portraying “‘mere thinking'” (the writer who thus characterized Eakins’s work used “mere” to mean “pure”), Eakins was painting the inner life of people he admired or held in affection–friends or family members, and musicians, scientists, physicians, and artists of his acquaintance, all individuals of high esteem or achievement who were given to reflection. (It is telling that when it came to their portraits, he preferred to work from life. As Tucker and Gutman observe, “with few exceptions he eschewed the aid of camera studies for all but commissions for posthumous likenesses.”)

Not all critics would agree with this account. Stevens, for instance, claims that there is a “rich melancholy” to be found in Eakins’s work, especially among the late portraits which, in his view, “almost always . . . conveyed a kind of Jamesian regret for the life unlived–a longing for the indefinably more.” He treads on dangerous ground here in attempting to ascribe to painted portraits a degree of emotional specificity applicable only to fiction, or drama. He certainly ought not project his own sensibilities onto the paintings as if he were reporting fact. In truth, it is highly unlikely that any of Eakins’s sitters would have been dissatisfied with their lives in the manner, or to the degree, Stevens suggests.

In Schwartz’s view, Eakins’s finest portraits “have an emotional depth that would make them stand out in any pantheon” of similar American works. That is high praise, indeed, but it seems disingenuous, given his further remark that . . . after you see a few of these sometimes enormous pictures it’s hard to keep them in mind as separate experiences. As works of art, they’re impersonal, even anonymous. That the many faces we see are serious or reflective, or that there’s no attempt at flattery or bravura painting, may be Eakins’s trademarks, but they hardly give these works the tension of a particular maker’s hand or mind or eye. What we encounter is a generic representation, little different from the approach hammered home in European academies for decades.

So Schwartz does not like Eakins’s late portraits. That much is clear, but it hardly excuses his further use of “the pretentious ‘we,'” as in “after you see . . . the many faces we see . . . what we encounter.” If it is difficult for Schwartz to keep these paintings in mind as unique experiences, if he feels nothing before them, he ought to speak just for himself, or for others of like mind. To do otherwise is irresponsible. These paintings, he claims, have “emotional depth.” They depict “serious or reflective” people. Yet he insists virtually in the same breath that the paintings are “impersonal, even anonymous,” and “generic.” Schwartz should make up his mind before committing his thoughts to paper. (Roberta Smith, too, dislikes Eakins’s work. In a review written in 1994, she was more direct (more honest) in her expression than Schwartz: “Even now,” she candidly observed, “it can be hard to warm to the exacting, tamped precision of Eakins’s realism, especially the muted moods and colors of his portraits. . . .” To Smith’s credit, there is the deeply personal implication, here, of for me.)

Early critics knew better. They recognized an elemental truth about Eakins’s portraits. As Simpson reports:

The singularity of Eakins’s art was often written about: one writer in 1881 noted the “positive individuality this artist has, how strongly marked his own style is, and how peculiarly his own methods of picture-making are”; another coined the term “Eakinsish” to describe an expression in which “mere thinking is portrayed without the aid of gesture or attitude.”
Contemporary writers, as well, have commented on the distinctive introspective nature of Eakins’s portraiture. Roger Kimball, in a Wall Street Journal review of the Eakins exhibition in London in 1993, characterized the late portraits as “searingly frank yet also gentle, respectful, affirmative.” He further observed: “Eakins painted very slowly and tended not to talk much while painting. This often lulled his sitters into a meditative repose, bereft of the rejuvenating sparkle that full attention brings.” Lewis similarly notes that Eakins “did not banter charmingly with his sitters in order to coax lively expressions from them, as Sargent did, preferring to work in silence and look for those truths that cannot be pried out by conversation.” In his review of the recent Eakins retrospective, Stephen May echoes these estimates:

Although his approach to creating art was intellectual and structured, Eakins’s personal feelings and passion come through in his deeply insightful likenesses. Whether depicting himself, his family, or people he hardly knew, he managed to penetrate to the core of the personality. “His gift,” scholar James Thomas Flexner wrote, “was to catch people at the moment when they lapsed into themselves.”
May notes “the extent to which [Eakins’s] personal observations and profound empathy for most sitters infused the final canvas,” adding that Eakins “painted not what he saw, but what he knew.”

In one of the catalogue essays, Darrel Sewell reports that after Eakins’s dismissal from the Pennsylvania Academy in 1886 (he had had the temerity to remove the loin cloth from a male model in a class that included female students) he began to concentrate almost exclusively on the making of portraits. More than ever, he painted “to please himself.” In another essay, Foster says that Eakins painted people whom he found “pictorially or intellectually inspiring” (both, I would think) and, not insignificantly, willing and patient enough to “endure” lengthy and frequent sittings.

Simpson quotes the common observation that “‘every figure [Eakins] painted was a portrait.'” In those he made in the 1890s, he dispensed with all narrative, historical, and action elements, “leaving the bald act of portrayal as the paintings’ principal–often sole–focus.” As Simpson further explains, the simple roster of titles Eakins gave to the five works he showed at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1891 . . . –his first association with that institution since his forced resignation in 1886–underlines the purposeful nature of his decision: Portrait of an Engineer, Portrait of an Artist, Portrait of a Lady, Portrait of a Poet, and Portrait of a Student. The reiteration of the word portrait coupled with a generic role–although the name of the lender most often made the identity of the sitter clear–emphasized the intent.
The known number of Eakins’s portraits is 247, including the only one he ever painted of himself, and they vary in scale from intimate to grand, his subjects either sitting or standing. Foster observes that the larger, full-length canvases, mostly of men in professions not open to women at the time, “denote merit or meaning.” Though Eakins invested these portraits with his customary attention to the unique qualities of the individual sitter, I found far more appealing those of smaller scale : of family and friends, of people especially dear to him. These intimate works often transcend their subjects, achieving universality in ways and to degrees quite unexpected.

Eakins’ Mother

If I Had to Choose . . .

“Of all the works on exhibition,” one often asks of a museum companion, “which are your favorites? And if you had to choose just one painting, which would it be?” For myself, the choice was not difficult, even during the first of several visits to the Eakins retrospective. Since I have tipped my hand more than once in this essay, a few of the paintings I am drawn to are already known. Here I will narrow my selection to the three I would name in answer to these questions.

Of all Eakins’s paintings of men, Portrait of Henry Ossawa Tanner (1897) strikes the deepest chord. Tanner, who had been a student of Eakins’s and was himself a gifted painter, is pictured seated, half-length, wearing a rich dark jacket and wire-rimmed glasses. Head held straight, he gazes downward to one side at nothing in particular, which only reinforces the depth of emotionally tinged thought suggested by the cast of his eyes, and especially by the concentrated set of his mouth. Tanner’s portrait has a remarkable gravitas about it, and I returned to it often, wanting to spend more time with this contemplative man whom I had truly grown to like. Eakins had portrayed, not a single moment in time, but an unambiguous abstraction of his subject’s psyche, distilled over many sittings. When reminded that Tanner had painted The Banjo Lesson, a tender depiction of an old man teaching a young boy that had long appealed to me, I was not surprised. The man in Eakins’s portrait would make such a work.

In some portraits, especially as the scale is greater, the individual is pictured with the accouterments of a particular profession, or in a setting reflecting social status, or posing in a manner revealing some personal trait or another. Of Eakins’s portraits of women, I am especially touched by two, in particular. One is Portrait of Amelia C. Van Buren (c. 1891).

Seated in a grand, ornately carved chair, Van Buren leans to one side, her head resting on her left hand, the arm itself resting on the velvet-cushioned arm of the chair. Like Tanner’s, her expression is the unfocused gaze of one who is looking at nothing in particular in the outside world, but instead reflecting inward. “Lost in thought” is how this uniquely human state is often described. Given the complexity of human thought (introspection, in particular), and the subtle capacity of the human countenance to reflect it, depicting the inner life over time is perhaps the most difficult task facing a painter or sculptor. In his handbook for artists, written at the height of the Florentine Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti observed that a painting “will move the soul of the beholder when each man painted there clearly shows the movements of his own soul.” I cannot say with any precision what “movements” were in Van Buren’s soul during her many sittings for Eakins, but I do sense some of my own in her.

The sitter, Van Buren, is an elusive, but fascinating figure. Born in 1856 she was recorded by 1880 as an “artist in color.” Her lifelong friendship with the Eakins family began when she took the artist’s life classes at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1884. Van Buren later became interested in photography, an enthusiasm she may have initially acquired from Eakins, who himself had used photographs extensively in his work. She turned from painting to work exclusively as a photographer.

In just one of Eakins’s portraits, that of his wife Susan, he excludes virtually everything extraneous, concentrating on her face alone–head frontward and tilted to one side, partly shrouded in darkness, as if a pin spot had caught her on a darkened stage, her hair and dark jacket and blouse only faintly defined. It is unique among his portraits, as far as I know. (Not surprisingly, at slightly over 20 x 16,” it may also be the smallest.) Of all of Eakins’s work, Portrait of Susan Macdowell Eakins (Mrs. Thomas Eakins) (c.1899) is, far and away, my favorite–the one that affects me most deeply. During my visits to the retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year, I returned to it often, and at times it took my breath away. Even in reproduction, or in memory, it still does.

Postscript
In 1912, just two years after the advent of abstract painting, Eakins created his last completed painting–a commissioned portrait of President Rutherford B. Hayes–assisted by Susan Eakins, as his eyesight was failing.

Paintings

William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River( 1876-77) Philadelphia Museum of Art

Eakins’s The Thinker: Portrait of Louis N. Kenton stands out among the artist’s portraits for its extreme simplicity. Kenton was the artist’s brother-in-law, and the details of his profession have been lost to history. In this composition, Kenton stands before a stark, light background in an empty room. The space is only barely suggested by the angle of the baseboard and the subject’s shadow on the floor. Kenton wears an ill-fitting black suit, the hazy contours of which contrast with delicately rendered details that include a flowered necktie, a watch chain, and creases of age in the sitter’s face. His casual pose is odd for a formal, full-length portrait.

In Eakins’s portrait, we see an image that is less about the exterior we can see than the interior we can’t. Kenton seems lost in thought. His head is bowed and his expression inscrutable. Eakins uses his isolation on the canvas to suggest an introspective character. The artist included The Thinker in many exhibitions during the years following its execution, suggesting that he was particularly proud of it. Critics, too, reviewed the painting favorably, perhaps because it read in many ways not so much as a portrait likeness, but as an allegory for the state of humanity on the brink of a modern age.

The Thinker (Portrait of Louis N.Kenton) (1900). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

LETICIA WILSON JORDAN (1888)

The Philadelphia Realist painter Thomas Eakins asked Letitia Wilson Jordan (1852–1931), the sister of one of his students, to pose for him after he saw her in this costume at a ball. Over the course of extended sittings, he recorded her appearance in the gauzy black gown, Japanese shawl, buff gloves, and red bow with an unsparing directness that distinguished Eakins’s art from the more flattering and fashionable portraiture of his contemporaries. The incongruity between Jordan’s elegant finery and her attitude of ennui suggests a self-conscious rejection of such fashionable conventions on Eakins’s part. (His sitters did not always appreciate his blunt realism, but the artist was sufficiently wealthy to avoid relying on commissions.) Eakins endowed this portrait with a powerful sense of immediacy through his skillful modeling of the sitter’s body and a dramatic play of light and dark that was inspired by the works of the seventeenth-century Spanish artist Diego Velázquez.

Whistling for Plover (1874)

The Philadelphia Realist painter Thomas Eakins executed exhibition watercolors during a brief period of his career. In this bird-hunting scene set in the marshes of southern New Jersey, he used dry, tightly controlled brushstrokes to model his central figure and more fluid washes for the landscape. While the subject matter and academic approach (including extensive preparatory studies) parallel his work in oil, the artist preferred watercolor for this sun-drenched picture because it allowed him to paint “in a much higher key with all the light possible.”
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source: bernardinailt

Naują visuomenės raidos tarpsnį pradėjusi mokslo ir technikos revoliucija paskutiniais XIX amžiaus dešimtmečiais įgauna pagreitį. Moksliniai tyrimai ir teorijos, atradimai ir išradimai ne tik plečia tyrimų ratą, bet formuoja naują ekonominę sanklodą – mašininę serijinę gamybą, kuri, savo ruožtu, gimdo pirmuosius masinės kultūros požymius. Vienas sraigtelių, padėjusių įsisukti naujai visuomenės sanklodai, buvo fotografija, atlikusi mokslo tyrimų katalizatoriaus, instrumento ir objekto funkcijas vienu metu.
Fotografijos reikšmę XIX a. pabaigos socialinėje aplinkoje charakterizuoja keli faktai. „Techninė“ fotografijos prigimtis puikiai tiko masinei gamybai ir masiniam vartotojui, t. y. buvo puikus pelno šaltinis, kuris, savo ruožtu, dar skatino ir chemijos pramonės augimą. Tobulėjant poligrafijai, atsiranda galimybė reprodukuoti nuotraukas spaudoje – dokumentiniai fotoreportažai vietoj anksčiau naudotų graviruotų kopijų keičia leidinių charakterį ir didina jų paklausą. Tačiau svarbiausia – iš „techninio žaisliuko“, sugebančio realistiškai fiksuoti aplinkos fragmentus, fotografija pati virsta mokslinių tyrimų ir eksperimentų instrumentu: 1858 m. Nadaras iš oro baliono padaro pirmąsias Paryžiaus aeronuotraukas, 1861 m. – pirmąsias nuotraukas po žeme (Paryžiaus katakombos) esant dirbtiniam apšvietimui, o aštuntame dešimtmetyje fotografija tampa rimtu instrumentu anatominėms judesio studijoms, kurias JAV atliko Eadweard‘as Muybridge‘as ir Thomas Eakins‘as; Prancūzijoje – Etienne Jules Marey; Vokietijoje – Ottomar‘as Anschütz‘as.

Nuo „judesio gaudyklių“ prie „carte de visite“

Klausimas, kaip technologiškai užfiksuoti nuolat kintančią ir dinamišką aplinką, iškyla kartu su fotografijos atsiradimu. Paradoksalu, tačiau ilga dagerotipų ekspozicijos trukmė – pusvalandį ir ilgiau trunkantis fotografavimo procesas – judėjimą vertė traktuoti veikiau kaip rimtą problemą (svarbiausia – nejudėti), nei nuoseklių studijų objektą. Todėl dagerotipiniai portretai, kuriuose žmogaus pakaušis ir rankos buvo „prirakinami“ specialiais laikikliais, idant nesujudėtų, asocijuojasi su „judesio gaudyklėmis“, akumuliuojančiomis pusvalandį tramdytą „fizinę energiją“. Dar keisčiau dagerotipuose atrodo urbanistiniai peizažai. Esant ilgai eksponavimo trukmei, bet kokie per tą pusvalandį kadre judėję objektai – žmonės, gyvūnai, diližanai ir pan. – paprasčiausiai nebūdavo užfiksuojami. Todėl net piko valandomis fotografuoti miesto fragmentai primena siurrealistinius, bedvasius, tarsi po atominės katastrofos užfiksuotus vaizdus.

„Tapytojo O. Daumier‘io 1856 m. karikatūroje lengvai šaipomasi iš dagerotipijos – scena primena sušaudymo sceną, kurioje prie judesio „laikiklių“ prikaustyti įsimylėjėliai desperatiškai susikabina rankomis.“

1851 m. G. Bernard‘o dagerotipe „Degantys malūnai“ užfiksuotos žmonių figūros reiškia, kad ugniagesiai su vandens čiurkšlėmis daugmaž apie pusvalandį stovėjo ramiai.
Kiek vėliau, devynioliktojo amžiaus septintame dešimtmetyje (šlapio kolodijaus proceso, sutrumpinusio vaizdo ekspozicijos trukmę šešis kartus, laikai), prancūzas André Adolphe Eugene Disdéri sukuria naują masinį fotografijos produktą – carte de visite. Naudodamas keturių objektyvų fotokamerą, leidžiančią vienoje plokštumoje užfiksuoti aštuonis kadrus, jis pradeda saloninių portretų erą. Jo komercinio išradimo esmė – skirtingomis pozomis užfiksuoto žmogaus portretai arba jo pamėgtos balerinos skirtingomis pozomis. Tai dar nėra vientiso judesio fazių fiksavimas, o veikiau vienos fotosesijos metu įamžintos skirtingos pozos. Tačiau tam tikra prasme juos galima laikyti Muybridge‘o judesio sekvencijų preliudija.
Lemtinga pažintis ir 25 tūkst. dolerių lažybos
Tobulėjant mechaniniams ir cheminiams fotografijos procesams (atsirandant vis jautresnėms fotomedžiagoms ir tobulesniems aparatams), t. y. mažėjant ekspozicijos trukmei, fotokadruose fiksuojami pirmieji judančių objektų „šešėliai“: permatomos, išsiliejančiais kontūrais figūros: arkliai su dviem galvomis; šešiaračiai vežimai, keturkojai žmonės ir pan. XIX a. septinto dešimtmečio pradžioje fototechnikos srityje jau buvo pakankamai daug nuveikta ir pasirengta kokybiškam judesio akimirkos fiksavimui: atsiranda „bioskopas“, kaip patobulinta 1851 m. išrasto stereoskopo versija; 1861 m. Dumont‘as Prancūzijoje užpatentuoja fotokamerą, galinčią fiksuoti judesio fazes; panašų prietaisą 1864 m. užpatentuoja ir Hauron‘as.

André Adolphe Eugene Disdéri carte-de-visite tipo princesės Gabrielės portretas. 1862 m. albumino atspaudas.

Apie 1860-uosius darytos Paryžiaus panteono nuotraukos fragmente galima įžvelgti arklio traukiamos karietos „vaiduoklį“, kuris labai primena šiuolaikinius „double print‘us“.
Tačiau Eadweardas Muybridge‘as pirmasis nuosekliai ir išsamiai ėmėsi vizualinių judesio studijų dėl lemtingo atsitiktinumo – pažinties su buvusiu Kalifornijos gubernatoriumi, verslininku ir žirgyno savininku Lelandu Stanford‘u. Įsitraukęs į tuo metu JAV ir Europoje aukštuomenės „arbatėlėse“ hipodromo entuziastų kurstomus debatus apie tai, ar būna akimirkų, kai galopu lekiantis arklys visiškai atplėšia kanopas nuo žemės, L. Stanford‘as pasišauna problemą ištirti „moksliškai“. Beje, egzistuoja dar viena šio mito versija, bylojanti, kad verslininko mokslinis entuziazmas buvo sustiprintas 25 tūkst. dolerių lažybų fondu. Kad ir kaip ten būtų, jis tikrai pasamdo Amerikoje jau spėjusį išgarsėti fotografą Muybridge‘ą, kad šis užfiksuotų dideliu greičiu lekiančio žirgo šuolių fazes. Akivaizdu, kad L. Stanford‘ui šis sandoris buvo itin naudingas, kadangi jis ne tik du dešimtmečius finansuoja Muybridge‘o techninius eksperimentus, bet ir globėjiškai apmoka jo asmenines kriminalinės bylos teismo išlaidas.

E. Muibrdydge‘o portretas.
Tikrasis vardas – Edward James Muggeridge (1830–1904). Jis gimė ir mirė Anglijoje, Kingstone, tačiau brandžiausi fotografo karjeros metai praėjo JAV. Jo vardo transformacijos vyko palaipsniui. Pirmą kartą pavardę jis pakeičia į Muygridge 1855 m. atvykęs į JAV kaip leidybos agentas ir knygų pardavėjas. Po smegenų traumos diližano avarijoje jis keleriems metams grįžta į Angliją ir 1866 m. vėl pasirodo valstijose nauja Muybrydge pavarde, su kuria ir pradeda fotografo karjerą San Franciske. 1870 m. perima Anglijos karaliaus Edvardo vardo senovinę transkripciją ir galiausiai tampa Eadweard‘u Muybridge‘u. Dirbdamas šlapio kolodijaus technika, jis išgarsėja Kalifornijos nacionalinio parko gamtovaizdžiais, architektūros fotografijomis, ypač Vakarų Amerikos bei Aliaskos vaizdais ir nuotraukomis, atspindinčiomis „laukinių vakarų“ užkariavimo romantiką.
Pirmieji E. Muybridge‘o eksperimentai
1872 m. Sakramente E. Muybridge‘as pradeda pirmąsias judesio studijas, kurioms „pozavo“ L. Stanford‘o favoritas žirgas Occident‘as. Nežiūrint prastos darbų kokybės (ryškumo, detalių stoka), jo mecenatas buvo patenkintas. Paaiškėjo, kad akimirką arklys tikrai skrieja oru, tik ne gracingai ištiesęs kojas, kaip buvo tapoma batalinėse, medžioklės ar kt. scenose, o parietęs jas po savimi. Finansavimas pratęsiamas ir 1878 m. įvyksta antrosios fotosesijos Palo Alto „premjera“, kurioje jau dalyvavo ir spaudos atstovai. Jai E. Muybridge‘as ruošėsi itin kruopščiai, didelį dėmesį skirdamas technologiniam pasirengimui. Išilgai „studijos“, kurią sudarė bėgimo takas, vienodu atstumu jis išdėliojo 12 stereoskopinių fotokamerų taip, kad kiekviena užfiksuotų jos matymo lauke atsidūrusį bėgantį arklį. Svarbiausiu E. Muybridge‘o sistemos elementu tapo specialus užraktas (savotiškas šiuolaikinio automatinio užrakto prototipas), kurį sukonstravo jo bičiulis, Pietų geležinkelio inžinierius John‘as D. Isaacs‘as. Prie kiekvienos kameros užrakto buvo pritvirtinta vos matoma plonytė vielutė, nutiesta skersai bėgimo tako. Bėgančiam arkliui truktelėjus vielutę, paleidžiamas užraktas ir vaizdas automatiškai užfiksuojamas esant 1/1000 s išlaikymui. Tokiu būdu gaunama 12 kadrų seka, nuosekliai fiksuojanti arklio judesių fazes. Pirmųjų eksperimentų rezultatai neišliko, tačiau apie juos galime spręsti iš 1978 m. „Scientific American“ leidinyje publikuotų grafikos reprodukcijų. Tobulindamas sistemą, E. Muybridge‘as pradeda naudoti 24 fotokameras su patobulinta užraktų sistema, leidžiančia sumažinti ekspozicijos trukmę iki 1/2000 sekundės dalies.

E. Muybridge‘o eksperimentai turėjo patvirtinti arba paneigti XIX a. dailininkų sukurtą virš žemės gracingai skriejančio arklio įvaizdį, kaip tai vaizduojama 1821 m. Géricault‘o paveiksle „Žirgų lenktynės Epsome“.

E. Muybridge‘o nuotraukos patvirtino, kad galopu lekiantis arklys visiškai atsiplėšia nuo žemės, tačiau jo kojos tuo momentu yra ne gracingai ištiestos, o suriestos po pilvu.

E. Muybrdidge‘o įranga judančiam arkliui fotografuoti.

Pirmosios E. Muybridge‘o nuotraukos grafinė reprodukcija (originali nuotrauka neišliko),
publikuota 1978 m. „Scientific American“ leidinyje.
1871 m. E. Muybridge‘as veda Florą Stone. Po trejų bendro gyvenimo metų paaiškėja, kad žmona jam neištikima, o vaiko, kurį jis laikė savo sūnumi, tėvas gali būti žmonos meilužis. 1874 m. jis nužudo savo konkurentą, įkalinamas metams, tačiau teisminio tyrimo metu paskelbiamas nepakaltinamu. Vienu pagrindiniu gynybos argumentų tapo 1855 m. avarijoje patirta galvos trauma, po kurios, jo draugų liudijimu, iš esmės pasikeitė Edvardo charakteris – iš ramaus ir santūraus žmogaus jis virto impulsyviu, priekabiu ir agresyviu.
Pripažinimas, nauji atradimai ir … rėmėjo “niekšybės”
E. Muybridge‘o atradimai patraukė visų visuomenės sluoksnių dėmesį (dailininkų, mokslininkų, anatomų, politikų ir pan.), juos publikavo ir viešai aptarinėjo spaudoje bei kuluaruose. 1981 m. Paryžiuje jis susitinka su mokslininku fiziologu Etienne Jules Marey, kuris taip pat domėjosi judesio fotografijomis ir pageidavo pasidalinti patirtimi. Šis susitikimas, kaip vėliau parodys laikas, buvo reikšmingas ne tik pačiam Marey, bet visai judesio fotografijos istorijai. 1882 m. E. Muybridge‘as toliau keliauja po Europą, skaito paskaitas Menų draugijoje, Karališkame institute ir Karališkoje akademijoje Londone, o jų metu demonstruoja ir reklamuoja savo naują išradimą „fotopraksimoskopą“ (photo-praximoscope), dar vadinamą „zoopraksiskopu“ (zoöpraxiscope). Tai buvo „judančių paveikslėlių“ įtaisas, kinematografo pirmtakas, kurio esmė, pasak jo dizainerio, „susintetintai demonstruoti analitiškai natūroje nufotografuotas judesio fazes“.
Kaip geras verslininkas, pasinaudojęs nuotraukų populiarumu ir perdėta savo, kaip mecenato, teise, 1881–1882 m. Stanford‘as išleidžia knygą „Akimirkos fotografijose įamžintas arklio judesys“ (The Horse in Motion as Shown by Instantaneous Photography), kurioje vietoj nuotraukų naudojami pagal E. Muybridge‘o fotografijas atlikti piešiniai ir graviūros. Dar daugiau – fotografo, kaip vaizdų autoriaus, teisės buvo visiškai sumenkintos ir jis negavo jokių autorinių teisių ar autorystės prioritetų. 1882 m. draugiška partnerystė dramatiškai baigiasi ir įsiutęs E. Maybridge‘as mėgina bylinėtis su L. Stanford‘u, tačiau teismui nesėkmingai pasibaigus pradeda ieškoti naujų rėmėjų.

E. Muybridge‘o „zoopraksiskopas“ – vienas iš nedaugelio pirmųjų mėginimų sukurti „judančius paveikslėlius“ arba kinematografo prototipą.
Faktiškai E. Muybridge‘as neišrado, o tik patobulino „phenakistoscope‘ą“ (zoetrope) ir „praxinoscope‘ą“, kuriuos 1867 m. sukūrė Sir John‘as Herschel‘is, ir jų esmę sudarė ant besisukančio cilindro ar plokštelės užfiksuoti paveikslėliai, kuriuos reikėjo žiūrėti pro priešinga kryptimi besisukantį arba stabilų monoklį. E. Muybridge‘as sukonstravo aparatą, kurio dėkle įdėtas skaidrus diskas (pagal jo perimetrą tolygiai išdėstyti paveiksliukai) sukamas specialia rankenėle ir stebimas pro priešinga kryptimi besisukantį monoklį. Tikruoju kinematografo išradėju reiktų laikyti E. J. Marey, 1873 m. vietoj disko pradėjusį naudoti nuo vienos ritės ant kitos persukamą juostelę.
Leidinyje – virš 20 tūkstančių pozų
Didelis E. Muybridge‘o gerbėjas, tapytojas, Akademinės mokyklos prie Pensilvanijos universiteto direktorius Thomas Eakins‘as išrūpina subsidiją Pensilvanijos universitete, kuriame 1883–1885 m. periodu jis fotografuoja „viską, kas juda“. 1887 m. pasirodo stambus leidinys pavadinimu „Gyvūnų judėjimas: elektrofotografiniai nuoseklių gyvūnų judesių fazių tyrimai“ („Animal Locomotion, an Electro-Photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movements“), kuriame publikuojami 1872–1885 m. atlikti darbai. Į jį buvo įdėta 781 nuotrauka. Šiose nuotraukose užfiksuota daugiau nei 20 000 žmogaus ir įvairiausių gyvūnų pozų. Kaina buvo nereali – 100 želatinos (9×12 ir 6×18 colių dydžio) atspaudų kainavo 100 dolerių, o tiems, kurie pageidavo 600 atspaudų, likusieji 181 buvo pridedami nemokamai. Dauguma, ypač vėlesnio periodo, sekvencijų padarytos naudojant 24 išilgai judėjimo linijos ir dar papildomai šonuose sustatytas kameras – taip, kad specialiais laikmačiais sinchronizuoti aparatai vienu metu fotografuotų objektą skirtingais rakursais. Kiekviena serija buvo kruopščiai aprašyta: išlaikymas (siekė net 1/6000 s dalies), ekspozicija, judėjimo tipas (pvz., „eina ir staigiai apsisuka, vienoje rankoje laikydamas krepšį, kitoje – vytelę“; „išlipa iš maudymosi kubilo, atsisėda, šluostosi kojas“ ir pan.). Be to, fone jis naudojo tinklelį, pagal kurį galima tiksliai apskaičiuoti atstumus ir matmenis. Vaizdai suskirstyti temomis ir potemėmis: paukščiai (kakadu, balandis, apuokas, gulbė ir kt.), gyvūnai, kurių daugelis fotografuoti Filadelfijos zoologijos sode (dramblys, žirafa, tigras, liūtas ir pan.), žmonės (vyrai, moterys, vaikai, net invalidai, pvz., ant kėdės lipantis berniukas amputuota koja). Iš esmės tai buvo nepaprastai kruopštus ir išsamus judesio fazių katalogas, skirtas mokslininkams ir ypač dailininkams tradicionalistams, siekiantiems realistiškai tiksliai pavaizduoti gyvūnų ir žmogaus pozas bei laikyseną. Tarp jo prenumeratorių buvo Millais, Whistler‘is, Ruskin‘as , Edison‘as, LEnbach‘as, Menzel‘is, Pui ded Chavanes‘as, Rodin‘as, Marey ir dešimtys kitų to meto garsenybių.

Pensilvanijos universitete E. Muybridge‘as pradeda naudoti kelias fotoaparatų grupes, leidžiančias vienu metu fiksuoti judesio fazes skirtingais rakursais.

Eakins‘o kritikos pliūpsniai ir naujoviška judesio vizija
Rekomendavęs E. Muybridge‘ą Pensilvanijos universitetui, Thomas Eakins‘as (1844–1916) turėjo savų sumetimų ir tikėjosi, kad fotografas susidomės jo eksperimentais bei taps tolesnių tyrimų partneriu. Dar 1879 metais rašytame laiške Eakins‘as kritikuoja kolegą už tai, kad jis suskaido, padalina judesį į atskirus segmentus ir primygtinai rekomenduoja pamėginti fiksuoti vaizdą ne atskirose plokštelėse, o vienoje. Tačiau Pensilvanijoje E. Muybridge‘as ir toliau dirba senu metodu, todėl 1885 m., ištobulinęs savo techniką, Eakins‘as užima jo dėstytojo vietą Universitete. Tuo pačiu jis užsitraukia didžiulę E. Muybridge‘o nemalonę ir pastarasis, leidinių dedikacijose dėkodamas visam Universiteto kolektyvui už „milžinišką pagalbą“, piktybiškai nutyli savo „geradario“ Eakins‘o pavardę.
Tapydamas Eakins‘as pats plačiai naudojosi fotografijos atradimais, tiesa, kartais keistai derindamas tradicinę ir modernią judesio ikonografiją: paveiksle „Rogers‘o karieta“ arklio kojos „įšaldytos“ pagal geriausius judesio studijos pavyzdžius, o ratų sukimasis pavaizduotas sąlygiškai, kaip „išplaukę“ apskritimai.

T. Eakins‘o metodas leido judesio fazes fiksuoti vienoje plokštelėje.
„Šuolio istorija“, 1884 m., sidabro želatinos atspaudas.

1878 m. paveiksle „Rogers‘o karieta“ T. Eakins‘as arklio kojas nutapo, remdamasis „įšaldyto“ judesio nuotraukomis, o ratai pavaizduoti „išplaukę“ tarsi „ilgo išlaikymo“ fotografijoje.
Per sekundę – 60 kadrų
Tuo pat metu Prancūzijos koledžo Paryžiuje profesorius fiziologas Etienne Jules Marey (1830–1904) kuria įvairiausius aparatus, leidžiančius fiksuoti skirtingos prigimties judesius – pradedant širdies dūžiais, vabzdžio ar paukščio skrydžiu ir baigiant žmogaus motorikos analize. Pirmoji musės trajektoriją vaizduojanti „oscilograma“ sukėlė furorą mokslo pasaulyje. Skirtingai nuo Muybridge‘o ir Eakins‘o, kuriuos įkvėpė menininkų debatai ir praktika, Marey vadovavosi grynai moksliniu tyrėjo interesu. Susipažinęs su Muybridge‘o technologija, jis sukuria „fotošautuvą“ su „apkaboje“ įtaisytu stiklo disku, dirbantį 12 kadrų per sekundę sparta. Tobulindamas savo aparatūrą, jis sukonstruoja juostos principu veikiančia kamerą su sidabro bromidu dengta popierine juostele. 1885 m. pradėjęs naudoti G. Eastman‘o želatinos pagrindu pagamintą fotojuostelę, jis sugebėjo per sekundę padaryti 60 9×9 cm dydžio kadrų. Tai buvo ne tik chronfotografija, sekundės dalies tikslumu fiksuojanti judesį, bet ir pats tikriausias kinas.
Siekdamas patobulinti savo eksperimentus, Marey netoli Bulonės miškų 1882 m. įsirengia fiziologinių tyrimų studiją, kurią iš dalies finansavo įvairios organizacijos, tarp jų ir Karo ministerija. Dviem žiedu einančiais takais judantį arklį arba žmogų fiksavo „mobili“ kamera (įtaisyta ant bėgių važinėjančiame namelyje-laboratorijoje). Tokiu būdu jis galėjo sutaupyti laiko ir energijos, reikalingos pernešti fotoaparatą iš vieno tyrimo lauko į kitą.
Daugiausia dėmesio Marey skyrė paukščių skrydžiui, siekdamas išsiaiškinti sparnų formos priklausomybę nuo oro srautų. Naudodamasis nuotraukomis, jis padaro muliažų seriją, atkuriančią skrendančio paukščio formas, o 1876 m. su savo mechanikos asistentu M. V. Tatin‘u sukuria dirbtinį paukštį. Marey domino ne sustabdyta akimirka, o judesio plastika, atskirų kūno dalių padėtis erdvėje ir viena kitos atžvilgiu. Šiuo požiūriu jo technika artimesnė Eakins‘o darbams – vienoje plokštumoje fiksuojamos visos judesio fazės, tik vaizdas labiau „išplautas“, mažiau išryškėja detalės. Tobulindamas dinamikos studijas, jis pradeda grafiškai schematizuoti judesį – tam tikrose juodai apsivilkusio ir juodame fone judančio žmogaus kūno vietose balta spalva nupiešia taškus ir linijas, kurios chronfotografijose primena elektros impulso oscilogramas.

Polemikos ir diskusijos, kurias XIX a. sukėlė Muybridge‘o, Eakis‘o ir Marey‘o eksperimentai, turėjo ne tik techninį, bet ir estetinį-moralinį diskursą. Vieni menininkai džiaugėsi galimybe atsikratyti beprasmių natūros studijų ir pagaliau ramiai atsidėti tapybinėms problemoms; kiti samprotavo apie menininkų teisę laisvai interpretuoti natūrą, vadovaujantis tik estetikos ir grožio kanonais. Tačiau meninė praktika parodė, kad vizualinį patyrimą, kurį naujai atskleidė fotografija, dailininkai išnaudojo prasmingai ir su išmone. Jau modernizmo prieangyje Dega nenatūralus balerinų judesių kampuotumas ateina iš Muybridge‘o „mauduolių“, Rodeno skulptūrų „nekordinuoti“ gestai – iš Marey chronfotografijų, futurizmo atstovų (M. Duchamp‘o; U. Boccioni),deklaruojamas dinamizmas tiesiogiai iliustruojamas Marey chronfotografijų schemomis. Tai tik keletas tipiškiausių pavyzdžių, įrodančių, kad šie fotografiniai eksperimentai, nežiūrint jų „natūralistinės“ ir techninės prigimties, neginčytinai padarė didžiulę įtaką tolesniam dailės, ypač modernizmo, formavimuisi.