Volume 43, Number 13 · August 8, 1996
The Ache in Eakins
By John Updike
Thomas Eakins:The Rowing Pictures 23-September 29, 1996; The Yale University Art Gallery, October 11, 1996-January 14, 1997; The Cleveland Museum of Art, February 15-May 15, 1997.
exhibition at the National Gallery, Washington, D. C., June, Catalog of the exhibition by Helen A. Cooper, with contributions by Martin A. Berger, by Christina Currie, by Amy B. Werbel
Yale University Press, 139 pp., $24.95
At times in his letters Thomas Eakins sounds as cranky and ingenuously Yankee as Ezra Pound. Writing to his father from Paris in 1868, the twenty-three-year-old art student proclaimed, 'The big artist does not sit down monkey like & copy a coal scuttle or an ugly old woman like some Dutch painters have done nor a dungpile, but he keeps a sharp eye on Nature & steals her tools. He learns what she does with light the big tool & then color then form and appropriates them to his own use.' Perhaps 'light the big tool & then color then form' is more like Hemingway. Eakins has the reformist impatience, in any case, of an American determined to make things new, to clear out the antique clutter. If he went to Greece to live, he goes on to his father,
Review, 3325 words
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