Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity 9780520943865

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: “This Current Confusion”: Thomas Eakins before Cultures
1 “Amongst Strangers”: Studies in Character Abroad
2 “What Kind of People Are There”: Local Color, Cosmopolitanism, and the Limits of Civic Realism
3 “To Learn Their Ways That I Might Paint Some”: Cowboys, Indians, and Evolutionary Aesthetics
Coda: “Distinctly American Art”: Thomas Eakins, National Genius
Notes
Selected Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index

Citation preview

A H M A N S O N • M U R P H Y F I N E

T H E

A H M A N S O N

A R T S

I M P R I N T

F O U N D A T I O N

has endowed this imprint to honor the memor y of F R A N K L I N

D.

M U R P H Y

who for half a century served arts and letters, beauty and learning, in equal measure by shaping with a brilliant devotion those institutions upon which they rely.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Art Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which is supported by a major gift from the Ahmanson Foundation.

Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity

Thomas Eakins

Alan C. Braddock

and the

Cultures of Modernity

Universit y of California Press | Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2009 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Braddock, Alan C., 1961– Thomas Eakins and the cultures of modernity / Alan C. Braddock. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-25520-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Eakins, Thomas, 1844–1916—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Art and society—United States—History—19th century. I. Title. nd237.e15b73 2009 759.13—dc22 2008043136 Manufactured in the United States of America 18 10

17 16 15 14 13 9 8 7 6 5 4

12 11 10 3 2 1

09

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper ).

This book is dedicated to Karen and to the memory of our beloved companions, Winslow and Lucy

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: “This Current Confusion”: Thomas Eakins before Cultures / 1 1

“Amongst Strangers”: Studies in Character Abroad

2

“What Kind of People Are There”: Local Color, Cosmopolitanism, and the Limits of Civic Realism

3

“To Learn Their Ways That I Might Paint Some”: Cowboys, Indians, and Evolutionary Aesthetics / Coda: “Distinctly American Art”: Thomas Eakins, National Genius Notes

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List of Illustrations /

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233

Selected Bibliography

Index

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Acknowledgments

In keeping with its subject matter to some extent, this book is the product of a rather complicated nonlinear process of development, with multiple points of origin, a few detours, and considerable revision along the way. I take ultimate responsibility for the result, but I also wish to thank a number of people for their inspiration, influence, and assistance. I am particularly grateful to Karen Sherry for sharing her valuable insights in our many conversations about Eakins over the years. Her active engagement and enduring patience provided a constant touchstone. The present book has changed a lot since my 2002 dissertation on Eakins, but I still thank Alexander Nemerov and Michael Leja for their generous support and helpful suggestions long after the conclusion of their official duties as my doctoral advisors. Technically Michael and Alex are my colleagues now, but they remain inspiring teachers. Since 2002, I have benefited greatly from scholarly exchanges and institutional support in a variety of contexts. At Syracuse University, my department chair Wayne Franits and the College of Arts & Sciences provided significant time and funding for research. In 2004, I spent six idyllic months in Santa Fe, New Mexico, thanks to a fellowship from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center. There I enjoyed fruitful discussions with Barbara Buhler Lynes, Bill Anthes, Mark White, Greg Forter, and Linda Kim. In 2006–7, during a fellowship at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, I had interesting conversations with Nancy Cott, Suzanne Cusick, David Lubin, Jennifer Roberts, Beth Levy, Susan Carruthers, Kim Phillips, Carol Oja, and Susan Zeiger. A few other people have helped with their expertise and insights at various moments in the process of research and writing, including Jim Bollman, Tracy Cooper, Ted Frisbie, Barry Harwood, Pat Hills, Bill Homer, Susannah Koerber, Elizabeth

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Milroy, Kevin Muller, Triloki Nath Pandey, Alex Pezzati, Ken Sherry, Roger Stein, Bill Truettner, Edward Wemytewa, and Juti Winchester. I also thank the scholars who took time to read and offer constructive criticism on my manuscript for University of California Press: Richard Handler, an anonymous reader, and especially Brad Evans, whose ideas and observations have had a truly transformative effect. Finally, I thank Stephanie Fay, Eric Schmidt, Sue Heinemann, and Charles Dibble at UC Press for their tireless efforts and support.

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introduction

“This Current Confusion” Thomas Eakins before Cultures

In an 1869 letter to his father, twenty-five-year-old Thomas Eakins described works in the Prado Museum and other sights in Madrid, one of the stops on a four-year sojourn in Europe: O what a satisfaction it gave me to see the good Spanish work so good so strong so reasonable so free from every affectation. It stands out like nature itself, & I am glad to see the Rubens things that is [sic] the best he ever painted & to have them alongside the Spanish work. I always hated his nasty vulgar work & now I have seen the best he ever did I can hate him too. His best picture he ever made stands by a Velasquez. His best quality that of light on flesh is knocked by Velasquez & that is Rubens only quality while it is but the beginning of Velasquez’s. . . . I went to church this morning to hear mass. The music on the organ is the queerest I ever heard. It is the quickest dance nigger jig kind of music then its echo in the distance. Then another jig & it comes so sudden each time or you cant get accustomed to it. The whole cathedral floors are covered with thick matting & there are no seats. The people all keep on their knees men & women & from time to time fall their face on the ground like a Hindoo sticking the backside up in the air and then back on the knees again. The ladies of Madrid are very pretty, about the same or a little better than the Parisians but not so fine as the American girls.1

Three decades later, in 1905, Eakins expressed his thanks for a gift of Japanese drawings in a letter to his friend Stewart Culin, an anthropologist: The Jap. drawings came to us this morning with your letter. They are exceedingly beautiful, and being original drawings they reveal the manner work [sic] which is as I have imagined it to be. The original studies are made by approximation much as I would work myself. Then the transparent paper is laid over the study and the artist being entirely sure of his drawing, he lays on his color with the greatest freedom. Mrs. Eakins can hardly thank you enough for the great pleasure we anticipate in studying the pictures.2

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In 1914, just two years before the artist’s death, Eakins “chatted” about American art to a newspaper interviewer: If America is to produce great painters and if young art students wish to assume a place in the history of the art of their country, their first desire should be to remain in America to peer deeper into the heart of American life, rather than spend their time abroad obtaining a superficial view of the art of the Old World. In the days when I studied abroad conditions were entirely different. The facilities for study in this country were meagre [sic]. There were even no life classes in our art schools and schools of painting. Naturally one had to seek instruction elsewhere, abroad. Today we need not do that. It would be far better for American art students and painters to study their own country and portray its life and types. To do that they must remain free from any foreign superficialities. Of course, it is well to go abroad to see the works of the old masters, but Americans must branch out into their own fields as they are doing it. They must strike out of themselves and only by doing this will we create a great and distinctly American art.3

Together, these three somewhat randomly chosen statements help to introduce the story of human difference, diffusion, and artistic nationalism at the center of the present book. As Eakins’s words suggest, he encountered and pondered the significance of unfamiliar traditions throughout his life, to some extent as a result of his own travels, but also via the global circulation of objects, customs, and people in modernity. Visual evidence of one such encounter appears in an 1878 watercolor by Eakins depicting African American minstrels at rehearsal, a work now known as The Dancing Lesson, to which he originally gave the generic racial title The Negroes (Plate 1). Art historians often have noted that this painting depicts another “culture” or the “cultural” behavior of its human subjects. According to Kathleen Foster, for example, it shows “the culture of an oppressed minority” with “a respectful sensitivity to ethnographic detail and a resistance to stereotype unusual at this period.” Frances K. Pohl has said that the picture emphasizes “the passing on of a broader cultural knowledge—dancing and playing the banjo—from one generation to the next and the pride and sense of hope and self-fulfillment attached to the acquisition and maintenance of this knowledge.” Similarly, Donelson Hoopes has asserted that the depicted figures “are all closely bound by strong cultural and personal ties” in “a mystical circle, a continuity of life which never ceases.” For Hugh Honour, “the banjo, so intimately associated with Afro-Americans, is an alternative rather than an inferior instrument for artistic expression to the piano of white bourgeois homes—with implications for the relationship between black and white cultures.” Such comments imply that Eakins consciously viewed African Americans as having a distinct “culture,” which he ostensibly represented in a truthful, pluralist,

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and even egalitarian manner. In that respect, The Dancing Lesson has functioned as a paradigmatic example of the artist’s realism.4 Yet Eakins’s own verbal observations suggest a more complicated perspective, alternately marked by positive curiosity and mild, or even strong, disdain toward people and customs that he deemed different. Whereas he praised Japanese drawings as “beautiful,” he evidently could take a dim view of “foreign superficialities” as well as “dance nigger jig kind of music.” Such music was the first thing that came to his mind as he attempted to convey feelings of disorientation and apparent discomfort prompted by the organ music of a Spanish Catholic Mass, to which he found it difficult to “get accustomed.” Significantly, none of the written statements by Eakins quoted above actually mentions “culture,” oppressed or otherwise, as a category of human difference. Nor do any other surviving texts or titles authored by him. Eakins classified human beings and their creative products mainly according to nation, race, gender, and religion, but not “culture” or “cultures.” With the latter observation in mind, the present book argues that the art of Eakins embodies a premodern understanding of cultural difference. As someone born and raised in antebellum Philadelphia, then academically trained as a painter in Paris shortly after the Civil War, he matured artistically and intellectually during the Gilded Age. By around 1914, when he spoke of a “distinctly American art,” his career essentially had ended. Two years later, Eakins was dead. Given those chronological boundaries, the artist probably never knew or comprehended the modern anthropological concept of “culture,” which began to emerge historically as a widely used descriptor of human group difference in American social science and philosophy only at the end of his life. This is the concept that informs the aforementioned art historical observations. The “culture concept”—as anthropologists and historians refer to it today—theorized group-based differences in human behavior as social constructs of language, custom, and tradition, developed and circulated through time and space. Accordingly, since the early twentieth century, “cultural” phenomena have come to be regarded as the product not of innate racial or ethnic traits but rather of historical circumstances of diffusion and exchange.5 Key figures in developing the modern culture concept were the New York-based German American anthropologist Franz Boas and his students at Columbia University, including Alfred Kroeber, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and others. The concept also appears in the critical and philosophical writings of John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, Horace Kallen, and Alain Locke during the second decade of the twentieth century. As a watershed in the concept’s public articulation, some historians cite Boas’s commencement address at Atlanta University

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in 1906 (given at the invitation of W. E. B. Du Bois), where the anthropologist exhorted his audience “to remember that there have been cultures different from ours and that the qualities that are today dominant and most highly esteemed . . . have not always had the same value.” According to Boas, “there is no anatomical evidence available that would sustain the view that the bulk of the Negro race could not become as useful citizens as the members of any other race.” Through the work of Boas, his students, and other early twentieth-century writers, the modern culture concept—now viewed in the plural sense—severed biology from social conventions. The concept gradually entered American popular consciousness by the 1930s and continues to play a central role in discussions of art and other human behaviors today.6 During Eakins’s lifetime, a rather different epistemological framework prevailed. As a way of beginning to understand that framework, we can consult an important essay published in the journal American Anthropologist by Boas’s student Alfred Kroeber in 1917, the year after Eakins died. In that essay, Kroeber defined culture in terms of “the superorganic” so as to underscore its social rather than biological essence. Distinguishing between “the organic and the cultural,” Kroeber observed the following: The implicit recognition of the difference between organic qualities and processes and social qualities and processes is of long standing. The formal distinction is however recent. In fact the full import of the significance of the antithesis may be said to be only dawning upon the world. For every occasion on which some human mind sharply separates organic and social forces, there are dozens of other times when the distinction between them is not thought of, or an actual confusion of the two ideas takes place. One reason for this current confusion of the organic and the social is the predominance, in the present phase of the history of thought, of the idea of evolution.7

Kroeber’s observation about “this current confusion of the organic and the social” owing to evolutionary thought tells us a great deal about the dominant understanding of culture during the time Eakins lived. Keep in mind that these are the words of a trained Boasian anthropologist, for whom such issues constituted a primary professional concern. For Eakins, an artist born in 1844, there may have been some “implicit recognition” of a distinction between the organic and the social, but this would have been largely unconscious or inchoate at best. As the present book reveals, in confronting the cultures of modernity—different group customs, such as “dance nigger jig kind of music” and “Jap. drawings”—Eakins and his art labored under the “current confusion” described by Kroeber. Let us consider the nature and aesthetic implications of that epistemological confusion in more detail.

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“A Little Barbarous Yet”: Art and Social Evolution Boasian cultural anthropology challenged an older, nineteenth-century social evolutionary paradigm that equated “culture” with “civilization.” Throughout Eakins’s career as an artist, those words generally signified a high degree of cultivation measured on a linear scale, with European (and Euroamerican) achievement at the top and the rest of the world below, supposedly mired in the inferior or “primitive” stages of “barbarism” and “savagery.” Eakins knew and used such rhetoric, for it was the lingua franca of his world. In a letter from Paris during the late 1860s, for example, he reflected upon certain pictures with Hellenic themes by his French master at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Jean-Léon Gérôme, by declaring, “the Greeks were very much like ourselves good plain civilized people.” On another occasion, Eakins recalled some criticism of his student drawings by Gérôme, who told him they were “a little barbarous yet.” According to Eakins, “If barbarous and savage hold the same relation to one another in French as they do in English, I have improved in his estimation.” Elsewhere, the young American painter recounted a hazing that he endured from older École students, who referred to him jokingly as a “Huron or an Algonquin” and a “savage.” A hint of wry irony in some of these comments indicates Eakins’s nontheoretical, or nonideological, embrace of social evolutionary discourse, but he was hardly immune to its basic premises. Viewing a demonstration of craftsmanship by Egyptian “Moors” at the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, he noted the limitations of their tools and techniques, describing them as “primitive” compared with the impressive achievements of “our weaving machine,” one of many modern industrial miracles on view at the fair.8 An important intellectual touchstone for social evolutionary thinking about culture at the time was the English writer Matthew Arnold, whose book Culture and Anarchy of 1869 famously defined “culture” as “the study and pursuit of perfection” leading toward “sweetness and light.” For Arnold, who was interested in both aesthetics and politics, people of “Indo-European stock” had “naturally” inherited and developed the great legacy of “Hellenism” from ancient Greece, thereby providing a progressive modern beacon of civilization toward which all people should aspire. Doing so would ensure social harmony and individual fulfillment for everyone, in Arnold’s view. His ideas were widely embraced by literate, economically privileged Europeans and Euroamericans during the late nineteenth century, including some of Eakins’s patrons. The artist never mentioned Arnold by name, nor did he programmatically follow the Englishman’s theories, but his approving reference to the “civilized” Greeks painted by Gérôme has a timely Arnoldian ring.9 In 1871, another English writer named Edward Burnett Tylor defined “culture”

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in terms that foreshadowed the social orientation of twentieth-century anthropology when he observed, “Culture or Civilization . . . is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Yet his conception remained, like that of Arnold, well within the linear, evolutionary framework of nineteenthcentury epistemology. As Tylor further explained, “Its [culture’s] various grades may be regarded as stages of development or evolution, each the outcome of previous history, and about to do its proper part in shaping the history of the future.” Moreover, Tylor’s description of culture as a “complex whole . . . acquired by man as a member of society” gained little traction among nineteenth-century contemporaries, who preferred to see his “various grades” and “stages of development or evolution” in racial terms.10 In the United States, Eakins encountered popular forms of social evolutionary thought in grammar school textbooks such as Mitchell’s Intermediate Geography, from which he copied maps and read comparative information about people and nations of the world. That particular textbook must have caught his special attention, for the publisher, “Thomas, Cowperthwait & Co.,” was a local firm run by a relative on his mother’s side of the family, from which his given name originated (Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins). In one of several relevant passages, Mitchell’s differentiated human races into “Stages of Society,” beginning with the “savage” or “lowest stage of existence,” comprising those who “derive their sustenance from hunting, fishing, and from wild fruits and roots” and who are “ignorant of reading and writing.” As the devoted son of a professional writingmaster, Eakins likely would have absorbed that commonplace lesson. Next to an illustration of “Savage Life.—Indians hunting the Buffalo,” the text noted, “The American Indians, many of the negro tribes of Africa, and all those of Australasia, are savages.” Near that passage, the reader encountered another illustration of “Barbarous Life.—Arab Encampment” along with the statement “The wandering tribes of Tartary, Arabia, and the Great African Desert, as well as many of the nations of interior Africa, are barbarous. . . . Savage and barbarous nations are almost always at war; they are much addicted to plunder and robbery.” By contrast, the textbook predictably identified “Caucasian” people as the world’s most progressive, echoing the cover illustration, which featured a white astronomer gazing at the heavens from a symbolically enlightened center, surrounded by stereotypical representatives of the world’s darker races (Fig. 1). The text of Mitchell’s also distinguished between European countries by comparing the “splendid,” “civilized” achievements of France and the United States with the economic decline of Spain, a nation noted mainly for its picturesque peasants, bullfighting, and Moorish history.11

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Figure 1. S. Augustus Mitchell,

Mitchell’s Intermediate Geography, cover (Philadelphia: Thomas, Cowperthwait & Co., 1849). The Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Mitchell’s was not the only textbook that offered the youthful Eakins such instructive social evolutionary comparisons. Another was Rembrandt Peale’s Graphics, his main drawing textbook at Central High School in Philadelphia. According to Peale, the progress of refinement is necessarily connected with the prosperity of a civilized country. Let a community rise but a little above the level of the mere Savage in a wigwam, or hut, constructed by his degraded wife; or that of the wandering Arab, sheltered by no habitation but his tent, with no better friend than his horse in his career of robbery;— let society advance but a little beyond these conditions, and the Fine Arts have their commencement. The permanent cottage becomes decorated with a portico of rustic columns, and its furniture of useful articles gradually assume elegance under the improving eye of taste.12

Peale’s stereotypical assessment of the “wandering Arab,” riding a horse and living by a “career of robbery,” thus reinforced information already provided to Eakins in his grammar school geography textbook. The Arab tent and the Native American wigwam together constituted an evolutionary foil to the permanence of “civilized” classicism, an architectural style that abounded in Eakins’s Philadelphia— notably at Girard College, located only a few blocks away from where he lived.13 Social evolutionary discourse enjoyed wide public currency in his world, thanks

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not only to textbooks but also museum exhibitions, world’s fairs, books, magazine articles, and popular lectures. As the historian Gail Bederman has observed, the United States during this period was gripped by a “popularized Darwinism” in which the idea of “civilization denoted a precise stage in human racial evolution.” Although many Americans failed to understand, or refused to embrace, the more disturbing elements of chance, violence, and discontinuity in Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, famously articulated in The Origin of Species (1859), the general principle of evolution as a process of social and historical change seemed inescapable and beneficial, at least to most people in the United States. One of many popular visualizations of that principle appeared on the cover of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Historical Register of the Centennial Exposition, published on the occasion of the 1876 world’s fair in Philadelphia, showing female personifications of America and Europe—white, erect, intellectually alert—surrounded by their benighted Asian, African, and Native American colleagues, who look in wonder at the Western paragons of progress (Fig. 2).14 Social evolutionary ideas about culture were also routinely articulated by American scientists during Eakins’s lifetime. For example, Lewis Henry Morgan’s 1877 book Ancient Society; or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization influenced many contemporary anthropologists, museum curators, and educators. According to Morgan, “It can now be asserted upon convincing evidence that savagery preceded barbarism in all the tribes of mankind, as barbarism is known to have preceded civilization.” Furthermore, he observed, “Inventions and discoveries stand in serial relations along the lines of human progress, and register its successive stages,” such that “when collated and compared they tend to show the unity of origin of mankind, the similarity of human wants in the same stage of development, and the uniformity of the operations of the human mind in similar conditions of society.” For Morgan, “unity of origin of mankind” and “uniformity of the operations of the human mind in similar conditions of society” meant something very different from actual equality when it came to comparing Europeans and non-Europeans, either in the present or in the foreseeable future. His widely read treatise demonstrated that comparative methods of cultural analysis could reveal different levels of attainment among the various human “tribes,” with those of European origin occupying a secure position at the pinnacle of evolution.15 Morgan’s ideas directly informed the official story of human evolution told by the United States government in exhibits sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and at the National Museum in Washington, D.C., throughout the late nineteenth century. Following Morgan’s lead, prominent

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Figure 2. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Historical Register of the Centennial Exposition, 1876, cover. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Smithsonian anthropologists such as Spencer Baird, John Wesley Powell, and Otis Mason institutionalized the view that human beings were a species marching toward perfection but divided into groups that proceeded at different rates of speed, with inevitable winners and losers, leaders and followers. Adapting natural scientific taxonomies of biological evolution to the study of human groups, customs, and technologies, these official Smithsonian anthropologists represented culture as a linear, teleological process of development culminating in the advanced civilization of white Europeans and their racial descendants in America.16 In one of countless examples of such scientific representation during the late nineteenth century, the United States National Museum exhibited a display case illustrating a “Synoptic History of Inventions,” featuring rows of model spindles, shuttles, and looms from around the world arranged in evolutionary arrays, ranging from “savage” to “primitive” to “civilized” (Fig. 3). At the far right of each row, a European or Euroamerican version of the invention-type in question occupied the culminating position of modern civilization, regardless of the date or geographical origins of the “preceding” specimens. Through such a display of ob-

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Figure 3. Unidentified photographer, Synoptic History of Inventions: Spindles, Shuttles, and Looms, display

case from U.S. National Museum, ca. 1890. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 95, Box 42, Folder 26, image #21389.

jects, the museum metonymically consigned other existing human groups to “earlier” phases in the linear scheme of development, even when their inventions were contemporaneous with those of Europeans or Euroamericans. Not unlike Eakins’s geography textbook and the Centennial image in Frank Leslie’s Register, the National Museum display conflated racial difference with evolutionary hierarchy. Johannes Fabian, a historian of anthropology, has summarized such comparative arrays as projecting “the naturalization of time,” wherein human groups and their objects were ranked in a narrative at once spatial, biological, and historical.17 Without broaching this larger context of social evolutionary discourse, art historians often have noted Eakins’s proclivity for drawing his own implicit comparisons between different groups and customs in an aesthetic context. Gerald Ackerman was the first to cite numerous instances in which the young Philadelphian depicted modern American subjects that were conceptually related to foreign prototypes pictured by his French master, Gérôme. Thanks to Ackerman’s observation, we now recognize that Eakins’s American rowers, boxers, chess players, and singing cowboys fictively displaced and domesticated Gérôme’s exotic Egyptian boatmen, Roman gladiators, Turkish chess players, and bouzouki-strumming

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singers. Such conceptual relationships indicate an ongoing professional desire on the part of Eakins to emulate aspects of his teacher’s work, thereby inviting comparisons with his own. The paintings in question also point to Eakins’s interest in comparing analogous aspects of different societies, in a nationalistic manner roughly consistent with Mitchell’s Intermediate or Secondary Geography and other period discourse on social evolution, in which comparative methods played a central role. Responding to Gérôme’s orientalist paintings of exotic Middle Eastern people—whom Europeans and Euroamericans tended to view as backward in evolutionary terms—Eakins highlighted the modernity of his American versions, tacitly presenting them as occupying a more advanced stage of development. Far from being a critique of Gérôme, such an artistic approach strategically complemented the French master’s orientalist project and its social evolutionary orientation by touting comparative exemplars of American civilization and progress.18 For instance, in the first of several rowing pictures of the 1870s, Eakins portrayed his middle-class lawyer friend, the champion racer Max Schmitt, gliding swiftly into the foreground in the latest-model scull (Plate 2). Accentuating the modernity of Schmitt’s boat, his freedom of movement, and his scientifically trained physique, Eakins set the scene on a picturesque stretch of the Schuylkill River, along the shore of the city’s new Fairmount Park, then under construction. A decade earlier, Gérôme had depicted rowing in a celebrated Salon painting titled The Prisoner (Fig. 4), situating the scene on the Nile River in ancient Egypt, a geographically and chronologically remote setting marked by cruelty and the absence of modern democracy or progress. The Prisoner was one of several works by the French master that Eakins owned in photographic reproduction, so we know that it remained a point of reference for the Philadelphia pupil even after his return to the United States. In his own rowing scene, Eakins portrayed Schmitt as a progressive counterpoint, not only to Gérôme’s Egyptians but also to a trio of Quaker rowers—quaint emblems of “old Philadelphia”—who appear in the background (Fig. 5), plodding laterally across the Schuylkill River in a clunky, antiquated boat. That is, Eakins made evolutionary comparisons between and within national groups.19 In other works, Eakins identified what he considered to be rough equivalents across social and geographic boundaries, effectively comparing people and actions that seemed to him to occupy the same status or level of achievement. Scholars have noted this tendency as well, but again, without pondering its comparative logic in relation to the dominant social discourse of the period. For example, H. Barbara Weinberg has described the figures in Eakins’s minstrel scene (see Plate 1) as “American counterparts of European peasants.” Regarding the same work, Kathleen Foster observes that “Eakins grasped Gérôme’s picturesque subject

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Figure 4. Jean-Léon Gérôme,

The Prisoner, 1861. Oil on wood, 45 × 78 cm (173⁄4 × 303⁄4 in.). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY. Photograph by Gérard Blot. Figure 5. Thomas Eakins, The

Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), 1871 (detail of Plate 2). Oil on canvas, 81.9 × 117.5 cm (321⁄4 × 461⁄4 in.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Alfred N. Punnett Endowment and George D. Pratt Gift, 1934 (34.92). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

categories and perceptively discovered American analogues,” suggesting that the younger artist “saw Philadelphia’s blacks as the pictorial equivalents of Spanish street musicians.” In making such observations, Weinberg and Foster have in mind not only the itinerant, working-class street performers depicted by Gérôme and other European painters during the 1860s but also the human subjects in one of Eakins’s own early works, showing a trio of Spanish street entertainers, whom he observed in Seville while traveling abroad (Plate 3).20 To the extent that The Dancing Lesson (Plate 1) thus displaced, or transposed, a European artistic peasant type to the United States, it effectively rendered the trio of black minstrels as America’s itinerant peasant-entertainers—“our” picturesquely exotic lower class. Eakins thereby helped construct African Americans as representatives of the nation’s folklore, a gesture at once celebratory and patronizing, while also self-consciously touting his own artistic currency. Rooted in eighteenthcentury comparative anthropological inquiries about national character, the study of folklore by the late 1870s was becoming both chic and scientific, a staple of local color fiction, literary magazines, scholarly journals, and professional societies. Much early folklore writing in postbellum America dwelled on Southern black plantation life, usually represented nostalgically as a relic of pre-industrial times.

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Far from being merely nostalgic or dryly antiquarian, however, such writing had tremendous literary and commercial appeal among middle-class Northern whites during the late 1870s, when the Centennial fostered a longing for bygone days of national unity as well as a growing fascination with human difference in a postbellum age of accelerating migration and immigration. Folklore thus belonged to a broader comparative search for taxonomic order, regional character, and national identity amid the increasing dislocations of modernity.21 One of the better-known and influential early folklore studies in America was Slave Songs of the United States, an anthology compiled in 1867 by Lucy McKim Garrison of Philadelphia. The commercial and scholarly appeal of such material grew rapidly north of the Mason-Dixon Line during Reconstruction. Before long, popular literary and scientific magazines routinely featured articles with titles like “Folk-Lore of the Southern Negroes” (1877) and “Plantation Folk-Lore” (1880). A published review of Eakins’s The Dancing Lesson (see Plate 1) in The Nation, written by the artist’s friend Earl Shinn, partook of the folklore vogue by praising the work’s depiction of “the comedy of plantation life” and associated “goblin humor.” Like Shinn, Eakins did not need to draw inspiration from any particular published source. Rather, his painting rode the same wave of historicism and folklore by recirculating racial difference as a timely, even chic, artistic subject—an aesthetic commodity of sorts. In its general iconography, The Dancing Lesson also looked forward to Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus tales, which would become landmarks of folkloric black dialect literature in the 1880s and 1890s. One of Eakins’s students at the Philadelphia Sketch Club (1874–76) and at the Pennsylvania Academy (1878–81), Arthur Burdett Frost, even served as the chief illustrator for Harris (Fig. 6). Although Frost’s popular illustrations often constructed a more exaggerated, stereotypical vision of black life than did Eakins’s fine art watercolors, each artist leveraged the current taste for folklore and racial exoticism in his own way.22 In addition to drawing an international analogy to European peasants, The Dancing Lesson rendered a social evolutionary comparison between American whites and blacks through the insertion of a small but important detail: an oval picturewithin-a-picture of Abraham Lincoln and his son Tad in the upper left corner (Fig. 7). The picture in question reproduced a famous and easily recognizable photograph from the Mathew Brady studio that had been published on the front page of Harper’s Weekly shortly after the president’s assassination in 1865 (Fig. 8). Lincoln’s pictorial presence high on the wall of Eakins’s painting obviously established a postemancipation historical context for the depicted action, signaling the freedom of the depicted characters, but it also set up an important comparative structure. In the Brady image, Tad learns with his father in a manner analogous

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Figure 6. Arthur Burdett Frost,

“Plantation Play-Song,” in Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1901), p. 191.

to, but also qualitatively different from, the paternal teaching scenario of the minstrels below, where a boy practices dance under the watchful eye of an elderly man, probably a grandfather. While one boy appears to read a book—the consummate emblem of “civilization” touted in the Harper’s subtitle and masthead—the other receives unwritten bodily instruction.23 The resulting high/low, literate/nonliterate matrix of the composition constructed an implicit social evolutionary narrative differentiating whites from blacks. Not unlike the Smithsonian spindle display, Eakins’s painting distinguished levels of human development according to race, not the twentieth-century concept of plural “cultures”—a fact underscored by its original racial title. The picture situated blacks in the foreground but also symbolically lower, in an “earlier,” folkloric stage beneath the modern, “civilized” realm of white book learning with which Eakins himself strongly identified as a writing-master’s son. Since Tad

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Figure 7. Thomas Eakins, The Dancing Lesson (originally The Negroes), 1878 (detail of Plate 1). Watercolor on paper, 46 × 57.4 cm (181⁄16 × 229⁄16 in.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1925 (25.97.1). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 8. Unidentified artist, “President Lincoln at Home—[Photographed by Brady],” Harper’s Weekly:

A Journal of Civilization, vol. 9, May 6, 1865. Haverford College Library, Haverford, PA: Special Collections.

Lincoln’s given name was Thomas, Eakins may have identified personally with him and with the depicted paternal relationship. At the same time, the painting clearly addresses something more than a psychological family romance. In light of the recent failure of Reconstruction with the notorious Republican Compromise of 1877 (a political deal removing federal troops from the South in exchange for Democratic electoral votes, guaranteeing the presidential victory of Rutherford B. Hayes), not to mention ongoing racial segregation in Philadelphia schools and other public institutions, The Dancing Lesson artistically modeled the broader social hierarchy of American race relations in a timely way.24 In doing so, Eakins’s painting differed significantly from a nearly contemporary image of black literacy and self-education by Winslow Homer titled Sunday Morning in Virginia (Fig. 9). Although Homer’s picture arguably reassured postbellum whites about the merits of emancipation by associating black education with Christian bible study, unthreatening youth, and lighter complexion, it also clearly asserted the capacity of African Americans to read. By contrast, The Dancing Lesson made a much more cautious and even ambiguous statement, for it depicted a traditional oral form of learning that evoked the “plantation,” as we know from the direct testimony of Shinn. The painting thereby equivocated on the issue of black education,

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Figure 9. Winslow Homer, Sunday Morning in Virginia, 1877. Oil on canvas, 45.7 × 61 cm (18 × 24 in.). Cincinnati Art Museum, John J. Emery Fund. Accession #: 1924.247.

for, unlike Homer’s picture, it did not decisively challenge entrenched perceptions of black intellectual development or racial competence. The Dancing Lesson’s vague educational parallel—not really an equation—celebrated vernacular art forms stereotypically associated with black Americans, but it did not envision the advancement of such people into traditional white spheres of achievement.25 It is worth noting in this context that in 1876, John Lewis, a Yale law graduate, became the first African American admitted to the Philadelphia Bar; that in 1878, Caroline Anderson became the third African American graduate of the Philadelphia Women’s Medical College; that in 1882, Nathan Mossell became the first African American graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School; and that in 1883, Christopher Perry, an African American journalist, founded the Philadelphia Tribune newspaper. In light of such professional accomplishments, the import of The Dancing Lesson seems ambiguous at best, in keeping with the “current confusion” noted by Kroeber. On the one hand, Eakins cast humble black American folk art in a positive light by eschewing the most grotesque racial stereotypes of his time, which often circulated in particularly garish forms through popular minstrel entertainment spectacles. On the other hand, his realism represented plantation-style music and dance categorically as the natural, empirically observed

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custom of “Negroes,” even after emancipation, at a time when some blacks were entering middle-class professions. Indeed, Eakins’s depiction here of a cyclical educational relationship, which the art historian Donelson Hoopes has compared to the conventional artistic motif of the Three Ages of Man, would seem to guarantee a preliterate, working-class social condition in perpetuity for these emblematic “Negroes.”26

“Mere Blots of Color”: The Aesthetics of Racial Sympathy Despite the painting’s ambiguous representation of black education and potential social advancement, art historians have tended to interpret The Dancing Lesson as a work illustrating Eakins’s racial “sympathy.” For example, Lloyd Goodrich, the influential dean of twentieth-century studies on the artist, said in 1982 that the painting constituted Eakins’s “most complete and sympathetic picture of Negro life.” More recently, Nicolai Cikovsky has observed that it presents a “sympathetic image” of the paternal relationship between the old man and the dancing boy. Not unlike the scholarly references to “culture” quoted earlier, comments like these gained modern currency in the Eakins literature after the civil rights movement of the 1960s. They have helped to reaffirm the artist’s canonical reputation in narratives of American art, despite never being subjected to historical scrutiny. What did racial “sympathy” mean in Eakins’s lifetime? By reconsidering The Dancing Lesson in light of pertinent nineteenth-century constructions of that term, we gain a better understanding of the premodern framework through which the artist imagined human difference. Not unlike Lewis Henry Morgan’s anthropological notions of “unity” and “uniformity,” period visions of “sympathy” in art and literature easily accommodated social evolutionary ranking, albeit implicitly and loosely, in a nondogmatic way appropriate to aesthetic creativity.27 Pertinent evidence of this can be found in Earl Shinn’s 1878 review of The Dancing Lesson in The Nation, written after the author had seen the painting on display at the Eleventh Exhibition of the Water-Color Society in New York. Shinn’s review deserves to be quoted at length: How much better it is to leave a part of a painting in a sketchy state of definition rather than to insist upon an item of drawing already plainly suggested, and so make your color dead by overlaying it, is well expressed . . . clearly in the larger picture, “Negroes,” where, indeed, the sketchiness seems to have been in some sort a necessity; the painting somehow suggests that the artist might not have been able to carry a labor of such a size much further in finish without stirring up mud. As it is, there is not the slightest con-

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cession to the eye of the conventional spectator demanding evenness of manipulation. Foreground parts are left in riotous disorder, and parts on the second plane, at which the painter desires to direct the attention, are worked up with sympathy and patience. The theory of method seems to be that, if a broad, careless stroke has been lucky in defining the form and motion and in imprisoning the color, it is a better thing to leave it, whether consistent in style with the whole picture or not. These telling strokes and sweeps, these foreground forms felt as mere blots of color, these nearer members without outline while farther features are modelled and hardened with all precision, give the system of painting a perspectiveless look when seen close, and a look of pure atmospheric harmony when seen from the proper distance. The comedy of plantation life is felt by the painter of this picture with a quiet intensity that makes every onlooker sympathetic. The precocious solemnity of the child who is learning to dance, and whose bare legs have absorbed all the liveliness away from his face; the weight of warning in the countenance of his grandfather, who “pats” for him with the foot, and is ready to pounce on an error; and the serpentine insinuation of the banjo-player, who writhes and twists involuntarily to help on the motion, make up a group of goblin humor so true and intense as to notch a pretty high mark in the degrees of comedy.28

As a fellow Philadelphian and former classmate of Eakins at the École des BeauxArts in Paris during the late 1860s, Shinn had known the artist for more than a decade and was a regular critical champion. Eakins left us no description of the work or its meaning, so the words of his critic friend deserve close scrutiny, because they very likely reflect familiarity with the artist’s own thinking or “theory of method,” as Shinn called it.29 Notably, Shinn perceived a fictive relationship between Eakins and the depicted “Negroes,” whom the critic included among the various formal “parts on the second plane, at which the painter desires to direct the attention.” These, said Shinn, Eakins “worked up with sympathy and patience,” as if the painter’s diligent artistic “labor” were comparable to the work of vernacular music and dance pictured here. Indeed, Shinn observed that the scene was “felt by the painter . . . with a quiet intensity.” That same intensity—a mood of seriousness evident in the dancing boy’s “precocious solemnity”—created an overall sense of pictorial absorption, which in turn produced a “sympathetic” sense in “every onlooker” as well. At first glance, such comments would seem to provide a firm historical foundation for those made by recent scholars regarding Eakins’s “sensitivity” and “sympathetic” approach to depicting the “culture of an oppressed minority.” They also appear to resonate with broader nineteenth-century discourse on racial sympathy, famously exemplified by the sentimental literary classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s internationally renowned antebellum abolitionist novel about the dignity, suffering, and death of the elderly,

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eponymous Southern plantation enslaved man. As Stowe announced in her preface to the novel, “The object of these sketches is to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race, as they exist among us.” And, as she exhorted the reader in the final chapter, “An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race. See, then, to your sympathies in this matter! Are they in harmony with the sympathies of Christ? or are they swayed and perverted by the sophistries of worldly policy?”30 A close reading of Shinn’s review, however, reveals that sympathy for him and for Eakins was mainly an aesthetic concern involving the painterly rendering of form for pictorial effect, not a sentimental topic of moral consciousness-raising. As a secular artist with scientific inclinations, Eakins generally avoided conventional religious themes and emotional forms of expression, especially during the confident first decade of his professional career. According to art historian Martin Berger, Eakins’s “paintings from the 1870s downplay ties to sentimental culture.” Nor can we really say from Shinn’s assessment that Eakins approached anything like a modern, twentieth-century anthropological awareness of “culture”—a word conspicuously absent from the critic’s review. So much seems obvious from Shinn’s nostalgic evocation of slavery through references to the “comedy of plantation life” and “goblin humor.” Such remarks indicate a picturesque aesthetic sensibility, characterized by a certain emotional detachment from the subjects in question, rather than Stowe’s moral-sentimental exhortation or the sort of progressive, interracial sympathy wished for by Goodrich and other scholars in the post– civil rights era. Likewise, Shinn’s formal terminology of “parts on the second plane”—academic technical jargon that he likely learned alongside Eakins in Paris—further confirms the status of the depicted “Negroes” as aesthetic objects. As Shinn said, the artist’s “broad, careless stroke” succeeded in “imprisoning the color,” a discomforting choice of words in light of the “plantation” subject matter recalling bondage, despite other statements by the critic about “their nearer members without outline” in “strokes and sweeps” suggesting a countervailing sense of formal freedom.31 In any case, Shinn associated such freedom at least as much with the artist himself as with his human subjects, regardless of the two-dimensional presence of Lincoln and his son Tad in the upper left, looking down upon the scene (an element not mentioned in the review). Even with that postemancipation reference, for Shinn the scene still recalled the old days of slavery, consistent with the broader period discourses of Centennial-era nostalgia and white nationalist reconciliation between North and South. An ambiguous temporal structure of racial nostalgia mixed with postbellum freedom perhaps explains why The Dancing Lesson became

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one of the artist’s most successful and well-traveled works in the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, circulating to exhibitions in Louisville, St. Louis, New Orleans, and Atlanta, as well as in New York, Boston, Chicago, and Paris during the late 1870s and 1880s. Such was the artistic payoff of Kroeber’s “current confusion.” In its thematic ambiguity and racialized musical iconography, Eakins’s picture indirectly recalled Eastman Johnson’s widely circulated antebellum work Old Kentucky Home—Life in the South (Negro Life at the South) (Fig. 10), which Frances K. Pohl has described as “an instant success,” both in the North and the South, in large part because it was “noncommittal on the issue of slavery.”32 Aesthetic concerns apparently dictated a similarly noncommittal, or at least vague, approach by Eakins during the post-Reconstruction era. The artist may have “felt” the “comedy of plantation life” with “quiet intensity,” but he also “felt” its “foreground forms” “as mere blots of color,” according to Shinn. In other words, even if the picture produced a fictive sympathy between beholder and subject, this was primarily an aesthetic effect to be consumed by a privileged class of people, regardless of locale. That the work displayed vernacular folk music and dance for the refined (white, cultivated) “spectator” of fine art is clearly evident from the observation of another contemporary reviewer, who noted that it attracted crowds of “fair women, in elegant toilets.” Despite what some art historians have said about the work depicting a private scene of authentic black culture, secluded from the glare of theatrical performance and white exploitation, The Dancing Lesson actually toured the nation, offering an aesthetic performance of sorts for white audiences in art galleries from New York to New Orleans.33 The critic’s class-conscious comment about “fair women, in elegant toilets” alerts us to an interesting, if unexpected, historical similarity between The Dancing Lesson and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, namely their mutual address to the white bourgeoisie, a group not only “cultured” in the Arnoldian aesthetic sense but also proud of the economic freedoms and social relations afforded them by laissez-faire capitalism. Recent literary scholarship on Stowe’s novel helps illuminate a rather strategic, unsentimental class dimension in both artists’ deployment of sympathy. According to Amy Schrager Lang, for example, Stowe’s compassionate representation of aspiring, industrious, and morally upstanding black families essentially mirrored the self-image of nineteenth-century, middle-class, urban American whites who cherished notions of economic mobility, filial piety, and domesticity. As Lang observes, “the logic of Uncle Tom’s Cabin directs us to see the lives of the slaves as versions of our own. The slave quarters, for example, are as much the outgrowth of a particular system of economic exploitation as the tenements of the mill workers [in other contemporary fiction], but Tom’s cabin is nonetheless presented to us not as a hovel but as a veritable bastion of domesticity.”34

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Figure 10. Eastman Johnson, Old Kentucky Home—Life in the South (Negro Life at the South), 1859. Oil

on canvas, 91.4 × 114.9 cm (36 × 451⁄4 in.). Robert L. Stuart Collection, New-York Historical Society, on permanent loan from the New York Public Library, accession #S-225.

Such a domestic representation, Lang says, affirmed the broad rhetoric of emancipation by showing blacks to be responsible future citizens ready to evolve socially and economically. But it also displaced uncomfortable realities of class difference and immobility that potentially called into question America’s mercantile system and the economic privileges it bestowed upon the Northern bourgeoisie. In other words, by depicting “lowly” blacks as orderly, ambitious American citizens, Stowe—and arguably Eakins—literally hit home with white middle-class audiences. For such audiences, racial sympathy was affordable to some extent because it reinforced their belief that capitalism could work for anyone in the United States. Of course, blacks were perceived to have a lot of evolving to do before they would pose a serious challenge to white economic or social hegemony. Thus racial sympathy in art and literature palliated real problems of class stratification by benignly reassuring privileged consumers, whether Stowe’s readers or the “fair women in elegant toilets” viewing Eakins’s The Dancing Lesson at an art gallery. As a young man, Eakins maintained a strong, middle-class American faith in upward mobility, as well as a negative view of aristocracy. In letters to family members, written while he was studying abroad during the late 1860s, Eakins repeat-

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edly expressed his professional aspiration to make a “respectable” living back home as an artist, while disparaging rich “snobs.” In light of Lang’s discussion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a work projecting black versions of white domesticity, it is worth noting that Eakins used a studio in his family’s spacious, middle-class Victorian townhouse on Mount Vernon Street in Philadelphia as the backdrop for The Dancing Lesson. The depicted bench and mule-eared chairs even reappear in other works by the artist. Eakins’s approach to group difference was not “cultural” or “sympathetic” in a modern sense, but rather aesthetically astute and professionally strategic. Such motives had a great deal to do with Eakins’s middle-class aspirations as an artist. Like most white males pursuing that profession in the nineteenth century, he saw himself as occupying a different—and frankly superior—position to that of people belonging to other, especially nonwhite, groups in the existing social hierarchy.35 Of course, this story is not without significant complexity, partly owing to the fact that Eakins failed to secure the high professional status to which he believed he was entitled. In 1886, he notoriously fell from grace amid public scandal when he was forced to resign from his teaching post at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. As Eakins scholars know well, that debacle occurred after he exposed the genitalia of a male model before female students in a coeducational lifedrawing class. Those events, along with assorted other brushes with authority and social convention, have tended to present a picture of Eakins as a rebel against Victorian society tout court.36 Eakins’s outré social behavior is also well known. As early as the 1860s, during his studies in Paris, the young artist dressed in a rather plain manner, suggesting an attitude inconsistent with more refined, aristocratic versions of Arnoldian “culture” and “civilization.” In a contemporary article on Paris and the École for The Nation, his friend Shinn referred obliquely to Eakins as “Tom East,” a young man who supposedly pleased “the Latin Quarter” by dressing “like a fireman” and by praising the habits of “our friends of Bohemia.” Later examples in this vein include Eakins’s propensity for answering the door of his Philadelphia home wearing only underwear or secretly allowing himself to be photographed nude with female students. Such careless personal behavior prompted contemporaries to note with discomfort his “bohemian” looks and attitudes. After visiting Eakins at home in 1881, Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, an aristocratic art critic, observed, “His home & surroundings & family were decidedly of the lower middle class” (emphasis in the original). She described the artist himself as “a clever but most eccentric looking mechanic,” “not only not a gentleman in the popular acceptance of a ‘swell,’ but not even a man of tolerably good appearance or breeding.” Indeed, she thought him “very untidy” and his studio “a garret room.” Later, in 1890, the artist’s brother-

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in-law, William Crowell, angrily criticized Eakins for exposing the Crowell children to “Bohemianism.”37 For many scholars, all of this demonstrates quite clearly that Eakins pursued a decidedly different path from the more stylish, affected bohemianism associated with William Merritt Chase and other paragons of artistic gentility. According to Lloyd Goodrich, for example, Eakins once compared his own Chestnut Street studio with that of Chase by saying “Chase’s studio is an atelier: this is a workshop.” And yet, Chase sat for a portrait by Eakins, which the latter inscribed “To My Friend” (ca. 1899, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.). The two men also liked to shoot pistols together, among other activities. Let us recall, too, that Eakins had praised Gérôme’s Greeks as both “civilized” and “plain,” suggesting an Attic or Periclean (as opposed to Hellenistic or Alexandrian) attitude toward classicism, a European aesthetic tradition that the American artist explicitly engaged later in his career. In any case, such evidence, together with the aforementioned comparative comments and pictorial structures concocted by Eakins, points to a more complex story than the one presented in existing scholarly narratives, wherein he serves as a kind of deus ex machina, immune to the dominant nineteenth-century American discourses on human difference. Eakins certainly was an idiosyncratic personality—more petit bourgeois than bourgeois proper, as suggested by Van Rensselaer’s pointed comment about his “lower middle class” standing—but he was hardly a proletarian or progressive radical (of the abolitionist or socialist stripe), rejecting all Victorian codes and hierarchies.38 Accordingly, an ambiguous mix of sympathy and detachment informs a letter that Eakins wrote in 1897, turning down an invitation to address an unidentified club of “working people” about the Pennsylvania Academy’s Annual Exhibition, which included work influenced by newer modern styles: With regard to the matter of your letter of the 2d., I do not see my way very clear to comply. The artist’s appeal is a most direct one to the public through his art, and there is probably too much talk already. The working people, from their close contact with physical things, are apt to be more acute critics of the structural qualities of pictures than the dilettanti themselves and might justly resent patronage. In my own case I have not yet found time to examine the Academy Exhibit, and would be puzzled indeed to tell anybody why most of the pictures were painted. I have, however, the greatest sympathy with the kindly and generous spirit which prompts the action of your Club.39

Despite his expression of “greatest sympathy,” Eakins’s wording here actually implies that he belonged to the “dilettanti” (his vague grammar on this point is interesting in itself ) and therefore had to decline. After all, the “patronage” in ques-

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tion concerned his own, for he was the invited speaker. The invitation may suggest that Eakins had a positive reputation among some workers, perhaps owing to his contacts with boxers and immigrants at the time, but his letter confirms that he did not consider himself one of them.40 We should also remember that in the now well-known letter of 1894 to the director of the Pennsylvania Academy, Harrison Morris, in which Eakins bemoaned his “misunderstanding, persecution, and neglect,” the artist went on to complain that his predicament was “enhanced because unsought.” The latter comment may disclose a measure of denial or delusion on his part, but it does not amount to épater le bourgeois! or an expression of solidarity with “the culture of an oppressed minority.” Rather, it points to a grudging desire on Eakins’s part to seek approval from his more proper bourgeois superiors, even a general commitment to middle-class standards of professional identity and its attendant social assumptions, all of which were inculcated in him at an early age. The mere fact that he continued to paint portraits and attempted to sell or at least exhibit them throughout his life testifies to such a commitment. For these and a host of additional reasons articulated in the chapters that follow, the idea that Eakins radically broke with prevailing bourgeois perceptions about human difference—even those pertaining to social evolution—looks farfetched. All the more so, in fact, when we recall the artist’s relatively conservative views on issues such as women’s equality and modernist art, both of which he rejected.41

“Race, Milieu, et Moment” Far from espousing a twentieth-century anthropological perspective on culture or progressive interracial sympathy, Eakins more closely approximated the naturalist perspective of Hippolyte Taine, his eminent professor of aesthetics and art history at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Taine was one of the most influential historians and art theorists of the nineteenth century on either side of the Atlantic. During the 1860s, he famously articulated the importance of “race,” “milieu,” and “moment” as constitutive factors of artistic creativity and evolution. As those words suggest, Taine viewed the work of art as encoding a combination of organic, social, and historical forces, which he associated with the immediate context of its creation as well as the racial “blood” and national “character” of its creator. Although notions of national character would remain important for cultural anthropologists well into the twentieth century, Taine’s recourse to “blood” as an organic determinant of culture would not. In keeping with evolutionary discourse of the period, Taine explicitly adapted Darwinian natural scientific ideas to the his-

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torical understanding of art. Referring in one of his École lectures to “natural selection” (his emphasis) as “the great law by which we now explain the origin and structure of diverse existing organisms,” Taine described this as “a law as applicable to moral as to physical conditions, to history as botany and zoology, to genius and to character, as well as to plant and to animal.”42 Although Eakins’s surviving letters do not mention Taine explicitly, art historians generally agree that he absorbed the professor’s ideas. According to Elizabeth Milroy, for example, Eakins “would certainly have been sympathetic to Taine’s scientific approach to the study and analysis of art and creativity.” Similarly, William Innes Homer has observed that “in a manner fully in accord with Taine’s ideas, Eakins committed himself to representing nature.” Moreover, the artist’s friend Earl Shinn held Taine in high esteem. In a letter to his sister from Paris in 1866 shortly after he and Eakins gained admission to the École, Shinn wrote, “Among the privileges of my ticket is a magnificent course . . . of lectures on art subjects, including . . . Critical Aesthetics by Taine, the great art-critic; how I shall revel in the latter!” As Milroy observes, Shinn “doubtless would have discussed these with Eakins.”43 Scholars have yet to ponder the relevance of Taine for Eakins’s artistic construction of human difference, even though the professor had much to say on that subject within the context of aesthetics and history. For example, in a lecture titled “On the Ideal in Art” delivered at the École while Eakins was studying there in 1867, Taine observed the following: If you consider in turn the leading races from their first appearance up to the present time you will always find in them a class of instincts and of aptitudes over which revolutions, decadences, civilization have passed without having affected them. These aptitudes and these instincts are in the blood and are transmitted with it; in order to change them a change of blood is necessary, that is to say an invasion, a permanent conquest, and consequently, comminglings of race, or at least, a change of the physical milieu, that is to say an emigration and the slow effect of a new climate, in short, a transformation of temperament and of the physical structure. When, in the same country, the blood remains nearly unmixed, the same character of spirit and of mind which shows itself in the former grandfathers is again found in the latest grandchildren.44

According to Taine, races were distinguished from one another by certain engrained “instincts” and “aptitudes” that remained intact over centuries because they existed “in the blood and are transmitted with it.” Taine conceded that changes in the physical “milieu” could produce “a transformation of the temperament,” but such an effect was “slow” to occur—so slow, in fact, as to be impervious to “revolutions,” “decadences,” and even “civilization.” Such thinking vividly illustrates

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the premodern, social evolutionary “confusion” identified by Kroeber regarding the foundations of cultural behavior. Taine’s words help us to see a work by Eakins such as The Dancing Lesson freshly through nineteenth-century eyes, rather than anachronistically as a depiction of “the culture of an oppressed minority.” The professor’s interest in racial transmission of “aptitudes” and “instincts” from “grandfathers” to “grandchildren” even finds an echo in the visual scenario of Eakins’s minstrel rehearsal, where a young dancer practices under the watchful eye of an older man, whom Shinn identified as “the grandfather” in his Nation review of the work. Eakins did not necessarily create the watercolor as a programmatic illustration of Taine’s theory, but he very likely shared his professor’s perspective on the “blood” continuity of racial traditions over long periods. Regardless of the reference to Lincoln and emancipation, Eakins’s painting hearkened back at least to the “plantation” days of slavery, according to Shinn, if not all the way to Africa—the putative racial origin of Taine’s unchanging “character of spirit and of mind” in this case. The artist did not literally represent the blood of such transmission, but his original emblematic racial title for the work effectively communicated that organic perspective. Eakins even perceived his own identity in such terms, after all. In a brief biographical statement of 1893, provided in response to a publisher’s questionnaire, he noted casually that “On my mother’s side, my blood is English and Hollandish.”45

Circulating Culture If Eakins lacked access to the modern culture concept, evidence of cultural difference—as we understand it today—abounded in his world and circulated widely through a host of ill-fitting names, ideas, and images. This was certainly true of Second Empire Paris, where he studied for more than three years between 1866 and 1870. Described as the “capital of the nineteenth century” by the modern German critic Walter Benjamin, Paris in the era of Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann greeted Eakins with tremendous human variety at multiple sites: in the city streets, at the Exposition Universelle of 1867, at circuses, in the atelier of his French orientalist master, Gérôme, and elsewhere. So did Spain and especially the southern city of Seville, where Eakins spent six months toward the end of his European sojourn. There, in Andalusia, the young artist encountered not only the native region of Diego Velázquez but also its historic Moorish architecture, itinerant street entertainers (see Plate 3), Catholics at prayer, Gypsies in the quarter of Triana, bullfighters, and other characters he deemed picturesque.46 The circulation of human difference was scarcely limited to Europe during

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Figure 11. Walter F. Brown, “Our Artist’s Dream of the Centennial Restaurants,” Harper’s Weekly, vol. 20, July 1, 1876, supplement p. 541. Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Eakins’s lifetime, however. New forms of transportation and communication, from transatlantic steamships to cosmopolitan illustrated periodicals, facilitated the ready availability in America of exotic goods, images, and people. All of these acquired mystique as aesthetic, commercial, and/or scientific objects of interest while also gradually transforming conventional categories of social and geographic knowledge. Especially in major cities such as Philadelphia, large museums, expositions, and department stores displayed countless artifacts from around the world, resulting in the dissemination of customs and specimens far beyond their historical origins. Witnessing this rapid proliferation of difference everywhere around them, Eakins and his urban American contemporaries grappled to make sense of modernity’s human flux, often using pictures in the process.47 Any number of pictorial examples from late nineteenth-century Philadelphia could be chosen to illustrate such grappling—from depictions of Japanese envoys visiting the city to advertisements for exotic commodities in John Wanamaker’s colossal department store—but let us consider a popular magazine cartoon by Walter F. Brown, published in Harper’s Weekly during the 1876 Centennial Exhibition (Fig. 11). In the cartoon, Brown referred humorously to the jarring juxtaposition of different ethnic and national groups on display, represented here through the various cuisines, modes of dress, and architectural styles of the fair’s restaurants. In the center, a sign reading “restaurant francais” clamors for attention amid

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a multitude of banners advertising “genuine turkey figs,” “seal skin soup,” African “natives on a half shell,” and Chinese “puppy a la centennial,” among other international delicacies. Seemingly unfazed by the multisensory cacophony of difference, an elegant (American?) couple sits at the French restaurant as a waiter scurries by with a champagne bottle and glasses, next to still more signs touting “snails,” “eau sucre,” “bull frogs,” and “french peas.” Brown depicted the world’s fair as an unwieldy crowd of exotic customs and solicitations, creating a disorderly array quite unlike the carefully arranged social evolutionary grid of spindles at the United States National Museum (see Fig. 3).48 With less humor and more aesthetic refinement, Eakins meticulously orchestrated other tokens of global circulation in The Chess Players (Plate 4), a tiny, jewellike painting produced at the same moment as Brown’s cartoon and displayed at the Centennial art exhibit. In the foreground of the painting, figures of the artist’s father and two elderly friends huddle quietly around a chessboard in a well-lit parlor. Behind them in the shadowy background, we see a tasteful collection of imported and domestic goods: an exotic Middle Eastern hookah, an ornamental (possibly “Moorish” style) wicker table, a mantel clock, a framed engraving of a painting by Gérôme depicting ancient Roman gladiators, a globe, and various pieces of Victorian furniture, all placed—along with the black cat grooming itself—over a richly colored Oriental carpet. Eakins here broached the circulation of cultural difference as a series of commodities, some exotic and others domestic, all subsumed into a stable bourgeois vision of cosmopolitanism. A quarter century later, the artist would adopt a more monumental approach to picturing specimens of global variety in Antiquated Music (Portrait of Sarah Sagehorn Frishmuth) (Plate 5), showing a wealthy Philadelphia collector. In this work, Mrs. Frishmuth sits firmly at the center of her collection, surrounded by specimens of musical instruments from around the world that she donated to the anthropological section of the University of Pennsylvania’s Free Museum of Science and Art. In a manner more consistent with Brown’s Centennial cartoon than with The Chess Players, Eakins’s Antiquated Music represented exotic objects loosely arranged, with some even casually strewn on the floor. Here the “cacophony” of difference even carries an apt musical resonance.49 In addition to exotic objects, of course, late nineteenth-century America also witnessed an unprecedented influx of foreign immigration and domestic migration, which dramatically transformed Philadelphia and other cities by introducing large numbers of real people from different groups and places. Although modern anthropologists would gradually teach the public to call such groups “cultures,” most Americans during Eakins’s lifetime viewed their varied customs in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and nation—categories that fostered the lingering organic-

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social “confusion” noted by Alfred Kroeber in 1917. One indication of the colossal scale of demographic transformation in Eakins’s native city can be found in basic population statistics for the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. According to official reports, foreign immigrants constituted no less than 25 percent of the city’s total population every year between 1870 and 1930. United States Census figures indicate that in 1900, Philadelphia also had the largest black population of any city north of the Mason-Dixon Line, due in large part to massive post– Civil War domestic migration. The immigration numbers were even more dramatic for New York, a city that Eakins visited frequently into the late 1890s, but Philadelphia obviously saw its share of demographic change as well.50 While such facts about Philadelphia’s urban transformation are well known to historians, most art historical accounts still emphasize Eakins’s lifelong association with the city in terms of deep hometown roots, family relations, and a relatively small coterie of professional contacts, as if the metropolis were inhabited mainly by his relatives, scientist friends, and art students. People in those personal and professional circles certainly formed his immediate milieu, but to describe Eakins’s world exclusively in those terms distorts and unconsciously “whitens” his historical experience in an urban setting that was considerably more diverse. The Dancing Lesson (see Plate 1) provides just one clue to the presence in Philadelphia of such diversity, as do a number of lesser-known photographs and other paintings by Eakins, several of which are discussed in the following chapters.51 Apart from the work of Eakins, additional historical indicators of Philadelphia’s complex demography abound. For example, in an 1882 article about sightseeing in the city, his student Joseph Pennell wrote, “The mixture of races in our cities is rapidly increasing, and we hardly notice it, because we have gradually grown accustomed to it.” In 1899, the Harvard-trained historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois observed that Philadelphia’s population “has nearly doubled since the [Civil] war” and “consequently it is not the same place, has not the same spirit, as formerly.” Eakins and most of his contemporaries struggled to get “accustomed” to a pervasive sense of human difference circulating around them, but they did not understand or have at their disposal the modern anthropological terms of “culture” or “cultures.”52 The largely neglected diversity of subjects in late portraits by Eakins suggests an effort on his part to comprehend and acknowledge this proliferating human variety. In 1902, for example, he completed Signora Gomez d’Arza (Plate 6), a portrait of an Italian immigrant woman married to a Spanish-Italian theater owner in South Philadelphia. Eakins and his wife, Susan, visited the theater and surrounding immigrant neighborhood with some regularity at the time, befriending Signora Gomez d’Arza and her husband in the process. The artist’s early biogra-

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pher Margaret McHenry even published recipes for kidneys and spaghetti sauce that the Eakinses learned from the couple, who hosted them at their modest home. In portraying Signora Gomez d’Arza, Eakins evidently perceived his subject as a specimen of generic “Spanish” or “Latin” group identity, for he borrowed a famous compositional prototype from Velázquez (Fig. 12) and placed the finished work in an antique Spanish Baroque-style gilt frame. Such artistic “framing” devices conferred dignity and historical significance upon this working-class, immigrant subject, indicating a certain loosening of the hierarchical social evolutionary logic seen earlier in The Dancing Lesson (see Plate 1). At the same time, Signora Gomez d’Arza attained an aesthetic sense of exoticism, merging portraiture and ethnographic generalization with objet d’art in a manner consistent with the chic circulation of difference at the time. For Eakins, even late in life, the artistic uses of human variety remained complex and irreducible to a sentimental notion of “sympathy.”53 By framing an immigrant subject as he did in Signora Gomez d’Arza, Eakins also unintentionally revealed a deeper truth about his artistic vision and historical moment, when received categories such as “race” and “nation” increasingly failed to account for all the vagaries of human identity amid the growing demographic flux of modernity. After all, huge numbers of people from various places and communities were moving thousands of miles, sometimes exchanging their customs—like cooking spaghetti—and thereby adjusting their identities to new circumstances. Regardless of national origin, many such people were also becoming “American,” a category whose constant renegotiation (then and now) epitomizes the dynamically social aspect of culture, as we understand it today. Lacking a modern anthropological understanding of that social phenomenon, Eakins throughout his life necessarily resorted to the inherited artistic devices and national, racial, or ethnic categories at his disposal: “Negroes,” “Spanish,” and the like. His artistic efforts to frame human difference according to such categories provides a useful barometer of the larger struggle faced by his contemporaries in an era of dramatic circulation. A radical but little-understood dimension of modern anthropology concerns the recognition that human customs—as social practices independent of biology— circulate freely along what Franz Boas once called a “multiplicity of converging and diverging lines,” as opposed to the linear, hierarchical scale used by social evolutionists. Boas referred to this dynamic circulation of customs as “diffusion.” Rather than being shackled to organic causes, customs may roam from person to person, group to group, and place to place irrespective of skin color, physiognomy, or national origin. Boas’s subtle understanding of that social phenomenon laid the foundation for the modern culture concept, but the consequences of diffusion for human behavior and identity remain largely unfathomed by many people to-

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Figure 12. Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1650. Oil on canvas, 140 × 120 cm (551⁄8 × 471⁄4 in.). Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

day. Indeed, the significance of diffusion was not even fully grasped by Boas himself, for it posed an implicit challenge to the very notion of coherent group identity that figured so prominently in his anthropological method. Once we accept the proposition that human beings by nature have an innate capacity to learn potentially any custom or tradition through diffusion, the concept of a discrete “culture” or set of distinct “cultures” becomes unstable. Members of groups can always adopt new behaviors and thereby gradually transform group identity, destabilizing difference.54 By acknowledging the free play of diffusion, then, Boasian cultural anthropology not only challenged the biological determinism of social evolutionary thought. It also paradoxically (and unwittingly) deconstructed the culture concept to some extent by opening human identity to the prospect of infinite self-fashioning. As a result, claims about the natural ownership or essential belonging of certain practices and customs by any particular group—Eakins’s “Negroes,” or, for that matter, his own “Scots-Irish” community—become problematic, despite the considerable force of social convention. Evidence of diffusion was already widely visible during the artist’s lifetime, as in the many nineteenth-century photographs of various people playing commercially produced banjos (Fig. 13). Such photographs implicitly confirmed that knowledge of the instrument was not an exclusive or essential prerogative of “Negroes,” despite the naturalizing effects of countless

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Figure 13. Unidentified

photographer, Woman Playing a Banjo (possibly Lotta Crabtree), 1860s. Collection of Jim Bollman.

nineteenth-century “plantation” images, including Eakins’s The Dancing Lesson, which supposedly depicted authentic black “cultural knowledge.” Ironically, Philadelphia served as an important center of commercial banjo production and dissemination by the late 1870s, thanks to a white entrepreneur named Samuel Swaim Stewart, whose factory and publishing house became an engine of diffusion, transforming the instrument into a parlor accessory for the national market. As the historian Karen Linn has demonstrated, Stewart saw himself as using modern science to “elevate” the banjo—in an explicitly social evolutionary sense—above its “barbaric” origins. For better or worse, Stewart also effectively disarticulated the banjo from any notion of innate racial ownership by promoting its wide dissemination as a commodity. Although Hugh Honour referred to the banjo in Eakins’s The Dancing Lesson as an instrument “so intimately associated with Afro-Americans,” scholars outside art history now acknowledge that instru-

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Figure 14. Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Banjo Lesson, 1893. Oil on canvas, 124.46 × 90.17 cm

(49 × 351⁄2 in.). Hampton University Museum, Hampton, Virginia.

ment’s tremendous circulation across racial and geographic boundaries at the time. Indeed, according to Philip F. Gura and James F. Bollman, the efforts of Stewart and other entrepreneurs during the last quarter of the nineteenth century made the banjo “America’s Instrument”: a national rather than racial icon.55 In light of such historical diffusion, we might do well to reconsider the meaning of not only The Dancing Lesson but also The Banjo Lesson (Fig. 14), a thematically related work by Eakins’s onetime student at the Pennsylvania Academy, Henry Ossawa Tanner. Set in a humble interior depicted with Rembrandtesque brush-

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work and lighting, Tanner’s painting represents an anonymous elderly African American man teaching a boy—presumably a grandson—how to play the banjo. Even more than the watercolor by Eakins, Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson has acquired iconic status as an image of authentic black cultural transmission. According to Francis K. Pohl (who also found evidence of such transmission in the Eakins painting), Tanner’s picture “openly addresses, and subverts, the stereotype of the banjoplaying, high-stepping figure that had become so common over the previous decades.” In Pohl’s view, “The banjo here, far from being a prop, is central to a scene of the passing on of cultural knowledge from one generation to the next, and the pride and sense of hope and self-fulfillment attached to the acquisition and maintenance of this knowledge.” Moreover, says Pohl, “the banjo becomes a conduit, a connection from one generation to the next. It also represents a bridge between Africa and America, for the banjo was developed from a stringed instrument brought over from Africa.”56 Such comments about The Banjo Lesson, along with the scholarly observations about The Dancing Lesson cited earlier, correctly register a critical difference separating the works of Tanner and Eakins from mainstream racist caricatures of blacks during the period. By eschewing the minstrel accoutrements (hat, cane, barefoot dancing), though, Tanner arguably produced a more private, dignified representation than the “plantation comedy” depicted by Eakins. And, as Pohl observes further, Tanner’s picture also emphasizes that the young pupil learns to play the banjo with an upward plucking motion of the sort espoused in modern instruction manuals published by Stewart and increasingly used by all professional performers at the time. In light of this detail, Pohl asserts that Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson “could be read as a reaffirmation, therefore, of the banjo as a distinctly African and African American instrument and of the ability of African Americans in this field, as in many others, to master new techniques and acquire new knowledge.”57 In other words, both The Dancing Lesson and The Banjo Lesson waffled on the origins of banjo music by leaving the door open to an interpretation of the instrument as something naturally—or “distinctly”—belonging to blacks, whether by blood or experience or (most likely) a confused mélange of both. At any rate, such confusion would have been difficult to avoid for the average nineteenth-century, pre-Boasian viewer. Although Eakins and Tanner both represented scenes of education and thereby acknowledged the value of experience to some extent, their pictures only imagined diffusion to be an intra-racial process—not a potentially interracial one—despite substantial contemporary evidence to the contrary. A couple of later images by Eakins would actually show whites with banjos as picturesque aesthetic accoutrements, but The Dancing Lesson and The Banjo Lesson projected racial essentialism as a central theme.58

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And yet, Tanner’s essentialist perspective on that theme and the broader issue of race must be understood very differently from that of Eakins. As the greatgrandson of an enslaved black woman (his mother’s mother) and a Southern white planter, Tanner constantly experienced the blunt dichotomies and subtle machinations of racial thinking in the United States. Eakins may have felt professional “persecution,” but he never had to fear lynching on account of his skin color or ancestry. When we take Tanner’s personal history into account, his academic art training and successful international career in painting assume the character of an extraordinary monument to cultural diffusion, crossing multiple boundaries in an era of pervasive racism, colonialism, and state-sponsored segregation. Tanner did not perceive his achievement in the anthropological terms of cultural diffusion, but he intuitively understood the faultiness of race as an epistemological category. After all, his obvious competence and complex personal ancestry posed serious challenges to the conventional assumptions and binary logic of race. Not surprisingly, his paintings increasingly resisted racial typecasting after his expatriation from the United States to France in 1894. But even the essentialism of The Banjo Lesson, a work painted just before that departure, can be seen as functioning strategically and self-consciously—a gesture quite unlike the folkloric plantation nostalgia of Eakins’s earlier picture of “Negroes.”59 Indeed, Tanner’s approach in The Banjo Lesson anticipated the strategic essentialism of twentieth-century writings by Alain Locke, the Harvard-trained philosopher and Oxford Rhodes Scholar who became a key architect of the “New Negro” movement and the Harlem Renaissance. Already in 1915, Locke recognized that racial groups, “from the point of view of anthropology, are ethnic fictions.” At the same time, he also believed that such fictions were necessary in order to overcome racism. According to Locke, “The group needs . . . to get a right conception of itself and it can only do that through the stimulation of pride in itself. Pride in itself is race pride, and race pride seems a rather different loyalty from the larger loyalty to the joint or common civilization type. Yet . . . through a doctrine of racial solidarity and culture, you really accelerate and stimulate the alien group to rather more rapid assimilation.” As Locke keenly observed, “that the group needs to consider itself an ethnic unit is very different from the view that the group is an ethnic unit” (emphasis in the original). In an analysis of early twentieth-century pragmatism and cultural pluralism, historian Louis Menand has observed, “The elegance of Locke’s formulation is that neither human sameness nor human difference is treated as real and essential. They are defined functionally.”60 Today the free play of diffusion often causes anxiety among white supremacists and other racial nationalists, as well as some multiculturalists, precisely because it complicates the notion of a distinct cultural identity and heritage claimed by

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members of a given group. A century ago, Locke and Tanner—but not Eakins— grasped this problem and strategically employed essentialist “ethnic fictions” to combat racism. Of the three, Tanner arguably made the most radical gesture by eventually abandoning such fictions in his later work—a fact that prompted criticism from Locke, who made them the centerpiece of his New Negro project. For Tanner, racial essentialism, strategic or otherwise, seemed too confining and pernicious a fiction to perpetuate.61

A Premodern Perspective In a richly illuminating study on the “ethnographic imagination” in American literary realism, Brad Evans has explored the growing awareness of human difference during the period between 1865 and 1920, before the modern anthropological usage of “culture” and “cultures” became widely established. Evans’s analysis reveals that diffusion exposed cracks in the epistemology of race and other traditional classifications of human difference, along with the social evolutionary hierarchies they sustained. With subtle attention to the vagaries of premodern anthropological thought, he examines a wide range of literary productions, from the local color fiction of authors such as William Dean Howells, Hamlin Garland, and Joel Chandler Harris to the travel writings of Lafcadio Hearn and diverse forms of popular exoticism in Gilded Age magazines. According to Evans, such literature manifested a new and heightened “attention to differences . . . catalyzed by a fascination with and concern over the limits of categorical knowledge.” Amid this increasing awareness of difference and epistemological inadequacy, says Evans, “many of the structuring hierarchies [were] made obsolete by changes in American society, but there was also a growing recognition that they failed to correlate with the movement of a wide variety of things—languages, folk tales, customs, commodities, people, ideas, images, and . . . literature itself—between populations and across geographically dispersed regions. The words needed to make sense of the asynchronous dissemination of such things were either inadequate or unavailable.”62 The crucial words unavailable to most Americans of the period were the modern anthropological term “culture” and its plural form, “cultures,” which Boas and his students began to conceptualize only during the early decades of the twentieth century. Hence Evans’s central contention that the Gilded Age was an era “before cultures”—that is, before literary creators and other Americans learned how to comprehend human difference in the nonevolutionary terms disseminated by modern anthropologists. Though Americans could not quite recognize or con-

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sciously articulate it, diffusion during the Gilded Age was already making the static, inherited frameworks of social evolutionism and racial thinking obsolete. As part of the same historical process, diffusion also tended to collapse Arnoldian and anthropological paradigms, producing an aesthetic of exoticism (which, in some ways, still lives with us today). Following Evans’s lead, I contend that Eakins and his art are best understood within this premodern epistemological framework, situated on the historical threshold of late nineteenth-century aesthetics and subsequent Boasian anthropology. The art of Eakins reveals his premodern perspective, before “cultures,” in two main, interrelated ways: iconographically and technically. On the one hand, as his career developed he depicted people from a wider range of ancestries, including a number of immigrants, as well as several Anglo-American ethnographers and collectors whose activities centered upon mapping human artifacts and difference according to the prevailing social evolutionary terms of the time. On the other hand, the works in question by Eakins often show signs of technical struggle in their odd formal elements, compositional disjunctions, and categorical ambiguities, suggesting that human group differences posed special problems for the artist. As an example of categorical ambiguity, Eakins originally titled his minstrel watercolor The Negroes and then later oscillated between that designation and the one now preferred by art historians, The Dancing Lesson, suggesting his own uncertainty about the proper conceptual emphasis. On a technical level, his critic friend Shinn noted that the work displays a sketchy, “perspectiveless look” and “riotous disorder” wherein “a broad, careless stroke has been lucky in defining the form and motion and in imprisoning the color.” The vague “Spanish” or “Latin” inflections of Signora Gomez d’Arza (Plate 6) provide another case of categorical ambiguity, in which the sitter’s rather awkward posture, oddly recalling that of Pope Innocent X in the famous seventeenth-century portrait by Velázquez (Fig. 12), indicates a technical struggle over the adaptation of an appropriate national artistic prototype. These and other attempts by Eakins to assign generic ethnographic meaning to his subjects disclose a somewhat strained and persistent desire on his part to represent different people as types, not simply as individuals. That desire, indicative of a moment marked by exponential growth in human variety in his urban context, reveals a concern with demographic change and disorder.63 Although art historians have noted and attempted to explain various odd conceptual and technical aspects of Eakins’s paintings before, they have not considered the impact on his work of this bewildering context of circulating human difference. As a social phenomenon not yet widely understood in anthropological terms during his lifetime or conveniently reducible to objective physicality, culture and its diffusion resisted representation. Following an insightful reading re-

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cently offered by Michael Leja regarding the artist’s aggregation of quasi-scientific methods, we might say that culture exposes yet another gap between “seeing and knowing” in the work of Eakins. For a realist painter inclined to depict racial or national difference through objective tokens—the “Spanish” frame, the “Oriental” hookah, the “Negro” banjo, and the like—the ephemeral social phenomenon of culture posed an insuperable mimetic challenge. Consequently, we should not be surprised to find signs of uncertainty in his pictures of people, customs, and traditions that were both unfamiliar to him and subject to considerable diffusion.64 Through a close examination of pertinent works and writings by Eakins and his contemporaries—including Jean-Léon Gérôme, Hippolyte Taine, Frédéric Bazille, Arthur Burdett Frost, Joseph Pennell, Thomas Anshutz, Frederic Remington, Hamlin Garland, Franz Boas, and many others—we gain an art historical perspective on the broader epistemological shift toward twentieth-century anthropological views of culture and the varieties of “man.” Not unlike most of those contemporaries, Eakins stood at the historical threshold of the modern culture concept even if it ultimately eluded his conscious knowledge or recognition, for his art embodied that transitional period in its problematic adherence to older, premodern categories at a time of flourishing diversity. Though not exactly a cosmopolitan artist in the rarefied expatriate sense associated with aesthetes such as Chase, John Singer Sargent, or James A. M. Whistler, Eakins lived in an American metropolis that gave him access to international human variety throughout his lifetime. In his own way, he provides a useful artistic example of how middle-class Americans visualized the “cultures” of modernity avant la lettre. In some ways, Eakins and his art are especially instructive in this regard, for his enduring connection to Philadelphia afforded him a sustained, historical vantage point on demographic change in one urban location. This book is arranged chronologically in a series of three chapters that explore the manifold human diversity encountered and artistically negotiated by Eakins over the course of his professional career. Chapter 1 examines his early art and training in Europe during the late 1860s, with emphasis on the exotic human types that he portrayed in academic studies under the influence of Gérôme in Paris and subsequently in Spain. Such studies embraced the aesthetics of racial difference and evolutionary ethnography officially promoted by Napoleon III as part of the Second Empire’s colonial enterprise at the time. Eakins’s activities and expressed attitudes in Europe are also discussed more closely in relation to Taine and artcritical notions of national character. Chapter 2 looks at genre paintings that Eakins produced from 1871 to 1885 in response to period tastes for domestic exoticism and regional character or “local color,” specifically as these pertained to American nationalism of the Centennial

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era and its aftermath. In Europe, Eakins had learned important lessons from Gérôme, Taine, and their French contemporaries about the artistic pursuit of national character as a function of race, history, and environment. Back home during the 1870s and 1880s, Eakins transferred what he had learned to his American context, notably the distinctive waterways around Philadelphia and their various denizens. In addition to discussing similarities between the work of Eakins and contemporary local color writing, I examine certain limits imposed upon Eakins’s realism by the exigencies of civic pride and patronage. Respecting those limits, the ambitious young artist avoided troubling truths about Philadelphia’s environment and social relations in favor of maintaining a more upbeat, picturesque sensibility consistent with the prevailing aesthetics of American nationalism. Chapter 3 focuses on Eakins’s construction of the Western frontier and global exoticism in paintings produced after his ignominious termination as professor and director of teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1886. The chapter revisits his therapeutic 1887 excursion to the Dakota Territory, where he lived with cowboys and ranch hands. In paintings, photographs, and letters inspired by that excursion, Eakins embraced and embodied aspects of popular frontier discourse, as mediated by mass entertainment and advertising. The chapter concludes with a discussion of late portraits by Eakins depicting key figures in Philadelphia’s anthropological milieu around the turn of the twentieth century, a group that constituted an important alternative professional community for the artist. His portraits and related activities offer an intriguing window into the pre-Boasian, social evolutionary world of museum collecting at the University of Pennsylvania. The book concludes with a coda looking in more detail at the Signora Gomez d’Arza (Plate 6) and reflecting upon the artist’s posthumous critical reputation among early twentieth-century admirers such as Robert Henri, Alan Burroughs, Lloyd Goodrich, and Van Wyck Brooks. Such figures helped establish Eakins’s central position in the history of American art as a painter both of “humanity” and of the essential national character of the United States. Their writings about Eakins thus demonstrate the lingering presence of what Kroeber called the “current confusion” regarding the origins of culture, for they represent the artist as both deeply rooted in his native soil—a natural American—and a man of the world. In terms of method, Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity tries to emulate some of the best recent scholarship dedicated to historicizing American art critically in relation to important, but neglected, period discourses. In the spirit of such scholarship, the book eschews the modernist-nationalist approach of Lloyd Goodrich and his followers, whose primary concern has been to uphold the canonical status of Eakins as a great American master, almost at any cost. On the other hand, the scholarly model I have in mind also avoids extreme political revision-

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ism, one-sided formalist or iconographic analysis, and whimsical forms of psychological interpretation. Such approaches tend to treat art of the past either as a launching pad for moral judgments or as a jigsaw puzzle of pictorial typologies, technical procedures, and/or biographical dramas drained of historical specificity. In my view, the most effective recent scholarship has woven works of art carefully and critically into their historical contexts in ways that retain a sense of their materiality while illuminating pertinent epistemological structures, social discourses, and ideological issues. Here I particularly have in mind the following scholarly models: Michael Leja’s astute analysis of Gilded Age art and popular imagery in relation to period concerns about deception; Alexander Nemerov’s phenomenological interpretation of still-life paintings by Raphaelle Peale vis-à-vis changing historical notions of selfhood in early nineteenth-century America; JoAnne Mancini’s study of “premodernism” in late nineteenth-century art criticism and educational literature; and, obviously, Brad Evans’s challenging account of American literary realism in the era “before cultures.” Following their lead, the present book examines the art of Eakins in light of another defining discourse of modernity—that of “culture” and its prehistory—in order to situate his work more firmly in its own time while acknowledging its location on the threshold of a new social vision of human diversity and experience. It is my hope that such an investigation of Eakins will prompt similar inquiries about other American artists. Although I refer to a number of his contemporaries, the limitations of space and time have led me to focus on the rich story immediately surrounding Eakins himself.65 Finally, although this book concentrates on a past American artist and the internationalism of his historical context, it inevitably draws attention to our contemporary global predicament in the early twenty-first century, a period marked by ever more disorienting cultural complexity, diffusion, confusion, and conflict, as well as powerful forces of homogenization. As Princeton University philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues in a widely discussed 2006 book on the ethics of “cosmopolitanism” today, the inexorable diffusion of culture now demands not only greater tolerance of different group customs but also acceptance of voluntary transformation in those customs. Citing the worldwide dissemination of practices such as wearing kente cloth and drinking Coke, Appiah acknowledges the disquieting effects of globalization but contends that decisions about cultural behavior like these ultimately must be left to real individuals in particular contexts. Such individual decisions, he says, should not be made by others according to abstract or received historical conventions of cultural identity, racial propriety, or other narrow notions of group ownership. In other words, if some Americans want to wear kente or if people in Ghana want to drink Coke at special occasions, the de-

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cision to do so should be theirs. Defending such instances of “cosmopolitan contamination” against upholders of “authenticity,” Appiah encourages constructive “conversation” and debate rather than a priori stipulations about cultural purity or categorical repudiations of globalization. Although Appiah perhaps understates the problems of globalization, his fundamental point about the inevitability of diffusion is hard to dispute.66 While many celebrate the accelerating pace of exchange, transformation, and hybridity in our global culture—often by trumpeting notions of passage “beyond” race, nation, even culture—others assiduously cultivate isolationist enclaves of cultural continuity, patriotism, or ethnic identity. The rise of religious fundamentalism and the tenacity of racial categories in our time suggest resistance in many quarters to the inherent dynamism of culture in an era of instantaneous diffusion. On the other side of the same coin, descendants of people historically persecuted and excluded from power now assert compelling claims about sovereignty and cultural patrimony, as exemplified by Native American and other indigenous peoples’ land suits and repatriation efforts. Revisiting Eakins in the manner proposed in this book thus indirectly entails confronting the still-contested and unresolved character of culture today, even if some of the specific terms have changed since his time. By examining his halting struggle to comprehend the cultures of modernity at an earlier moment, perhaps we will see our situation with greater clarity. We may even find our vaunted diversity to be neither exceptional nor unprecedented.67

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chapter 1

“Amongst Strangers” Studies in Character Abroad

Before Eakins embarked upon his professional career as a painter in Philadelphia, he encountered a world of difference abroad during an extended period of study in Europe as a young man in his twenties. For nearly four years between 1866 and 1870, he lived in Paris while pursuing academic training at the École des BeauxArts. He interrupted this extended foreign excursion only once, for a two-month visit to Philadelphia at Christmas in 1868. Eakins was not the first American to study in Paris, but he preceded the great wave of compatriots that arrived in the 1870s and 1880s. Although European training was his father’s idea, the dutiful son embraced the foreign experience with gusto.1 Determined to make the most of his opportunity, Eakins took great pains to obtain admission to the atelier of Jean-Léon Gérôme, a conservative and highly regarded teacher at the École whose orientalist paintings of North African and other exotic subjects enjoyed international acclaim (see Figs. 4, 15). Under Gérôme’s instruction, the young artist struggled to gain facility in drawing and oil painting, but in 1868 he confidently told his father, “I will paint well enough to earn a good living & become even rich” and “even now I could paint heads good enough to make a living anywhere in America.” Two of the few surviving “heads” that Eakins executed as studies in Paris clearly reflect the influence of Gérôme and the aesthetic conventions of orientalism, which then emphasized empirical realism in representing physiognomy, complexion, clothing, and other visible markers of human difference (Plate 7, Fig. 16).2 When not attending classes at the École, Eakins avidly explored the cosmopolitan city of Paris, “capital of the nineteenth century,” as Walter Benjamin later described it. We know from Eakins’s extensive European correspondence that he visited museums, theaters, concerts, gardens, zoos, circuses, the 1867 Exposition Universelle, and other scenes of modern urban life in Paris. Thanks to a new net-

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Figure 15. Jean-Léon Gérôme,

Bashi-Bazouk, 1868–69. Oil on canvas, 81 × 66 cm (313⁄4 × 26 in.). Private collection. Photograph © 2005 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 16. Thomas Eakins, Man in a Turban, 1866–67. Graphite over charcoal on blue-green laid paper, 58.6 × 42.8 cm (231⁄8 × 167⁄8 in.) (sheet). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Memorial gift from Dr. T. Edward and Tullah Hanley, Bradford, Pennsylvania, 69.30.58.

work of railroads crisscrossing Europe, he also made tourist trips around the continent, including a six-month visit to Spain—spent mainly in Seville—before returning permanently to the United States in the summer of 1870 on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War. Eakins probably had been encouraged to go to Spain by another French academic teacher, Léon Bonnat, a friend of Gérôme and a noted portraitist with whom he studied briefly in 1869.3 During a three-day stopover in Madrid, the young American visited the Prado Museum and raved in a letter to his father about the “good Spanish work” by Diego Velázquez that “stands out like nature itself.” At the Cathedral of Madrid, in one of many encounters with unfamiliar local customs, Eakins witnessed what he called “Hindoo” genuflections in a Catholic Mass and exclaimed that he could not get “accustomed” to its “dance nigger jig kind of music.” In Seville, the former Moorish stronghold in Andalusia and birthplace of Velázquez, Eakins wrote of meeting “good natured natural people desirous of pleasing me” as well as “ever so many gypsies, men & women & circus people, street dancers, theatre dancers, and bull fighters.” There, in the winter of 1869 and early spring of 1870, he produced drawings, oil sketches, and his first multifigure composition in oil, depicting a family of poor street entertainers (see Plate 3).4 For decades, art historians downplayed or ignored the importance of Eakins’s European experience. Swayed by the nationalist bias of his early biographer, Lloyd Goodrich, they discounted signs of foreign influence, preferring to consolidate the artist’s reputation as an American native genius. In recent years, however, Eakins’s significant European debts have become an accepted matter of record. Most scholars now acknowledge his formative, if idiosyncratic, synthesis of technical lessons from his primary French masters at the École, Gérôme and Bonnat, as well as his embrace of their commitment to using nude models in academic art instruction. His letters and painting techniques also reveal an interest in the work of other contemporary European artists, notably Thomas Couture and Mariano Fortuny, whose supple brushwork and dynamic color range eventually led Eakins to diverge somewhat from the finicky surface treatment of Gérôme. Nevertheless, his special admiration and respect for Gérôme endured long after he returned from Europe. Confirming the new scholarly consensus about such matters, H. Barbara Weinberg has observed that “his subsequent accomplishments as an artist and his work as a teacher would always reflect what he had learned abroad.” Similarly, Kathleen Foster states that Eakins “depended on the principled and disciplined methods learned in Paris, and he continued to pay homage to his teachers, and their tradition, until the end of his life.”5 What Eakins encountered abroad encompassed more than technical lessons in painting and teaching, though. The present chapter focuses upon a dimension of

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the European sojourn little discussed even in recent art historical reappraisals of this episode in the painter’s life: his formative encounter with foreign people and customs as both art student and tourist. Residing across the Atlantic Ocean for four years, Eakins almost constantly experienced and thought about human difference. Indeed, living in Europe awakened in him a reciprocal awareness of his alien status as well as heightened attention to the modern mobility of peoples, traditions, and objects from various places. Shortly after arriving in Paris, for example, Eakins wrote to his father, “I am a stranger here” and “My Paris life is benefiting me in the study of human nature for amongst strangers who do everything in a strange way, character is strongly marked for me, while at home the same amount of character springing from the same motives would make no impression.”6 In another letter, he commented about an exotic musical instrument that he listened to on a city street: “The other day I heard playing on a mandoline. The man was a very good player & could imitate with it violin playing & drums & soldiers marching &c besides playing tunes in many odd ways. A mandoline is a short guitar like a ladle & is played with a quill & with the fingers too. It must have been brought into Europe by the moors for it is altogether like an African instrument.” Elsewhere, in a letter describing the foreign restaurants at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, he compared the various modes of clothing worn by the “waiter girls,” who were “dressed after the fashion of their country.” Whereas “Holland sends big women with showy dresses,” said Eakins, “The Turkish women are very ugly and heavy” and “The Spanish girls have the gayest frocks of all.” His disoriented reaction to the Catholic Mass in Madrid thus constituted just one of many responses articulated by Eakins to the human differences circulating around him in Europe.7 Yet Eakins never described those differences as evidence of an alternative “culture” or “cultures” in the modern anthropological sense of a fluid behavioral phenomenon subject to transnational diffusion. Rather, his interest in unfamiliar objects, customs, “motives,” “human nature,” and “strongly marked” “character” evinced an amalgam of premodern perceptions about individual people, traits, and accoutrements as representative specimens of racial groups, national types, and the broader category of humanity. In many respects, Eakins approached the worldview of another École professor, Hippolyte Taine, for whom “character” was the key to understanding art on multiple levels. By the late 1860s, when Eakins very likely heard his lectures on art history at the École, Taine was already famous in France for his monumental, multivolume Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863– 64). In that internationally influential study, Taine asserted the importance of viewing works of human creativity as the natural, objective residue of national character. For Taine, great literature—like great painting—served as a “fossil shell” through which the character of a nation could be read. In Taine’s view, a work of

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art encoded three elemental determinants of that character, which were formatively present at its creation: the historical “moment,” environmental “milieu,” and biological “race” of its creator. Moreover, thanks to the naturalism of late nineteenth-century art and literature, a work of art could also ostensibly reveal the character of the subject it represented, as in folklore, local color fiction, and ethnographic pictures.8 Although “moment” and “milieu” gave Taine’s theory an important historical and social-contextual dimension, “race” constituted their natural, evolutionary bedrock in his view, for it ostensibly gave rise to national character in a particular time and place and endured in the nation’s “blood” over the ages. In The Ideal of Art, a published compilation of lectures he delivered at the École during Eakins’s years of attendance, Taine described the fundamental significance of race in defining national character: National character [is] always intact and persistent. This is the primitive foundation; it lasts the whole life of a people, and serves as a support to the successive strata which successive periods happen to deposit on the surface.—If you were to go further down you would find other foundations still deeper; there are the obscure and gigantic strata which linguistic science is beginning to lay bare. Underlying the characters of communities are the characters of races. . . . The different races are to each other in moral, as a vertebrata, an articulata, a mollusk are to each other in physical relationship; they are beings organized according to distinct plans and belonging to distinct divisions.— Finally, at the lowest stage, are found the characters peculiar to every superior race capable of spontaneous civilization, that is to say endowed with that aptitude for general ideas which is the appanage of man and which leads him to found societies, religions, philosophies and arts; similar dispositions subsist through all the differences of race, and the physiological diversities which master the rest do not succeed in affecting them.9

In Taine’s opinion, “the characters of communities” depended on the “underlying” “characters of races,” which existed in “distinct divisions” according to nature, with “every superior race capable of spontaneous civilization.” Eakins never theorized in such detailed evolutionary terms about the nature of human civilization and group difference, but his ruminations about “character” belong to Taine’s world, not ours. As art historian William I. Homer has said of the young painter, “he agreed with Taine in the matter of consciously reflecting in his art the ideas and values of his own time. Eakins embraced the influence of his milieu and became straightforward in representing the characteristics of his native country and its people.” Furthermore, as suggested by his comments about the mandolin, the 1867 exposition’s national restaurants, and the Spanish Catholic Mass, Eakins also shared Taine’s belief in the existence of diverse, more or less unchanging national groups, racial divisions, and other supposedly natural categories

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of difference that governed human behavior. Although Eakins expressed that belief in a far less coherent or theoretical manner than did Taine, both men participated in the premodern, evolutionary “confusion” of organic and inorganic determinants identified by Arthur Kroeber in 1917 (see Introduction). In other words, their perspectives differed from the later Boasian anthropological view, which forcefully disarticulated the social phenomena of culture from the biology of race in order to assert the relative contingency of human behavior and identity.10 Nevertheless, the modern metropolis of Paris, not unlike that of Philadelphia, broached such disarticulation and contingency by increasingly putting “character,” people, objects, and received categories of group identity into rapid circulation during the late nineteenth century. As the French art critic Charles Baudelaire famously wrote in 1863, “Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent.” Baudelaire here did not specifically refer to human group differences, but the occurrence of ever more frequent and dislocating encounters with alien bodies and behaviors certainly contributed to a broader sense of modernity’s contingency. Things, people, and customs no longer seemed firmly anchored to national or natural origins. Eakins’s observation about being “amongst strangers” in urban Paris hints at his personal experience of that condition, as does his expression of discomfort at being unable to “get accustomed” to “Hindoo” prayer and “dance nigger jig kind of music” in the Cathedral of Madrid. His attempt to process such discomfort through transnational comparative stereotypes also points clumsily to a burgeoning global awareness of roughly similar human practices in locations widely apart. By 1887, Franz Boas would publish an influential essay in the journal Science titled “The Occurrence of Similar Inventions in Areas Widely Apart,” critiquing social evolutionary explanations by showing how the comparative method, as then used by most scientists, failed to account adequately for idiosyncratic local traditions or patterns of group behavior and their historical change.11 Eakins certainly did not arrive at that Boasian perspective. For him, comparative thinking remained a legitimate means of distinguishing and ranking human groups whose national characters or other traits remained largely unchanged over time. He did not understand such groups anthropologically in terms of their relative cultural logics, exchanges, and ongoing transformations. In a letter to his father from Spain, for example, Eakins chauvinistically described “the ladies of Madrid” as “very pretty, about the same or a little better than the Parisians but not so fine as the American girls. A good many of them are fair but the proportion is not so great of fair ones as in America.” Yet his rankings could be somewhat loose and unpredictable at times, indicating his layman’s perspective on matters of human difference, further corroborating Kroeber’s observation about premodern, evolutionary “confusion.” In one instance, Eakins marveled at visiting Japanese ac-

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robats in Paris who seemed to him “far ahead of the others,” including “the white people,” in what they did. On another occasion, he praised black North African craftsmen at the 1867 Exposition Universelle as “very dexterous” despite their “primitive” tools.12 On one level, such unscientific statements by Eakins conformed to a common, nineteenth-century tourist mentality (tourism itself being another defining aspect of modernity), but they also signaled an incipient recognition of the circulation of characters, customs, and objects as phenomena detached from their natural or historical origins. The sheer proliferation of strangers and strangeness that Eakins encountered even raised doubts in his mind occasionally about the viability of differential categories themselves. For example, precisely such a doubt crept into Eakins’s letter about “The ladies of Madrid” when he proceeded to compare them with “The country women” of Spain, who “are often coarse with that ugly hanging of the eye that is often supposed to represent the whole Spanish type.” His repetition of qualifying words—“often” and “often supposed”—registered a slight, but nonetheless perceptible, loss of faith in the received category “whole Spanish type,” which hearkened back to the sort of generic national data provided by Eakins’s grammar school textbook, Mitchell’s Intermediate or Secondary Geography. As his qualifiers suggest, Eakins already recognized that the Spanish people (including the subset “country women”) were too diverse to be summarized by one type. That is, although he clearly relied upon the comparative evolutionary categories of human typing (“Negroes,” “gypsies,” “Parisians,” “American girls,” “the whole Spanish type”), Eakins perceived a certain inadequacy or failure of comprehensiveness in them.13 The deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida once referred to the selfconscious, yet continuing, reliance upon faulty concepts as writing “under erasure.” Such usage entails halting acknowledgment of the limitations of language while remaining unable to escape those limitations in the absence of more supple forms of expression. Eakins was no deconstructionist, but as a result of his own tourist circulation amid the human diversity of modern Europe, he sensed that “the whole Spanish type” did not hold reliably in all cases. All the same, he could not do without the convenience of that category, for he lacked access to better terminology, including the modern anthropological concepts of “culture” and “diffusion.” Consequently, he resorted to the generic, comparative-evolutionary language of type.14 Similar dynamics mark Eakins’s early visual efforts in Europe as well. By critically examining such works in their European historical context, we see him wrestling pictorially with questions of difference made palpable by his own circulation abroad “amongst strangers.” To put it another way, the works in question

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reveal his artistic negotiation with the cultures of modernity avant la lettre. Precisely in their bland conventionality, Eakins’s early academic student exercises instructively indicate the institutional aspect of his aesthetic encounter with circulating human difference in Europe. Such exercises constituted an important part of a formative experience abroad that art historians have said helped to lay the foundation for his later art. Forged amid the academic, orientalist, and social evolutionary discourses that dominated the École and much of Parisian culture in the 1860s, Eakins’s artistic perspective prized distinctive human “character.” In that respect, his early work very much belonged to its nineteenth-century “moment” and “milieu,” in which concerns about “race” remained fundamental. Yet he also could not help but negotiate the modern forces of diffusion that were already placing such discourse under erasure.15

In the City of Nomads Eakins was hardly alone in seeing himself as a “stranger” “amongst strangers” in Paris. While he studied there during the 1860s, the city witnessed an unsettling physical and demographic transformation. Under the public works program implemented for Emperor Napoleon III by his prefect, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, medieval neighborhoods were demolished to make way for grand modern boulevards. Eakins noted this activity in a letter to his sister Frances, describing his perambulations of the city with a Philadelphia friend and fellow art student, William Sartain: “Bill and I went all over yesterday afternoon hunting studios and when almost despairing of our day’s work found just what we wanted. . . . It is in the big new street of Rennes not far from the Church of Saint German des Près . . . I would give you the address so you could send my letters there only the place is not numbered yet.”16 Urban renewal dramatically changed the character of the city by facilitating a rapid yet regulated circulation of people, gazes, and goods. Such circulation was conducive to the emperor’s economic program of laissez-faire capitalism and political control, but it also created traumatic upheaval and a general state of defamiliarization. According to historian David Harvey, Haussmann “bludgeoned the city into modernity” and contributed to a broader sense of “radical break in Parisian political economy, life, and culture.” In his perceptive essay on “the capital of the nineteenthcentury,” Walter Benjamin observed that Haussmannization “estranges Parisians from their city” such that “they begin to be conscious of its inhuman character.” The integration of “Haussmann’s efficiency” with “Napoleonic idealism,” said Benjamin, “favors finance capital” and “a flowering of speculation,” while “the true pur-

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pose of Haussmann’s work was to secure the city against civil war. He wanted to make the erection of barricades in Paris impossible for all time.” Second Empire Paris thus was marked by an unprecedented, but carefully managed, circulation.17 In addition to finance capital, foreign tourists, and international students such as Eakins, Paris admitted a flood of migrant laborers and economically displaced rural workers during the 1850s and 1860s, many looking for work on Haussmann’s project. Augmenting that infusion was the wholesale eviction of Parisian residents from the medieval neighborhoods demolished in the name of progress and security. In response to these conditions, Napoleon III and the Second Empire enacted laws restricting vagrants, street entertainers, and other poor people within the city, a move that resulted in their politicization and frequent artistic representation as “bohemian” symbols of modernity. In a study of the social and pictorial status of such working-class “real” bohemians, including various Italian pifferari depicted by Eakins’s teacher Gérôme, art historian Marilyn Brown has noted “an inverse relation between legal measures against gypsies, saltimbanques, pifferari, vagabonds, professional beggars, and the like . . . and the popularity of such subjects among artists” in late nineteenth-century France. Descriptions of Eakins by friends and family visitors in these years refer to his simple dress, like that of an “ash man” or a “fireman,” suggesting a timely identification with—or appropriation of—this bohemian persona on his part. Even the emperor became strategically attentive to the politics of class identity during the 1860s as a result of these demographic conditions. Fearing a popular backlash and needing support from the laboring classes, Napoleon III made careful gestures of accommodation to French workers during the 1860s by appointing labor-friendly Saint-Simonians to his administration and by expanding some rights of association.18 The emperor’s benevolent authoritarianism evidently won the admiration of Eakins. In a letter of 1866, he told his father that the French “ought to thank their lucky stars they’ve got such a good man to govern them, for it will be many a day before they can begin to govern themselves as we do.” Eakins apparently felt that France still needed to evolve before it could mature into a modern democracy like the United States. He acknowledged that in Paris the laws were “strict” and “diligently carried out,” but he said, “I doubt if anywhere the well doers can find so much personal freedom and social equality as in France.” Although Eakins’s view of the imperial administration would sour somewhat over time as he tired of politics at the École and as he observed growing protests in the streets, in May of 1869 he promised his father that he had no intention of becoming politically active himself while in Paris. In other words, while Eakins may have dressed like an “ash man,” he did so not as a radical expression of working-class solidarity. Rather, his clothing reflected a middle-class American distaste for elitism as well as admira-

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tion for the “plain,” “civilized” manners of his teacher Gérôme and the ancient Greeks.19 Other middle-class Americans at the time tended to share Eakins’s more or less sanguine attitude toward the emperor and his regime, suggesting a wider rapprochement between bourgeois democratic ideals and benevolent authoritarianism. For example, the Harper’s Handbook for Travellers in Europe of 1867 trumpeted “the universal homage now paid by all Europe, nay, the whole world, to Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, who has so rapidly risen to the very highest pinnacle of fame and glory.” A similar, if somewhat more quizzical, comment appeared in Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad of 1869, when the author observed that Napoleon III “has taken sole control of the Empire of France and made it into a tolerably free land— for people who will not attempt to go too far in meddling in government affairs . . . one has all the freedom he wants.”20 In a book reviewing various forms of travel writing about France, historian Harvey Levenstein has noted that “some Americans interested in the arts saw in the [Second Empire] regime’s expansion of the Louvre and École des Beaux-Arts proof that authoritarian governments were better-equipped to foster the arts and architecture than ones based on popular sovereignty.” By studying at the École and expressing reservations about the prospect of French popular sovereignty, Eakins basically sided with such Americans, for whom visiting Paris in the nineteenth century constituted what Levenstein has called a form of “personal uplift through self-education.” For American tourists, in other words, going to France offered the opportunity of personal progress and civilization. Not surprisingly, in one of his earliest letters from Europe, Eakins informed his sister Frances that “the first thing a traveler does on reaching Paris is to visit the Louvre.”21 At the École, Gérôme provided Eakins with a model of progressively authoritarian artistic governance analogous to that of Napoleon III in the public sphere. Using an appropriate popular evolutionary expression of educational uplift, Eakins told his family, “I will never forget the first day that Gerome criticized my work. His criticism seemed pretty rough, but after a moments consideration I was glad. . . . What he wants to see is progress.” Elsewhere, Eakins said that the French master stood above other men “as man himself is raised above the swine.” As we have seen, in reflecting upon certain pictures by Gérôme depicting Hellenic themes, the aspiring young American painter declared “the Greeks were very much like ourselves good plain civilized people.”22 The demographics of modern Paris, however, increasingly looked rather different from Gérôme’s “civilized” vision of ancient Athens. As a result of expanding French colonialism and foreign enterprise, a growing number of non-European blacks, Arabs, and Asians found their way to the imperial capital during the 1850s and

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1860s as visiting dignitaries, interpreters, soldiers, entertainers, and, in some cases, permanent residents. In June 1851, for example, Paris hosted a grand public entertainment “fantasia” on the Champ de Mars advertised as The Children of the Desert, featuring horsemen from the French colony of Algeria. According to contemporary coverage in the popular periodical L’Illustration, the show consisted of “real Arabs, weapons, costumes, characters, and more” who “ride at a trot, at a gallop” and “shoot at great distances with their long rifles.” Such attractions foreshadowed later nineteenth-century international extravaganzas like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, which came to Paris in 1889. In addition to capturing public attention in 1851, members of the Algerian troupe served as objects of scientific documentation by Étienne-René-Augustin Serres, director of the laboratory of human anatomy at the French government’s Muséum d’histoire naturelle, who arranged to document them in ethnographic photographs and sculptural busts.23 By the time Eakins took up residence in Paris during the 1860s, foreigners had become even more common in the city, paradoxically rendering human exoticism a kind of normative condition. Some members of the African diaspora, for example, worked as models for academic painters at the École (see Plate 7, Figs. 15, 16), while others sat for portraits by official ethnographic sculptors and photographers such as Charles Cordier (Fig. 17) and Jacques-Philippe Potteau, two artists commissioned by Serres’s successor, Armand de Quatrefages, to document racial types for the anthropological gallery of the Muséum d’histoire naturelle. Between 1861 and 1864, Gérôme produced a series of pictures commemorating official visits to France by Siamese ambassadors and their families. The most famous exotic artistic model of the period—an Afro-Caribbean woman named Laure (last name unknown) from the French colony of Martinique—appeared as the anonymous servant to a white prostitute in Édouard Manet’s notorious Olympia, exhibited at the 1865 Salon (Fig. 18).24 Not all “exotic” foreigners in Paris served as artist models, however. Between 1860 and 1869, the Turkish painter Osman Hamdi studied with Gérôme and with Gustave Boulanger at the École. Compared with the work of his French teachers, who tended to exaggerate Eastern sensuality, violence, and Islamic fanaticism, Hamdi’s paintings developed a variant of orientalism that spoke back to Western stereotypes by depicting scenes of dignified religiosity, domestic harmony, and intellectual cultivation in contemporary Ottoman Turkey (Fig. 19). According to art historian Zeynep Çelik, Hamdi’s works “provide acute and persistent critiques of mainstream Orientalist paintings. They represent a resistant voice, whose power derives from the painter’s position as an Ottoman intellectual, as well as from his intimate acquaintance with the school’s mental framework, techniques, and conventions.”25

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Figure 17. Charles Cordier, Capresse des Colonies, 1861. Bronze, onyx, colored marble, 96.5 × 54 × 28 cm (38 × 211⁄4 × 11 in.). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY. Photograph by Raux/Ojéda. Figure 18. Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas, 130.5 × 190 cm (513⁄8 × 747⁄8 in.). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY. Photograph by Hervé Lewandowski.

Figure 19. Osman Hamdi, Discussion in Front of the Mosque, ca. 1906. Museum of Painting and Sculpture, Istanbul.

Eakins apparently took no notice of Hamdi or his work. Instead, he embraced Gérôme’s rather ambivalent and simplistic Western perspective on Turkish people and their customs. Responding to certain orientalist pictures by his teacher in 1869, for example, Eakins expressed admiration for the directness of Islam as a religion, with its “silent prayer to the unknown immense God . . . How simple & grand. How Christ like” (terms oddly evoking the Quakerism of Eakins’s elder family members). In contrast, he disparaged “the contemtible [sic] catholic religion the three in one & one in ‘3’ 3 = 1 1 = 3 3x1 = 1 which they call mystery & if you dont believe it be damned to you.” Eakins further observed in the same letter, “The Turk dont pray like a Christian. For he dont pay any one to pray for him.” Despite this endorsement of Islam at the expense of Catholicism, the young American art student proceeded to recycle orientalist stereotypes uncritically, saying, “How often has Gerome painted those simple Eastern prayers. Is that cruel! Is that cold. They are men of deep feeling these men of the East but they are lazy & sensual.” The irony here, of course, is that while Eakins used Islam to criticize Catholicism as a

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religion of mystifying middle-men, his own perceptions of “the East” were largely mediated by the paintings of his master.26 Regardless of such aesthetic mediation, actual demographic diversity in Paris struck a powerful chord that resonated far beyond Gérôme’s atelier or the scandal provoked by Manet’s pictorial exposé of the modern urban sex trade. In the words of one observer in 1867, invoking what by then had become a cliché about the modern city, “Paris, to speak properly, has no inhabitants, it is only a floating, or better still, a nomadic population.” Similarly, in an 1864 address to the French Parliament (later published in his Mémoires), Baron Haussmann deplored what he called the city’s growing “rootlessness” and the influx of “this mob of nomads.” To many others, that sense of rootlessness seemed to characterize modern life in general, encompassing not just displaced workers and colonial subjects in Paris but also well-to-do European and American tourists. As an author for the American periodical Putnam’s Magazine wrote in 1868, “If the social history of the world is ever written, the era in which we live will be called the nomadic period. With the advent of ocean steam navigation and the railway system, began a traveling mania which has gradually increased until half of the earth’s inhabitants, or at least half of its civilized portion, are on the move.” Referring to his expeditions to Egypt, Constantinople, and other distant locations in the 1850s and 1860s, Gérôme observed, “Probably some Bohemian slipped in among my ancestors, for I have always had a nomadic disposition and a well-developed [phrenological] bump of locomotion.” Eakins’s European sojourn in its own way exemplified this broader trend, for as a self-described “stranger” in France he was something of a nomad as well.27 If nomadism constituted a global phenomenon, Paris served as its symbolic urban center by being an especially dynamic crucible of human difference, intersection, and exchange. The city’s reputation in that respect prompted some nineteenthcentury commentators to express anxious concerns about the purity of French society, customs, and traditions. Hippolyte Taine, for example, referred disparagingly to “our equalized, rude and mixed society” in one of his lectures at the École in the late 1860s. Drawing a comparison between barbarian invaders of ancient Rome and those in modern France, Taine said, “They were complete savages, similar to the Hurons and Iroquois suddenly encamped in the midst of a cultivated and thinking world like ours”—words that conceivably inspired classmates at the École to tease Eakins as a “Huron or an Algonquin” “savage” during his hazing there as a new American student in 1866. By the end of the nineteenth century, French nationalist writer and politician Maurice Barrés complained in his novel Les Déracinés (1897) about Paris being “composed of all races and countries,” “a swirling dustbowl of individuals . . . without social bonds, without normalcy, without purpose.” As a result of transformations initiated during the Second Empire, then, both the

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infrastructure and demographic identity of Paris had grown increasingly complex and shifting, making the city unfamiliar even to many of its own residents.28 The nomadic strangeness of Paris even became the subject of popular humor. In 1867, popular French cartoonist Cham contributed an illustration to the widely known Paris-Guide showing a well-dressed Parisian couple, apparently lost in their native city, asking for directions from an imposing exotic foreigner who possesses a copy of the guidebook (fig. 20). The cartoon appeared in a section of the Guide titled “Foreigners in Paris” (“Les Étrangers à Paris”), leaving open the question as to whom, in this case, we should view as the outsider. Elsewhere in the same section, Cham provided a picture poking fun of “The American Colony,” depicting a Northerner and Southerner shooting at each other with pistols across the top of a Paris omnibus crowded with frightened passengers (fig. 21). For all of its satirical humor, Cham’s caricature of post–Civil War American gunslingers actually contained a kernel of truth, since we know that Eakins carried a Smith & Wesson revolver in Europe and brandished it occasionally to impress the natives. He may have been “a stranger here,” as he said, but he also represented a familiar national type within a popular French taxonomy of human difference.29 The 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris offered Eakins and his contemporaries a monumental spectacle of nomadic strangeness. That gargantuan world’s fair promoted Napoleon III’s vision of France as the greatest modern industrial and imperial nation. Occupying more than a hundred acres of land on the Champ de Mars between April 1 and October 1, the exposition attracted 11 million visitors, dwarfing the attendance of earlier fairs, including the previous one held in Paris in 1855. Nominally organized on the theme of the history of labor, the 50,000 exhibits originated from around the world, including 15,000 from the French colonies alone. For the eminent French author Victor Hugo, the exposition’s global scope demonstrated the cosmic significance of France, but it also paradoxically called into question the very idea of French national character: O France adieu! You are too great to be merely a country. People are becoming separated from their mother, and she is becoming a goddess. A little while more, and you will vanish in the transfiguration. You are so great that you will soon no longer be. You will cease to be France, you will be Humanity; you will cease to be a nation, you will be ubiquity. You are destined to dissolve into radiance and nothing at this hour is so majestic as the visible obliteration of your frontier. Resign yourself to your immensity. Goodbye, people! Hail, man! Submit to your inevitable and sublime aggrandizement, O my country, and, as Athens became Greece, as Rome became Christendom, you, France, become the world!30

We have no idea whether Eakins read these words of Hugo (which were published in the 1867 Paris-Guide), but the young artist’s expressed interest in “human nature”

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Figure 20. Cham, “Les étrangers à Paris: Les orientaux à Paris,” in Paris-Guide (Paris: Librairie International, 1867), facing p. 1106. Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY. Figure 21. Cham, “Les étrangers à Paris: La colonie américaine,” in Paris-Guide (Paris:

Librairie International, 1867), facing p. 1064. Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY.

bears some relation to the Frenchman’s universalizing notion of “man.” For both men, however, imperial France clearly was a privileged site for witnessing such universality. Indeed, historian Paul Greenhalgh notes the prominence of French imperial themes at the 1867 exposition compared with that of 1855. According to Greenhalgh, “Attitudes toward empire at the 1867 Exposition revealed an expansive frame of mind, humanized by an insistence upon the civilizing powers of the French nation.” As one of many illustrations of such attitudes, he cites the contemporary statement by a Tunisian consul, praising the French for the “benefits of their civilization” and for being “enemies of isolation.” Such references to “civilization” indicate that the exposition’s imperial message contained a corollary lesson about Europe’s special place within a global comparative scheme of human social evolution. According to an official American report on the fair, the “great end in view” was “the exhibition of the objects of all nations in such a manner as to invite and facilitate comparison and study.”31 In addition to exhibiting foreign objects, the 1867 exposition was the first world’s fair to place exotic people on display. For example, Greenhalgh points out that the North African exhibits functioned essentially as “tableaux-vivants,” with their human subjects attracting more attention than either their artifacts or the exotic architectural pavilions that housed them. Confirmation of the latter point can be found in a contemporary English guidebook, which described the exposition’s “chief attraction” as “its foreign denizens and habitations, and the ‘Gallery of the History of Labour,’ illustrating the various phases through which human industry has gradually passed, from the rude age of stone to the present period of refinement.” In a manner consistent with the Smithsonian’s comparative spindle exhibit (see Fig. 3) but animated on a colossal scale, the 1867 exposition thus presented actual human specimens as living evidence of evolutionary difference.32 Such exhibition logic obviously touted the imperial superiority of France vis-àvis its colonies. At the same time, it helped the emperor manage labor relations at home by posing the technological progress of industrial capitalism as a preferred modern alternative to domestic artisan-craft traditions. This was especially important in light of a worsening economic recession and growing class tensions at the time, which eventually helped give rise to the Communard rebellion in 1871. Historian David Harvey indicates that Napoleon III made a point of inviting French artisan-craft workers to the 1867 exposition as a way of promoting the benefits of new industrial technology and laissez-faire capitalism. In such a context, comparative displays of nonindustrial craftsmanship by North Africans and other exotic non-European people implicitly conferred a sense of evolutionary backwardness upon all artisan labor. Thus the fair functioned as a spectacle of human

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difference in technological and economic terms, carefully orchestrated to be consumed by millions of visitors through the progressive modern discourses of evolution and market capitalism.33 Eakins was amongst the many strangers and consumers of that discursive spectacle. He visited the exposition several times and enthusiastically recounted what he had seen in letters to his family and friends. To the consternation of some art historians, he said relatively little about the official art exhibits and never mentioned the unofficial solo shows held outside the exposition grounds by the French modernist painters Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. Instead, Eakins concentrated on the more popular national displays of modern machinery, the restaurants with their representative people and fashions, and the exhibits of pre-industrial craft. Of them all, his favorite featured what he called “the beautiful mosaic work of the Moors on their jewelry,” a demonstration by North African artisan laborers at the Egyptian Exhibition, located in an exotic pavilion known as the Okel. Eakins provided the following comparative description: I took interest in nothing more than in seeing these black[s] working with tools entirely dissimilar with our own. . . . The old fellow sits down on it cross-legged wraps the string of a bow around the nose of this primitive lathe and then takes the bow in the left hand and saws in and out with it while he grasps his heavy chisel between his hand and bare foot. . . . The furnace for melting gold and silver is a little bit of thing and the bellows are made of the stomach of a camel with no boards and are squeezed by the hand. The rough hammerings are afterwards made into rings, bracelets or ear rings and are covered with ornamentation conspicuous among which always shines out the crescent. . . . They make matting there too. Two Moors sitting cross legged alongside one another and on the strings take the straws in their fingers and poke them in and out . . . I guess they never thought of making the strings themselves go up and down . . . like our weaving machine would do it, but they certainly must have the credit of being very dexterous and they work very fast.34

In keeping with the pervasive evolutionary themes of Western “civilization” and industrial technology surrounding the exposition, Eakins regarded the African tools as “primitive” compared with “our” modern “machine.” Such observations were also consistent with lessons he had learned during his grammar and high school education only a few years before. At Central High in Philadelphia, Eakins had carefully rendered a modern lathe and other mechanical forms, so his assessment of the African technology comes as no surprise. Nevertheless, in a statement perhaps indirectly reflecting his own family’s artisan roots, he expressed admiration for the speedy dexterity of the “Moors.” His careful verbal description—comparable to the sort of pictorial realism found in The Dancing Lesson (see Plate 1)—suggests a real curiosity, even fascination, with their craftsmanship and customs.

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Yet Eakins did not perceive those different customs as exemplifying an alternative “culture,” nor did he draw a symmetrical equation between Western and non-Western traditions. He also apparently felt no overwhelming romantic nostalgia here for artisan traditions increasingly displaced by the sort of modern technology championed elsewhere at the fair. Instead, the pre-industrial Egyptian techniques struck him as “entirely dissimilar with our own.” Eakins could not imagine the possibility of cultural diffusion between his world and that of these “blacks,” who “never thought of making the strings themselves go up and down . . . like our weaving machine would do it.” Though conveyed in a mild, nonabrasive manner, the young American art student clearly perceived the African craftsmen as occupying an earlier stage in the evolutionary history of labor. His was precisely the sort of perception that Napoleon III wanted visitors to take away from the exposition. Two years later, Eakins would make a similar assessment of Egyptian industry in a letter praising various orientalist works by Gérôme, depicting “their peaceful arts, their treading the grain with oxen & their machines their arts their little shops, their delicate workmanship & fairy like houses their tending cattle like in the days of Methusaleh & Solomon.” To Eakins, life and labor in Egypt remained unchanged since biblical times.35

Orientalist Aesthetics As we have seen, Eakins’s views of Egypt were mediated by Gérôme’s paintings and by exhibits at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, but they also conformed to the dominant European aesthetic ideal of the Orient as a timeless place untouched by modernity. Historians of anthropology refer broadly to such a perception of timelessness as the “ethnographic present,” or “denial of coevalness,” a categorical refusal by many Westerners to envision progressive moral and technological change—social evolution—in the non-Western world. Accordingly, orientalist art of the nineteenth century tended to ignore evidence of modernization in North Africa and other areas then being transformed by European colonization and empire. Historical evidence of such transformation is not hard to find. In a recent study of orientalism, for example, art historian Roger Benjamin has noted that, in 1849, France celebrated nearly twenty years of colonial rule in Algeria by destroying the old Turkish Palace of the Deys (in Algiers) and constructing in its stead an enormous new imperial Place du Gouvernement. Despite the spectacular effects of that colonial prequel to Haussmannization, says Benjamin, “the march of modernity itself in the Algerian colony was generally not a valid subject for serious art.”36

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The same was true of the Suez Canal and other modernizing initiatives in Egypt under Isma’il Pasha, the Ottoman viceroy from 1863 to 1879. Eakins’s teachers, Gérôme and Bonnat, joined the entourage of French dignitaries invited to attend the canal’s opening ceremony in 1869, but neither painted any pictures commemorating that major feat of modern engineering. European orientalists considered such things to be lacking in Oriental character and therefore insufficiently picturesque. As Roger Benjamin puts it, the aesthetic conventions of orientalism required “paintings to image otherness—architectural, ethnographic, or climatic,” not evidence of European-style modernization.37 No artist satisfied the imperatives of orientalism more insistently or successfully than Gérôme, a point amply demonstrated by The Prisoner (see Fig. 4), A BashiBazouk (see Fig. 15), or A View of the Plain of Thebes in Upper Egypt (1857, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, France), works that represented “the East” as an unchanging land of Islamic cruelty, exotic bric-a-brac, and pharaonic monuments. In portraits, genre paintings, and landscapes, Gérôme realistically constructed the Orient as a site of timeless difference untouched by modernity. Nineteenth-century reviewers of his work repeatedly underscored such ideas. In an 1857 Salon review, for instance, the eminent French writer Théophile Gautier described the distant Colossi of Memnon (ca. 1417–1379 b.c.e.) that appear in The Plain of Thebes as “two mountains carved in human form . . . which neither time, nor earthquakes, nor even the most terrible of conquerors were able to dislodge from their bases!”38 Gérôme’s reputation for representing human difference realistically in racial terms tended to dominate reviews of his work. In this regard, Gautier established a common critical refrain in his 1857 Salon review when he praised the French master’s “ethnographic veracity.” Describing Gérôme’s attention to detail in depicting exotic figures, Gautier said that “M. [Étienne-René-Augustin] Serres, the anthropologist, would be able to consult with absolute certainty these specimens of unrecorded races. . . . M. Gérôme satisfies one of the most demanding instincts of the age: the desire that people have to know more about each other than that which is revealed in imaginary portraits. He has everything which is needed in order to fulfill this important mission.” In another review around the same time, Gautier lauded Gérôme as an “artist traveler” who “has made numerous pencil portrait studies of different characteristic types; there are fellahs, Copts, Arabs, negroes of mixed blood from Sanandaj and from Kordofan—so exactly observed that they could be used in the anthropological treatises of M. Serres.”39 Rather than supply documentary images for Serres and the French government’s Muséum d’histoire naturelle, however, Gérôme pursued more lucrative venues for his art. As the son-in-law of the powerful French dealer and publisher Adolphe Goupil, Gérôme enjoyed many commercial opportunities for the dissemination

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Figure 22. Charles Bargue (after Jean-Léon Gérôme), Head of a Fellah, Three-Quarter View, lithograph. Published in Charles Bargue, Cours de dessin (Paris: Goupil & Cie, 1868), première livraison, pl. 4. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

of his work, including the publication of a large edition of photogravure reproductions with an accompanying text written by Eakins’s friend Earl Shinn (under the pseudonym Edward Strahan). In 1868, when Eakins was still his student, Gérôme also published ethnographic drawings in a teaching manual titled Cours de dessin, compiled by a French pupil named Charles Bargue. An example from that publication, titled Head of a Fellah (Fig. 22), depicts one of the “characteristic types” that Gautier had mentioned in his earlier review. In its didactic clarity and exotic human subject matter, Gérôme’s drawing embodies the pedagogical infrastructure and aesthetic imperatives central to academic orientalism. As a nearly contemporary student effort produced in Gérôme’s atelier at the École, Eakins’s Man in a Turban (see Fig. 16) evinces the impact of that pedagogy in its conventional bust format, descriptive linearity, and Arab subject with “characteristic” headdress. In the absence of direct testimony from Eakins about his drawing, we can infer something of its significance from contemporary critical responses to the orientalism of Gérôme. The dutiful American student here emulated his master’s “ethnographic veracity.”40 Around the same moment, in 1868, another critic named Émile Galichon echoed Gautier’s comments of the previous decade by describing Gérôme as a “painter-

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ethnographer” who “excels in rendering the proper character of the various races.” According to Galichon, Gérôme had a “remarkable aptitude for seizing and rendering the typical characteristics of diverse peoples.” Given the artist’s ethnographic “mission,” such recurring references to “character” and “characteristics” inevitably bring to mind Taine’s theory of art as both “fossil shell” and document of racially informed national character. Gérôme and Taine probably exchanged ideas about such matters directly, either in their official capacities as professors at the École or in private, for they occupied intersecting Parisian social circles. Both men frequented the literary salon of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte and had several friends in common, including writers like Gautier and the Goncourt brothers, Jules and Edmond.41 The allies and admirers of Gérôme continued to heap the same terms of praise upon him for decades. In 1889, one of the French painter’s other American students, George de Forest Brush, was quoted in The Century Magazine saying, “His strong love of character is, I believe, key to his choice of subjects, which are most frequently of semi-barbaric people, in whom individuality is more strongly pronounced than among the civilized”—a comment recalling Eakins’s statement about having better opportunities for observing “strongly marked” “character” in Paris. Looking back on Gérôme’s career in 1901 (three years before the painter died), writer Frédéric Masson celebrated the master’s powers of “invention in the grouping of personages, in researching the symbols of each nation, in the pursuit of characteristic types of the human races,” resulting in “a sort of ethnographic résumé.” In such art criticism, as in the theories of Taine, the concepts of “character” and “race” became so closely linked as to be practically inseparable. Yet there were no references to “culture” or “cultures” in the modern anthropological sense.42 Even critics who disliked Gérôme’s work tended to acknowledge his accuracy and ethnographic realism in depicting premodern otherness, if only to hold such artistic attributes up to scorn. For example, in 1866 an American critic for The Galaxy named Eugene Benson disparaged the French master as “not a great painter, but a man of great intellectual force,” “impartial, judicious, thoroughly trained, learned, exact,” an artist whose works “have no abounding life and no vitality of color” although they stand unparalleled in their “fidelity” and “intensity,” their “accuracy and thoroughness.” According to Benson, “Gérôme has associated his name with the East, and attained . . . distinction with his renderings of the mournful country of camels and of Arabs.”43 Similarly, the vituperative attacks by contemporary French modernist-realist critics ultimately underscored Gérôme’s reputation for empirical observation. One such critic was Jules-Antoine Castagnary, who championed Gustave Courbet and

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coined the term “Orientalism” as a derogatory epithet. In an 1857 Salon review lambasting the works by Gérôme that Gautier had praised, Castagnary reviled artisttravelers who went “far off to search in the Orient, deep in the desert, for a nature that is extraordinary and lacks any relation to our ideas and our temperament.” Such nationalist criticism implicitly conceded the orientalist painter’s wider international perspective and firsthand knowledge of the world beyond Europe. In an interesting historical irony, then, Castagnary, the champion of modernist realism, espoused a kind of aesthetic isolationism in opposition to the imperialist international orientalism of Gérôme. According to Roger Benjamin, there was “a logical congruence between rejecting European colonial hegemony and the realists’ call for French artists to occupy themselves with the problems of the national school on French soil, to prefer France to the Orient.” But as a result, says Benjamin, Castagnary was “almost xenophobic” in rejecting “any image of the nation made outside the hexagon of true France.” That Eakins pondered taking a trip to Algiers and instead ended up in Spain—the latter being a topos of excursions by modernist and academic realist painters alike during the 1860s—suggests his ambiguous position with respect to such debates. In any case, Eakins never became ideologically engaged in either of the “colonial” or “xenophobic” positions identified by Benjamin.44 Can we say anything else about Eakins’s Man in a Turban (see Fig. 16) aside from noting that it is a highly conventional student exercise indebted to the established academic conventions of European orientalism? Executed in graphite and charcoal on blue French paper, the drawing resembles Gérôme’s contemporary Head of a Fellah (see Fig. 22) in its straightforward use of contour line and shading to define the forms of the model’s face and clothing. Eakins’s unusual point of view from behind his model probably was just an accident of the young artist’s location in the studio that week, but it provided him an opportunity to concentrate on the subject’s distinctive North African turban. Areas of erasure and redrawing around the chin and back of the head suggest difficulty with details of physiognomy, possibly in response to slight changes in the model’s position from one studio session to the next. We might also speculate that such marks indicate a deeper epistemological struggle on Eakins’s part to reconcile inherited racial profiles about “men of the East” with the empirical truth about this particular figure. Such speculation is impossible to verify, but struggle of that sort would constitute a visual analogue to the kind of verbal hesitation expressed by Eakins in his letter describing “the whole Spanish type.” In other words, the drawing suggests a pictorial form of writing “under erasure,” to borrow Derrida’s term once again.45 More certain—and in some ways more interesting—is the fact that Eakins went to the trouble of bringing Man in a Turban home to Philadelphia and preserving

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the drawing for posterity. Evidently, he valued this student exercise as an important memento or souvenir of his European training. Also, he probably viewed Man in a Turban as an intriguing ethnographic document, a truthful record of his encounter with an exotic human subject whose “character” was “strongly marked” and rarely seen in the United States. Viewing the drawing in those terms would have been consistent with Taine’s theory of artistic naturalism then dominating the École. At the same time, the drawing embodied “civilization” in an evolutionary sense for it also documented a process of French academic education and aesthetic refinement—Matthew Arnold’s “pursuit of perfection”—that Europeans and Euroamericans took to be unparalleled anywhere in the world. In its own small way, though, Eakins’s Man in a Turban unwittingly contributed to the undoing of evolutionary assumptions. Not only did the drawing represent one of the many “nomads” populating Paris during the 1860s. As a portable ethnographic object—like Taine’s “fossil shell”—it epitomized the increasingly nomadic mobility of all artifacts and peoples at the time. Though only a minor work, so conventional as to be banal, Man in a Turban nevertheless bespoke the modern circulation of difference on multiple levels. As such, it signaled the loosening of inherited evolutionary categories, which presupposed a static natural order governed by a predictable hierarchy, geography, and pathway of human development. Just as Eakins was forced to redraw the shifting contour line of his model’s face, the linear framework of social evolutionism was being shaken by the mobile diversity of modernity.

The Art of Resignation The largest of Eakins’s few surviving Parisian oil sketches is Female Model (see Plate 7). A work never exhibited publicly during the artist’s lifetime but known during most of the twentieth century as A Negress, it depicts the head and nude torso of an anonymous dark-skinned woman—possibly an African or AfroCaribbean—posed against an undefined greenish beige background. Unlike the light-skinned European models that appear with no clothing accessories in other oil sketches by Eakins from Paris, this woman wears a brightly colored madras head wrap and red coral earring. She looks away somberly from the beholder and from the implied light source beyond the frame at left, leaving her eyes, breasts, and left shoulder mostly in shadows. The resulting darkness of her facial features creates a physiognomic silhouette that contrasts sharply with the lighter background color as well as with the scarf in her hair. Painted thinly and loosely in a palette of earth tones, the picture constitutes a competent but not virtuosic stu-

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dent effort by Eakins. In nineteenth-century academic jargon, this was called an ébauche, a highly standardized head-and-shoulders oil sketch intended to teach students how to delineate contours rapidly, add highlights, and distribute tones. Judging from the murky formlessness of the woman’s breasts, Eakins struggled with the sketch somewhat, but he managed to depict the details of her face, head wrap, and earring convincingly.46 As with Man in a Turban, no verbal testimony survives from the artist or his contemporaries regarding Female Model. After interviewing the artist’s widow, Lloyd Goodrich titled the work A Negress and dated it to Eakins’s years in Paris, a judgment corroborated by its ébauche format and uncertain technique. Despite such technical uncertainty, Eakins considered the sketch valuable enough to bring home with him from Europe to preserve for posterity. Art historians have generally ignored Female Model, apparently considering it a minor student exercise irrelevant to the artist’s later development as a painter of American subjects. The few scholars who have bothered to interpret the work concur in viewing it as an expression of the artist’s interracial sympathy. For example, in 1966, Sidney Kaplan described the painting as “both warmly exotic and brownly real,” exemplifying Eakins’s attention to “facets of the Negro’s inmost being.” More recently, Hugh Honour has observed that the woman’s “gentle, sadly resigned expression” suggests the artist’s “sensitivity to the predicament of blacks in the United States.” According to Guy McElroy, the “sensuous plastic qualities” of Eakins’s treatment effectively “relate the mood of the sitter to the viewer.”47 Though admittedly a youthful sketch, Female Model deserves more critical attention than it has received, in part because the “mood” and “sadly resigned expression” noted by McElroy and Honour foreshadowed defining characteristics of Eakins’s celebrated late portraiture. In his 1895 portrait Maud Cook (Fig. 23), for example, we see an echo of the earlier work in the sitter’s look of psychological interiority, communicated through her inward gaze and pensive tilt of the head, which similarly creates a physiognomic profile in marked contrast with the background. Differences of race, class, clothing, geography, chronology, and technical maturity obviously separate Female Model from Eakins’s late portraits of middleclass Euroamerican sitters. Nevertheless, they share important conceptual and structural similarities (including virtually identical dimensions in the case of Maud Cook), suggesting that toward the end of his career—after the notorious Pennsylvania Academy scandal—Eakins turned back to his earliest academic lessons in “painting heads” for inspiration. Having preserved Female Model in his studio all those years, he could have consulted it directly for ideas. If so, its melancholy otherness offered a useful prototype for projecting emotional depth and alienation onto his late portrait sitters.48

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Figure 23. Thomas Eakins, Maud Cook (Mrs. Robert C. Reid), 1895. Oil on canvas, 62.2 × 51 cm (241⁄2 × 201⁄16 in.). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; Bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A., 1903. 1961.18.18. Photo: Yale University Art Gallery/Art Resource, NY.

Female Model also merits closer analysis in relation to its immediate artistic and historical context because of the particular manner in which it constructed an exotic human subject. Contrary to the assertion by Honour, Female Model does not explicitly address “the predicament of blacks in the United States.” Instead, the work clearly exemplifies once again Eakins’s formative international encounter with circulating human difference amongst strangers in Paris as well as the mediating influence upon him of European art. Depicted here was another anonymous “nomad” of sorts, apparently a colonial émigré displaced to the imperial capital from afar (or a descendant thereof ). As represented by Eakins, the model’s dark skin, nudity, and exotic headdress broached the prevailing aesthetic conventions of French orientalism, along with the asymmetrical colonial relations and evolutionary stereotypes that they presupposed. Those same conventions and stereotypes dictated the model’s “sadly resigned expression,” for Eakins’s contemporaries routinely referred to the Orient as a place of fatal resignation, signaling evolutionary capitulation to modern European progress. As we have seen, for example, the Galaxy critic Eugene Benson in 1866 described “the East” as a “mournful country of camels and Arabs.” Such comments were consistent with Eakins’s own statement about “the East” as a place of “deep feeling” and sensual laziness, unchanged “since the days of Methusaleh & Solomon.” A few years earlier, in an important 1863 essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” Charles Baude-

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laire famously associated the affective withdrawal of modern prostitutes with what he called the “resigned fatalism of the Orient.” Acknowledging this orientalist discursive context renders scholarly claims about the interracial sympathy and sensitivity of Female Model somewhat problematic, not least because Baudelaire’s reference to prostitution is relevant to the thematic content and aesthetic conventions governing Eakins’s sketch, as we will see momentarily.49 This particular ébauche by Eakins invoked an enduring French orientalist type of the négresse, an eroticized African female servant or enslaved harem woman familiar in continental art and literature since the eighteenth century but still current in various forms during the 1860s. In Female Model (a title contrived recently to soften the racial edge of “A Negress,” though the latter undoubtedly reflected Eakins’s nineteenth-century perceptions more accurately), we do not literally see acts of servitude, but the woman’s nudity, dark skin, and Oriental resignation clearly alluded to the type by conveying a poignant, generic sense of submission to the beholder. Historically speaking, the depicted model also implicitly submitted to artistic conventions that were deeply informed by French colonialism. Precisely how knowledgeable Eakins was about the European “Negress” tradition is difficult to say, but a brief survey of artistic precedents and contemporary comparisons helps situate his sketch in a specific orientalist niche. The point here is not to claim that Eakins’s student exercise ranks with such comparative works in importance or even that he consciously quoted them, but rather to show the trajectory of a type that had become reified as an artistic formula by the time he assayed it in Paris. In treating such a formula, Eakins was not motivated by cultural or interracial empathy so much as by strategic professional imperatives. That is, Female Model constituted a technical hurdle in his artistic training—a student rite of passage—involving the production of a desired realist aesthetic effect then known (per Baudelaire, for example) as “the resigned fatalism of the Orient”— an effect that twentieth-century scholars like Honour have confused with genuine “sensitivity.” Female Model also indicates how Eakins, in rehearsing such an effect, forged aspects of his mature style amongst strangers in modern Paris. Often represented as a bare-breasted or scantily clad attendant in a white woman’s boudoir, the servile French “Negress” personified African enslavement. The precise geographic origins of the “Negress” were usually left unclear in art and literature; she could have been enslaved in France’s Caribbean colonies or encountered in mercantile relations with “the Orient” (a vague geographic designation generally understood by Europeans to encompass North Africa, Asia Minor, and the Holy Land, but also East Asia). In a grandiose 1733 portrait by Jean-Marc Nattier, for example, an aristocratic French woman named Mademoiselle Clermont masquerades as a Turkish “sultana,” surrounded by an en-

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tourage of “Negress” attendants, one of whom wears a dress with low décolletage (Wallace Collection, London). The elements of servitude, sensuality, and masquerade visible in Nattier’s picture became central tropes in the enduring “Negress” tradition.50 With the end of the ancien régime, the type underwent modification amid French debates over slavery and abolition. By the early nineteenth century, full frontal nudity in “Negress” imagery could function as a complex metaphor for black emancipation, through a racial reconfiguration of classical emblems for political “Liberty” (traditionally associated by Western artists with the exposed breast of a European woman). The most celebrated artistic example in this vein was Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of a Black Woman (another recently retitled work, known previously as Portrait d’une négresse) (Fig. 24), painted during a postRevolutionary moment when slavery was temporarily abolished in France (1794– 1802), just prior to its reinstatement by Emperor Napoleon I. Despite being a “portrait,” the work depicted an anonymous model. With exposed breast, tricolor fabrics, and head wrap in the form of a neoclassical Phrygian cap, the woman projected a nationalistic allegory of liberty-as-emancipation. Eakins could have seen the painting when he visited the Louvre.51 Despite its apparent progressivism, Benoist’s abolitionist allegory retained obvious overtones of eroticism and colonial servitude. According to art historian James Smalls, Benoist’s Portrait, “although seemingly sympathetic to blacks and women, is actually part of the French notion of ‘dressing up’ blacks, displaying them, and injecting them with politics and ideology particular to French concerns.” Another scholar, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, points out that “it is clear from the evidence of the picture itself that the ‘negress’ could be made into beautiful painting”—not a minor achievement in light of the predominantly racist art-critical reactions when Benoist exhibited it at the Salon of 1800. Yet, as Grigsby also notes, “Benoist’s family and fortune were deeply bound up with colonialism,” such that “by depicting the negress in the vaguely classicizing white drapery which was the height of fin-de-siècle fashion,” the artist “also performed an act of assimilation, integrating the black woman’s body into French pictorial traditions and sartorial habits.” Whether “Benoist may have aspired to do so as an abolitionist or as a fondly patronizing colonialist,” says Grigsby, “the anonymous black body— deprived of proper name and stripped bare—necessarily functioned as a mute screen for Frenchmen’s disparate projections.” In other words, the work tells us more about the French artist’s expedient liberalism and professional aspirations than about African emancipation.52 France permanently abolished slavery in 1848, but artists of the Second Empire regularly recycled aspects of Benoist’s colonial vision of black “Liberty.” Charles

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Figure 24. Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of a Black Woman (Portrait d’une négresse), 1800. Oil on canvas, 81 × 65 cm (317⁄8 × 259⁄16 in.). Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Cordier’s Capresse des Colonies of 1861 provides a case in point (see Fig. 17). Having traveled to colonial Algeria twice during the 1850s on behalf of the French government, Cordier produced the sculpture as part of a series of busts documenting different racial types for the Gallery of Anthropology and Ethnography at the imperial Muséum d’histoire naturelle in Paris. Capresse des Colonies (the archaic French word capresse being basically synonymous with négresse) lacks the overt emblematic references to “Liberty” in Benoist’s painting, but its classical bust format performs a related act of European assimilation, following Grigsby. Besides being a sculptor, Cordier belonged to the French Society of Anthropology and even lectured to that organization on artistic matters of ethnographic representation. In a lecture delivered to the Society in 1862, Cordier espoused unusually liberal, relativist views for his time regarding race and beauty: Because beauty is not the province of a privileged race, I give to the world of art the idea of the universality of beauty. Every race has its beauty, which differs from that of other races. The most beautiful Negro is not the one who looks most like us, nor the one who presents the most pronounced characteristics associated with his race. It is the individual in whom are united such forms and traits, and a face that reflects with harmony and balance the essential moral and intellectual character of the Ethiopian race.53

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We have no evidence that Eakins knew of Cordier’s work, the Society of Anthropology, or the Muséum d’histoire naturelle, so it seems unlikely that the young American encountered the Frenchman’s ideas about relative beauty. Even if he had, such aesthetic relativism did not preclude racialist assumptions or hierarchical thinking. Writing in 1865, Cordier told the director of the imperial museums: “I wish to present the [African] race just as it is, in its own beauty, absolutely true to life, with its passions, its fatalism, in its quiet pride and conceit, in its fallen grandeur, but the principles of which have remained since antiquity.” Despite his pronouncements about black beauty, Cordier remained beholden to stereotypes about African “passions” and the evolutionary “fatalism” of the Orient. Even the sumptuous polychromatic materials used by the artist to execute works such as Capresse des Colonies—including onyx extracted from Algerian quarries by French mining companies—bespeak colonial relations on a formal level. Like the rest of Eakins’s nineteenth-century artistic contemporaries, Cordier viewed human difference as a problem of aesthetics and natural science, not modern anthropological understanding of “cultures” or diffusion. Far from seeing or celebrating cultural diffusion, Cordier actually perceived the circulation of people negatively as a biological phenomenon of racial mixing that threatened the established ethnographic categories upon which he had based his art. As he told the director of the imperial museums, he feared “the day when the forces of the universe could cause a merging of the races.”54 A later example in the French “Negress” tradition provides an instructive contemporary foil to Eakins’s Female Model. At the Salon of 1869, the French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux exhibited a bust titled Negress (also known as Pourquoi naître esclave? or “Why Born a Slave?”) (Fig. 25), a work closely related to the female personification of Africa in the artist’s Four Continents fountain later installed at the Luxembourg Garden, Paris. Writing in a letter to his father that year, Eakins lavishly praised Carpeaux’s sculptural decorations at the Paris Opéra for their lifelike effects, but he did not specifically mention the French sculptor’s Negress after visiting the Salon. In that work, Carpeaux skillfully deployed the dynamic vitality of Beaux-Arts realism to create a sensational abolitionist image. Yet his allegory of emancipation, not unlike the Revolutionary-era painting by Benoist, subjected the black female body to erotic display in a manner that compromised the progressive political message. Indeed, art historian Hugh Honour has cited the Carpeaux sculpture in identifying a structural contradiction at the heart of the entire “Negress” tradition: A remarkable increase in images of female slaves in European art exhibitions after emancipation in the United States—when abolitionism ceased to be a popular cause despite

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Figure 25. Jean-Baptiste

Carpeaux, Negress (Pourquoi naître esclave?), 1868. Marble, H 67 cm (263⁄8 in.). Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.

the persistence of slavery elsewhere—suggests that they appealed, and may always have appealed, to libidinous as much as philanthropic instincts. They are very often equivocal in their moral condemnation of chattel slavery and reflect male desires for the absolute possession of women. Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s strongly emotive bust of a black woman, bound by a rope twisted round her arms and cutting across her full breasts, is a case in point.55

Eakins downplayed the type’s erotic dimension in Female Model by representing the nude woman in a less alluring pose, with eyes averted in a look of introspection. But such a look still effectively allied her with Oriental “fatalism” and thus embodied a sort of political quietism of Eakins’s part, akin to what we have already encountered in his sanguine acceptance of Napoleon III’s liberal authoritarianism and the ambiguity of The Dancing Lesson (see Plate 1). Whereas Carpeaux’s eroticized slave at least attempts to break free, the woman depicted by Eakins seems stoically resigned to her predicament—her aesthetic bondage—as a matter of fate. By the late 1860s, some French artists inflected the iconography of the “Negress” type with a new emphasis on its formal dimension, often referring to earlier landmark orientalist tableaux such as Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers (1834, Louvre, Paris) or Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Odalisque with Slave (1839–

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Figure 26. Frédéric Bazille, La Toilette, 1869–70. Oil on canvas, 132 × 127 cm (52 × 50 in.). Musée Fabre, Montpellier. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

40, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University) as models. Whereas Ingres’s painting mainly appealed to artists of a classical orientation and that of Delacroix became a touchstone for modernists, such stylistic distinctions were hardly absolute.56 Painted shortly after France had initially colonized Algeria in 1830, Delacroix’s Women of Algiers featured a dark-skinned, colorfully attired “Negress” ministering to the needs of three languorous concubines in a sumptuous harem interior. Art historian Diane Pitman notes that a younger generation of painters of varied stylistic orientations, including Frédéric Bazille, Henri Regnault, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, particularly admired Delacroix’s work as “a painting without subject.” Viewing Women of Algiers as a prototype of formal experimentation, they disregarded its colonial content and appropriated its supposedly disinterested play of color, texture, and light—all the while maintaining the exotic, interracial accoutrements of

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Figure 27. Frédéric Bazille, Young Woman with Peonies (Négresse aux pivoines), 1870. Oil on canvas, 60 × 75 cm (235⁄8 × 291⁄2 in.). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. Image © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

the harem. According to such formalist logic, the skin of the “Negress” became merely one patch of dark color in a larger aesthetic pattern, devoid of historical or political significance. Viewed another way, of course, this formalist reorientation of pictorial values merely shifted the effects of colonialism into a new aesthetic register. As the art historian Griselda Pollock puts it, “The woman of Africa is not a protagonist in the painting but simply the site of color.”57 In its mood of somber emotional restraint and in specific pictorial details, Eakins’s Female Model closely recalls a series of exactly contemporary paintings by Bazille. Indeed, the woman depicted by Eakins more than generically resembles the figure of an anonymous black maidservant appearing in Bazille’s La Toilette and two works titled Young Woman with Peonies (originally Négresse aux pivoines), all painted between the winter of 1869 and spring of 1870, shortly before the French artist died in battle during the Franco-Prussian War (Figs. 26, 27). As in Eakins’s Female Model, Bazille’s La Toilette presents a dark-skinned woman with bare breast and madras headscarf. In Young Woman with Peonies, the figure wears clothing, but her tilted head projects an expression similar to that seen in the picture by Eakins. Whereas Honour said the woman depicted by Eakins looks “sadly resigned,”

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Pitman has described Bazille’s model in Young Woman with Peonies as “withdrawn,” “calm,” and “subdued.”58 Precisely when and under what circumstances we do not know, but Eakins and Bazille evidently employed the same female model to pose for their respective “Negress” pictures. Visual confirmation of that fact occurs not only in the woman’s physiognomic similarity throughout the pictures in question but also in the small yet significant detail of the solitary red coral earring worn by the model on alternating ears in Eakins’s Female Model and Bazille’s Young Woman with Peonies (Figs. 28, 29). The earring’s setting consists of one large coral ball surrounded by a ring of smaller ones. Although earrings were conventional exotic attributes of African women in orientalist pictures, this particular design is unusual enough to rule out coincidence. Thus the earring constitutes a Morellian proof of sorts, verifying that a single (albeit still anonymous) female model posed for paintings by these two young artists working in Paris at the same historical moment.59 We do not know whether Eakins encountered the woman in Gérôme’s atelier or elsewhere. His Paris account books indicate that he occasionally hired models of his own for studies conducted independently of the École during 1868 and 1869, but none of the pertinent entries refers to Female Model or identifies such a person. In letters written by Bazille in 1869–70, the artist mentioned an anonymous female model that he had hired to pose for his paintings, referring to her in one instance as “my negress.” Elsewhere he mentions “three charming models, one of them a superb negress.” Evidently, this unnamed “negress” was not the AfroCaribbean woman known around Paris as “Laure” (surname unknown) who had posed as the servant in Olympia for Bazille’s friend Manet a few years earlier. Absent further documentary evidence, it remains a mystery as to whether Eakins actually met Bazille, for the two men traveled in very different circles—one as a student in the orbit of Gérôme and the École, the other in the circle of Manet and the Independents. The young American painter probably saw works by Bazille when he visited the 1870 Salon, but the Frenchman’s “Negress” pictures were not among them (they never were publicly exhibited during Bazille’s lifetime). Conceivably, Eakins could have visited Bazille’s quasi-public Paris studio at 9, rue de la Condamine, near Montmartre, on the Right Bank, but no evidence of such a visit survives. Nor did Eakins mention Bazille in any of his surviving letters.60 Consequently, the intriguing discovery of a shared model hardly lets us align Eakins with Bazille, Manet, or the rest of the mythic nucleus of French modernism. Rather, if anything, it simply indicates the multiplicity of black models in Paris and the common currency of orientalist motifs such as the “Negress” both inside and outside the academy at the time, regardless of the aforementioned critiques of orientalism by realists such as Castagnary. As Pollock observes,

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Figure 28. Thomas Eakins, Female Model (A Negress), ca. 1867–69 (detail of Plate 7). Oil on canvas, 58.4 × 50.2 cm (23 × 193⁄4 in.). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, Mildred Anna Williams Collection, 1966.41. Figure 29. Frédéric Bazille, Young Woman with Peonies (Négresse aux pivoines), 1870 (detail of Fig. 27). Oil on canvas, 60 × 75 cm (235⁄8 × 291⁄2 in.). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. Image © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

“Painters ambitious to negotiate modernity’s representation would have to pass through the defile of Orientalism” in these years. Similarly, Roger Benjamin has demonstrated that orientalism functioned as a kind of artistic playbook for artists ranging from salonniers like Gérôme to the Impressionist Renoir. By acknowledging that the “Negress” was an aesthetic trope circulating extensively in imperial Paris during the late 1860s, we gain a better sense of the dangers in reading too much “sympathy” or “sensitivity” into Eakins’s work. Instead of expressing intercultural understanding or sympathy toward racial others, Eakins and Bazille deployed melancholy negritude as an artistic formula. They did so for aesthetic reasons because they aspired to achieve success in the profession of painting at a time when that occupation was increasingly marked by formalism, orientalism, and colonialism.61 For that reason, despite the shared “nomadic” model and related thematic similarities uniting the works of Eakins and Bazille, we should not be surprised to find important stylistic differences between these artists. Eakins diverged markedly from Bazille in the technical details of brushstroke, surface handling, and color. While both young men approached the blank, monochromatic background of their respective “Negress” images with straightforward simplicity, Bazille generally employed a much thicker impasto and more varied palette. Whereas Eakins used tra-

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ditional thin, transparent glazes and local colors, Bazille achieved a rich, chalky flatness obviously indebted to the work of Frans Hals and Manet. For all their stylistic differences, though, both artists created a similar mood of subdued resignation consistent with stereotypes about “Oriental fatalism.” In doing so, they noticeably diverged from the example of Manet’s Olympia, which had featured a more vibrant, emotionally upbeat vision of the “Negress” type as part of the artist’s scandalous exposé of modern French prostitution (see Fig. 18). As Pollock argues, Manet’s “Negress” not only provided formalist “color” but also critically unveiled the orientalist trappings of contemporary Parisian brothels, specifically their use of dark-skinned servants to stage fictive harem scenes for clients. By alluding to such current realities, Olympia also violated orientalism’s central aesthetic-evolutionary tenet about not acknowledging modernity. Manet’s painting revealed the inner logic of orientalism, specifically its displacement of modern bourgeois sexual fantasies onto exotic colonial subjects and sites. What distinguished Manet’s Olympia from other “Negress” paintings of its time, according to Pollock, was the way in which “its factual reconstruction of the deceit” in Parisian brothels disclosed “the theatrical masquerade of Orientalist painting.” Meticulously staged works in this vein by Gérôme (such as The Moorish Bath, ca. 1870, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) epitomized such masquerade, but the pictures by Bazille and Eakins also dabbled in the mystifications of orientalism by recycling the motifs of exotic nudity, headscarf, coral earring, and fatalism. Despite their considerable differences, all three artists—Gérôme, Bazille, Eakins—illustrate what Pollock calls the “failed legacy” of Manet, for none took up the active critique of orientalism offered by Olympia. Rather, they acquiesced and even collaborated in orientalism’s ongoing aesthetic colonization of African “Liberty.” In that respect, their “Negress” imagery looked forward to later colonial images of Oriental fatalism in the popular sphere, including countless souvenir photographic postcards of Algeria, showing beautiful native women with breasts exposed and eyes modestly averted in the stereotypical look of resignation.62 Before judging Eakins too harshly, though, let us specify the nature of his collaboration with orientalism a bit more precisely. As a student in his early twenties, keen to succeed as a professional painter, he undoubtedly approached his Female Model mainly as an academic hurdle. After all, this was just another ébauche—one charged with an unusual exotic sensuality, but nonetheless still an exercise—and therefore not a deliberate theoretical statement about orientalist aesthetics and the politics of “Liberty” (or, for that matter, interracial sympathy and cultural understanding). His use of standard orientalist motifs and colonial stereotypes—the head wrap, earring, nudity, and somber look—demanded only a perfunctory engagement with their meaning. In a letter of 1869, Eakins even complained to his

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Figure 30. Albert Goupil, Two Models on a Terrace, 1868. Albumen print from a glass collodion negative. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

father about the monotony of studio sketching exercises and disparaged the “studymakers” among his classmates who made such work “their special trade.”63 The formulaic nature of Eakins’s encounter with the “Negress” under those conditions even seems to have informed her “sadly resigned expression,” as if the desired look of Oriental fatalism here were, in some degree, the result of physical exhaustion and/or ennui on the part of both the model and the artist. That is, faced with the monotonous academic task of representing an orientalist topos, Eakins and the woman may have experienced related feelings of boredom verging upon despondency. To characterize such an experience in terms of sympathetic “sensitivity” thus could be right in a narrow technical sense, though Eakins did not intend a deep exploration of what Kaplan called “the Negro’s inmost being,” whatever that means. Nor would Eakins have been alone in disclosing such fatigue and boredom on the faces of orientalist models at the time. For example, a contemporary photograph by Albert Goupil (son of Gérôme’s father-in-law) inadvertently revealed similar weariness, probably mixed with resentment, on the faces of two North African women as they reluctantly exposed their breasts for the beholder (Fig. 30). Expressions of this sort, the products of type, tedium, and asymmetric colonial relations, at once resisted orientalism’s masquerade and succumbed to its evolutionary discourse on “fatalism.” By unwittingly documenting such an expression in Female Model, Eakins left “Liberty” aesthetically colonized while subjecting himself to the tiresome repetition of an artistic formula.

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The Streets of Seville In September 1869, Eakins wrote to his father that he might “go over to Algiers in the sunlight & paint landscape,” because, as he said, “Open air painting is now important to me to strengthen my color & to study light.” For unspecified reasons, in December he opted to travel to Spain instead. After spending a few days in Madrid, watching a Mass at the Cathedral and admiring Velázquez’s paintings at the Prado Museum, Eakins proceeded south to Seville for half a year. His decision to go to Spain rather than Algiers most likely was prompted by a combination of personal practicality and prevailing Hispanism in Parisian artistic circles at the time. Countless European and American painters visited the Iberian Peninsula between the 1860s and 1880s, including Manet, Henri Régnault, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and William Merritt Chase. All were inspired by Spain’s exoticism and baroque artistic legacy.64 The most direct Hispanist influence upon Eakins was his other major French teacher, Léon Bonnat, whose well-known “Spanish” manner the young American characterized as “entirely different from Gérôme’s,” for it exhibited “much more freedom and color.” Travel to Spain thus permitted Eakins to pursue his own stylistic independence or artistic “liberty.” As part of that pursuit, he freely circulated through the streets of Seville, observing not only scenery in the bright Mediterranean sunlight but also some of Spain’s colorful human subjects and customs. In the words of art historian Elizabeth Milroy, Eakins went there “to study a picturesque culture at first hand.” We have no evidence that he actually used the term “culture” in that modern sense, but various Spanish people and customs definitely struck him as worthy of artistic representation.65 Shortly after arriving in Seville on December 4, 1869, Eakins produced Carmelita Requeña, a loosely brushed oil sketch depicting a seven-year-old girl whom he found dancing in the city streets for a living (Plate 8). Carmelita Requeña constituted yet another bust-length study of a figure with exotic headdress, an ébauche painted in nearly the same dimensions as those of Female Model, with a similar palette of earthy browns and reds. Eakins executed this study in a more direct and spontaneous manner, emulating the stylish “premier coup” technique then associated with Bonnat, Thomas Couture, and other fashionable European painters of the period. In terms of subject matter, Carmelita Requeña represents a younger female model with lighter complexion, fair hair, and clothes. Yet the work still projects absorption in a manner comparable to that seen in Female Model—an effect that Eakins achieved by averting the girl’s eyes downward to the right, away from the beholder, such that they appear to be closed. As the art historian Carol Osborne has observed, “Carmelita’s inward pensiveness already suggests the empathy Eakins

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felt throughout his career for the lives of his sitters.” Similarly, Milroy states that “the pensive, introspective mood which would characterize so many of Eakins’ mature portraits is already apparent here in [Carmelita’s] calm expression and concentrated gaze.” In the words of Kathleen Foster, “the painting also shows a psychological gentleness unknown to either Gérôme or Bonnat, marking the commencement of a long series of introspective portraits.”66 Such comments rightly underscore the formative importance of the artist’s European studies, but questions arise regarding the meaning of “empathy” and “psychological gentleness” when we consider the somewhat artificial circumstances in which Eakins produced Carmelita Requeña. In a letter to his sister Frances, written on Christmas Day in 1869, he explained those circumstances in detail: Some candy given me, I ate a little & then gave all the rest to a dear little girl Carmalita [sic] I am painting. I don’t think she ever had such a nice Christmas before. She is only 7 years old & has to dance in the street every day. But she likes better to stand still & be painted. She looks down at a little card on the floor so as to keep her head still & in the right place & when we gave her the goodies she ate some & put the nicest ones down on the card so she would be looking at them all the time while she posed.67

Prefiguring the paternalistic twentieth-century American GI liberating war-torn Europe, Eakins gave a piece of his candy to the impoverished model. He did so partly out of pity, but also for artistic reasons. According to Eakins, the “dear little girl” who “has to dance in the street every day” never “had such a nice Christmas before” receiving his largesse. If such statements indicate a degree of empathy and gentleness, they also reveal expediency and mild condescension, reflecting Eakins’s acceptance of the social distinction separating him, as an aspiring professional artist, from this peasant or working-class subject. One wonders whether he paid the girl anything more than a piece of the candy that had already been “given” to him. It would appear that Carmelita willingly posed, either out of generosity or desperation, making her one of the “good natured natural people” in Seville whom Eakins elsewhere described as “desirous of pleasing me” in his artistic pursuits. For Eakins, the key issue here seems to have been his art, not her “culture.”68 As depicted by him, Carmelita presents no palpable signs of poverty. Nor does she display “that ugly hanging of the eye” that Eakins elsewhere hesitantly associated with “the whole Spanish type.” Instead, she looks quite beautiful, even serene, with golden light gently illuminating passages in her face, hair, and bright red tunic amidst an otherwise shadowy pictorial field. Of course, she does not actively look, since Eakins reserved that agency for himself (and for us) by closing her eyes and tilting her head aside. He carefully choreographed Carmelita’s

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darkened visage—facing “down,” as he said, her “head still & in the right place”— presumably to embody her fateful predicament of poverty, but the resulting effect is one of passive beauty and “character” rather than emotional distress. Carmelita Requeña thus slightly reconfigured the familiar orientalist-evolutionary aesthetics of resignation, with its racial generalizations. In place of the historically enslaved “Africa” evoked in Female Model, here the exotic female subject emblematically alludes to an economically beleaguered “Spain” as simply a matter of fact, a picturesque reality. The geographic difference may have seemed negligible to Eakins, judging from the broad conceptual similarities between Female Model and Carmelita Requeña. Indeed, many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries tended to conflate Africa with Spain, especially when referring to the exotic reputation of Seville and Andalusia. With its centuries-old Arab legacy, the southern city and surrounding region constituted a mythic borderland or contact zone linking European civilization with the North African Orient. In a famous iteration of that idea, Victor Hugo once declared, “Spain is still the Orient. . . . Spain is half African, Africa is half Asiatic.” By substituting Seville for Algiers, and Carmelita for a “Negress,” Eakins echoed Hugo’s view.69 Art historians occasionally have identified Carmelita as a “gypsy,” a term loosely applied to poor street entertainers, nomadic travelers, and various social outcasts during the nineteenth century. European-trained artists of the period often perceived itinerant poor, or real “bohemians,” as reflexive symbols of folk creativity and freedom poignantly adrift in modern oblivion. For example, Honoré Daumier’s saltimbanques, Manet’s travelers and musicians, and Gérôme’s pifferari fell under that inclusive social and aesthetic rubric. In format and conception, Carmelita Requeña generally belonged to the same category, but more specifically the painting recalls a contemporary subgenre of dreamy “gypsy” girls, exemplified by Gustave Courbet’s Rêverie tsigane (Gypsy in Reflection) of 1869 (Fig. 31). The latter work similarly depicted a self-absorbed female figure in a sketchy style connoting “freedom” from convention for both artist and subject. In a related gesture, some nineteenthcentury artists, including Courbet and Eakins, embodied such metaphorical freedom by dressing and behaving in simple, informal clothes that contemporaries deemed “bohemian” as well.70 Yet Eakins did not use either the term “gypsy” or “bohemian” to identify Carmelita in his letter explaining how he choreographed her pose, even though he definitely had some understanding of gypsies and their picturesque potential. As he said in other letters written shortly after his arrival in Spain: I went to . . . the big tobacco factory where there are 5000 women Spanish & gypsies employed making segars & segarettes.71

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Figure 31. Gustave Courbet, Rêverie tsigane (Gypsy in Reflection), 1869. Oil on canvas, 50.3 × 61 cm (193⁄4 × 24 in.). The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.

I know ever so many gypsies, men & women & circus people, street dancers, theatre dancers, and bull fighters.72 My student life is over now & my regular work is commenced. . . . I will make a bullfighter picture, and maybe a gypsy one.73

Eakins wrote the latter statement after the letter describing the modeling session with Carmelita, so he evidently did not view Carmelita Requeña as a “gypsy” picture. His visit to Seville’s famous Fábrica de Tabaco even suggests an awareness of Carmen, the legendary “gypsy” femme-fatale protagonist and tobacco worker in Prosper Mérimée’s eponymous novella of 1845 (later the subject of Georges Bizet’s celebrated opera, which premiered in 1875). Instead, Carmelita must have been just one of the generic “street dancers” that Eakins encountered in Seville. Compared with Mérimée’s Carmen, Courbet’s Rêverie tsigane, and other works in the “gypsy” genre, in fact, Eakins’s Carmelita lacks the characteristic sense of danger, sexual innuendo, and psychological restlessness.74 Eakins undoubtedly met “ever so many gypsies,” though, when he visited a suburb of Seville known as Triana, located across the Guadalquivir River, southwest of the city’s center. Nineteenth-century travel manuals and other sources clearly identify Triana as a notorious “gypsy” quarter of Seville. For example, in 1841,

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George Borrow, the foremost English authority on Spain’s “gypsies,” wrote that “from time immemorial” Triana was “noted as a favorite residence of the Gitános, and here, at the present day, they are to be found in greater numbers than in any other town in Spain.” In 1866, an English guidebook written by Henry Blackburn highlighted “the rather disreputable suburb called Triana, inhabited by a race of gypsies, who live in a half-Arab fashion, conforming as little as possible to Spanish habits.” In Blackburn’s words, Triana was “the very place for picturesque old buildings, and for painters who wish to study the costumes and habits of the gypsies of Andalusia.” Writing in 1869, probably with Triana in mind, the English travel author Richard Ford said that the suburbs of Seville were “tenanted by gypsies” whose dances “are truly national and Oriental.”75 Definitive evidence that Eakins visited Triana appears in a notebook containing drawings he made of various Seville residents and scenes, along with inscriptions recording the names of the people in question and associated street addresses. Among the streets mentioned are “[Calle] Verbena” (now Calle Rodrigo de Triana) and “[Calle de la] Cava nueva” (now Calle Pagés del Corro), both in the historic heart of Triana. In noting those particular streets and their denizens, Eakins did not mention Carmelita Requeña, so it remains unclear precisely where in Seville he encountered her, but he obviously took an interest in the locale best known for “gypsy” exoticism.76 As suggested by Blackburn’s racial reference to Triana, the word “gypsy” here described not just any generic “bohemian” but a member of a specific ethnic diaspora, also known as the Romany, whose ancient nomadic traditions and pariah status originally inspired the aforementioned social-aesthetic category. Today, the capitalized form of the term “Gypsy” is standard for this narrower ethnic designation, but nineteenth-century orthography and understanding were anything but consistent. As a historically persecuted, lower-caste ethnic group from northern India, Gypsies began migrating westward in large numbers approximately one thousand years ago. Subsequently, they became scattered into various branches that spoke dialects of the Indo-Iranian language Romany, a relative of Sanskrit. Observed in Western Europe by the early 1400s, Gypsies were initially identified in those years as either “Bohemians” or “Egyptians,” depending on varying European misperceptions about their geographic origins.77 Historian Katie Trumpener notes that Western Europeans, especially those in the nineteenth century, have tended to view ethnic Gypsies as a “people without a history,” or timeless vestiges of an earlier phase of human evolution. Not unlike the Egyptians depicted by Gérôme and perceived by Eakins as unchanged since biblical times, Gypsies generally connoted for Westerners what Trumpener calls “nonsynchronicity”—another instance of European “denial of coevalness” with regard to an Oriental other. As Johannes Fabian and other historians of anthro-

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pology would say, Gypsies were consigned to “the ethnographic present,” an unchanging subaltern space marked by racial, temporal, and evolutionary difference from Europe. Accordingly, Borrow asserted the “antiquity of this sect or caste” and the “tenacity with which they have uniformly preserved their peculiar customs.” He also remarked that “their countenances exhibit a decidedly family resemblance, but are darker or fairer according to the temperature of the climate, but invariably darker, at least in Europe, than the natives of the countries in which they dwell.” All of these perceptions, together with entrenched stereotypes about the Gypsies’ propensity for thievery, deception, the “evil eye,” and resistance to assimilation, help explain the long history of their legal persecution in Europe. Such persecution persisted well into the modern period, notably in Nazi Germany, where Gypsies were subjected to genocide along with Jews, homosexuals, and other people deemed undesirable. The flip side of that persecution, of course, has been the more affirmative caricature of Gypsies as poignant, “bohemian” free spirits.78 Known in nineteenth-century Spain as Gitános (Spanish for Egyptians) or Zincali (Romany for “the black men”), Gypsies were especially well represented in Andalusia and its capital, Seville. Over the centuries, Gypsies in Spain suffered imprisonment, expulsion, legal harassment, and assimilation, but they also contributed immeasurably to the nation’s allure as a picturesque backwater of the Oriental exoticism noted by Hugo—an allure compounded by Andalusia’s rich Islamic, or Moorish, legacy. Historians long have noted that the Gypsy communities of Andalusia very likely absorbed many Moriscos (Christianized Arab Muslims), Jews, and other social pariahs over the centuries, resulting in considerable racial and social hybridity. For example, Borrow acknowledged that the Spanish Zincali historically were an “impure caste” changed by “intermarriage” and that in modern times they engaged in “freer intercourse with the Spanish population.” For centuries, the Gypsies lived among Andalusians, whom Borrow described as “a mixed breed of various nations, Romans, Vandals, Moors,” such that “perhaps there is a slight sprinkling of Gypsy blood in their veins, and of Gypsy fashion in their garb.” Such historical variety, circulation, and exchange certainly posed a challenge to simplistic, categorical thinking about national identity, so it hardly seems surprising that Eakins, upon visiting Spain, felt uncertain about the validity of a “whole Spanish type.” Although his portrait of Carmelita broadly suggests Oriental exoticism, he may well have regarded her specific racial or ethnic identity as an enigma.79 Eakins’s excursions to Triana and other areas around the city informed his next Spanish work, A Street Scene in Seville (see Plate 3). The painting, his first tableau or multifigure composition, presents a veritable palimpsest of picturesque local color. As we know from another inscription (without street address) in Eakins’s Spanish notebook, the central figure group features Carmelita Requeña once again,

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here in full length, dancing on a sun-dappled cobblestone street to music performed by her parents, Augustín and Angelita, who stand and sit, respectively, against the shadowy stucco wall of a building in the background. The street, wall, and building provide the family troupe with a humble urban stage reminiscent of the backdrops in Gérôme’s pifferari pictures. A palm tree, blue sky, and sun-baked tile roof appear through an opening at the upper right-hand corner of the composition. In the upper left, a woman and child gaze down at the scene below from a rusted, iron-grated window. Drawings in Eakins’s sketchbook anticipate most of these figurative and architectural details. For example, one drawing shows a woman looking through a window in a manner closely related to the vignette in the upper left corner of the finished painting. On the reverse of that drawing, Eakins scribbled the address “[Calle] Cava nueva 79,” a location in Triana where he apparently observed the woman in question.80 From that information we might be led to infer that A Street Scene in Seville literally depicts a street in the Gypsy quarter of Triana and therefore constitutes the “gypsy” picture that Eakins had planned to paint. Other details, however, together with the synthetic approach that he used in composing the picture, suggest a broader, more allegorical or emblematic motive. Indeed, Eakins seems to have gathered source material from multiple locations around Seville as he perambulated the city like a flâneur. As a case in point, let us consider the verbal and pictorial graffiti inscribed on the background wall behind Carmelita and her parents. Just above the picture of an orb with cross denoting Catholicism, we see fragmentary political slogans that read “Avajo los Borbones . . . ” and “Viva la liv[ertad]” (“Down with the Bourbons” and “Long live liberty”). Such slogans were nationally topical, for Spain recently had ousted the long-reigning Bourbon monarchy in the so-called September Revolution of 1868, setting the stage for the establishment of a fragile and short-lived Republic in 1873. Debates about civil liberty, educational freedom, and freedom of religious conscience had played important roles in that revolutionary struggle, so Eakins’s graffiti may reflect a general awareness of those concerns. At the same time, he may have been reminded of the legal restrictions regulating working-class, bohemian performers on the streets of imperial Paris. In other words, perhaps he wished to tout the relative liberty they seemed to enjoy in Seville and post-Bourbon Spain.81 On the other hand, a newfound sense of personal aesthetic freedom could just as likely have been foremost in Eakins’s mind in painting A Street Scene in Seville, since his surviving letters at the time demonstrate little awareness of Spanish politics. Moreover, the picture actually establishes a dialectical interplay between liberty and confinement through various thematic and formal oppositions: the women behind bars in a shadowy window versus Carmelita dancing in the open sunlight

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Figure 32. Thomas Eakins, “San Bernardo” Sign with Bullfight, 1869–70. Graphite on wove paper, 9 × 15.4 cm ( 39⁄16 × 61⁄16 in.). Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection. Purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust and the John S. Phillips Fund.

atop a grid of paving stones; the ominously flat stucco wall versus the distant palm tree and roofline in perspective; the splotchy paint connoting earthly dirt and decay versus the clean white and visceral red highlights of Carmelita’s dress.82 Additional graffiti on the background wall in A Street Scene in Seville depict a bull and matador, both generic national emblems of Spain. Eakins closely based these elements upon another notebook drawing, representing a tavern sign decorated with wine bottles and an inscription that reads “san bernardo” (Fig. 32). He indicated no street address here, but the sign’s inscription probably alludes to the suburb of San Bernardo, located on the southeastern periphery of Seville, back across the Guadalquivir River and several miles from Triana. San Bernardo had its own reputation for Gypsies and other picturesque characters, including bullfighters, wine drinkers, and artists. According to Richard Ford’s travel manual, “In this suburb is also the matadero [slaughter-house], close by which Ferdinand VII founded his tauromachian university,” or bullfighting school. The author also notes that this area, with its “idlers, Barateros [Gypsy knife fighters], and gamesters . . . playing all day long for wine, love, or coppers,” offered “capital groupings and studies for artists.” Omitting the words “San Bernardo” from A Street Scene in Seville, Eakins clearly intended the bull and matador to make a broader, emblematic reference to “Spain.” Rather than simply documenting a specific location in Seville, then, the painting was intended to capture the essential character of the city and nation.83

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The central figure of Carmelita dancing in the street performs a similar emblematic function. With her castanets, calf-length skirt, soft slippers, and twirling pose, she clearly performs the bolero, Spain’s national dance. Her posture, holding one arm above the other, specifically recalls the fourth in a series of eight standardized arm positions that compose the bolero, as identified by the dance historian Marina Grut. According to Grut, the bolero was recognized in the eighteenth century as an Andalusian folk dance, but it became appropriated as a national form early in the next century. Thereafter, it quickly entered the wider European ballet repertoire and popular consciousness. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a rich European literary and visual discourse developed around the bolero in response to international tours by Spanish ballet troupes and performers from other nations as well. For example, after an 1837 performance in Paris of the Spanish national troupe led by Dolores Serral and Mariano Camprubí, the French writer Théophile Gautier praised the bolero as “a national dance of primitive character and such barefaced simplicity that it has become chaste. It is so openly sensual, so boldly amorous, and its provocative coquetry and delirious exuberance are so full of youth that it is easy to forgive the very Andalusian impetuosity of some of its mannerisms.”84 In keeping with his pictorial tendency to downplay erotic elements, Eakins represented the dancing Carmelita with something like the “simplicity” and “chaste” “youth” that Gautier mentioned, but none of the “openly sensual” or “boldly amorous” sensibility. As in Female Model and Carmelita Requeña, Eakins filtered extremes from his versions of prevailing artistic stereotypes about human difference, while nonetheless operating within those stereotypes. Whereas John Singer Sargent, a European-born American expatriate, would later depict the writhing sexual drama of Spanish Gypsy flamenco in El Jaleo (1882, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston), Eakins preferred the comparatively staid delicacy of Carmelita’s national bolero. Indeed, the pictures by Eakins and Sargent—one set outdoors in the street, the other in a darkly lit café cantante—could not be more different, even if both used folk dance to emblematize the exotic freedom of “Andalusia” and “Spain.”85 One of the best-known nineteenth-century visual representations of the bolero appears in Édouard Manet’s Spanish Ballet of 1862 (Fig. 33), showing Mariano Camprubí standing at right, here paired with another female partner named Anita Montés. In that year, Manet had attended their performance of a ballet titled Flor di Sevilla at the Hippodrome in Paris, after which he arranged to have them model for him at his rue Guyot studio. At first glance, the pose of Anita Montés in Manet’s painting seems uncannily close to that of Carmelita Requeña in Eakins’s A Street Scene in Seville, once again raising the intriguing question about whether the Amer-

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Figure 33. Édouard Manet, Spanish Ballet, 1862. Oil on canvas, 61 × 90.5 cm (24 × 355⁄8 in.). The Phillips

Collection, Washington, D.C.

ican artist was aware of modernist currents in Paris. In 1867, Manet had exhibited Spanish Ballet in his independent exhibition at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, so Eakins conceivably could have seen the painting during one of his visits to the fair. Yet, as we know, he never mentioned Manet in his surviving letters. The similarity between their works here might just as easily be a coincidence, because the fourth arm position pose was already a familiar trope in visual representations of the bolero. Both painters, that is, perceived “Spain” and its national dance through an established vocabulary of artistic gestures. In any case, their paintings otherwise could hardly be more different, especially in terms of style and attitude. Whereas Manet’s dancers stare at us from a Parisian studio interior with the flat blankness of Olympia (see Fig. 18), the Requeñas humbly avert their eyes as they diligently embody the freedom of Spanish national character on a street in Seville.86 In another important departure from Manet, Eakins’s A Street Scene in Seville did not depict an official ballet company but rather a small, informal family outfit that he described in his Spanish notebook as a “compañia gymnastica.” In other words, the Requeñas were not only “street dancers” but also acrobats, a Spanish version of French saltimbanques (literally, “those who jump on benches”). Eakins’s interest in them thus related to his broader fascination with the circus, an important spectacle of human physiology and exoticism that he regularly consumed in Eu-

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rope. In Paris, for example, he repeatedly visited the circus and made a point of sketching a Japanese acrobat in one of his letters (Fig. 34). Later, in Spain, besides depicting the “compañia gymnastica,” he acquired a photograph of an unidentified boy acrobat. Eakins could not get enough of bodies in motion or the circulation of difference.87 If Eakins’s A Street Scene in Seville diverged significantly from the Spanish works of Sargent and Manet, it conceptually anticipated his own vision of African American minstrelsy in The Dancing Lesson (see Plate 1) of 1878. As Kathleen Foster has suggested, Eakins viewed Spanish street entertainers and black minstrels as “pictorial equivalents.” Though different in medium, scale, and setting, both paintings placed a trio of humble, non-Anglo-Saxon folk entertainers on display for a white, economically privileged fine-art audience. A dancing child occupies the limelight in both pictures, watched over by a paternal figure. The mottled stucco wall and street paving stones of Eakins’s Seville image find their counterparts in the wall and floor of the artist’s Philadelphia studio in the later work. The woman and child looking down from a Spanish window make way in The Dancing Lesson for Abraham Lincoln and his son Tad. The bench carrying the artist’s signature in the lower right of The Dancing Lesson literalizes a conceptual relationship between African American minstrels and European saltimbanques. Still more comparative details point to other structural homologies. For example, the bull and matador graffiti in A Street Scene in Seville serve a purpose analogous to that of the minstrel hat and cane in The Dancing Lesson: both are picturesque emblems of exotic people in Spain and America, respectively. By virtue of their location on a background wall or casually resting on a chair, they occupy a comparable visual register in that both are conspicuously inconspicuous. Roughly analogous emblematic meanings inform the different, group-characteristic musical instruments of the horn (European “bohemians”) and the banjo (“Negroes”). Eakins’s aesthetic perception of such analogues presupposed broad hierarchical ranking of a popular, social evolutionary sort. By treating Spanish and American folk entertainers as timely emblems of “Liberty” in their respective contexts, Eakins effectively answered Hippolyte Taine’s call for an art that embodied “national character” in terms of “race, milieu, et moment.” In that respect, his European training had laid the foundation for much of his later work.

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Figure 34. Thomas Eakins, sketch of Japanese acrobats in letter to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, June 3, 1869.

Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Archives.

chapter 2

“What Kind of People Are There” Local Color, Cosmopolitanism, and the Limits of Civic Realism

After returning to Philadelphia from Europe on July 4, 1870, Eakins adapted the lessons he had learned abroad to the task of depicting American subjects. For the next decade and a half, he took a special interest in outdoor genre scenes featuring diverse people and activities on or near the distinctive waterways surrounding his native city. He also produced a number of moody interior genre paintings, historical images, and portraits, including his masterpiece, The Gross Clinic (Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross) (1875, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Philadelphia Museum of Art), but the bulk of his work during this period depicted sportsmen and laborers in the open daylight at recognizable suburban locations around Philadelphia: the Schuylkill River at Fairmount Park; the Delaware River at Gloucester, New Jersey; the tidal marshes south of the city; and a pond near Bryn Mawr. Of the roughly two hundred and fifty works exhibited and published by the artist between 1871 and 1885, over one hundred belonged to this body of outdoor imagery, or nearly double the number for any other single subject category. Beginning with The Champion Single Sculls (see Plate 2) and culminating with Swimming (Fig. 35), local bodies of water and their various denizens particularly dominated Eakins’s pictorial output. By realistically depicting human diversity and daily life in such contexts, the artist captured something approaching the “culture” or “cultures” of outdoor Philadelphia, though he never consciously described his efforts in those modern anthropological terms. At the same time, Eakins circulated his images of local subjects widely beyond Philadelphia in hopes of attracting attention not only at home but across the nation and even abroad. The present chapter examines Eakins’s attention to differences, in contexts both local and cosmopolitan, as an aesthetic strategy for advancing his fledgling professional career.1 The Champion Single Sculls provides a good example of that strategy in action.

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Figure 35. Thomas Eakins, Swimming, 1885. Oil on canvas, 69.5 × 92.4 cm (273⁄8 × 363⁄8 in.). Amon

Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, Purchased by the Friends of Art, Fort Worth Art Association, 1925; acquired by the Amon Carter Museum, 1990, from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth through grants and donations from the Amon G. Carter Foundation, the Sid W. Richardson Foundation, the Anne Burnett and Charles Tandy Foundation, Capital Cities/ABC Foundation, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The R. D. and Joan Dale Hubbard Foundation, and the people of Fort Worth. 1990.19.1.

As we have seen, this early work shows Eakins’s friend Max Schmitt gliding gracefully into the foreground in a scull during the late afternoon on a picturesque stretch of the Schuylkill River, northwest of the city’s urban center. Scholars have noted the painting’s debts to Gérôme and French academicism as well as its precise reconstruction of a Philadelphia scene. While obliquely acknowledging his master’s Nile River prototypes (see Fig. 4), Eakins represented a specific location on the Schuylkill, upstream from the Girard Avenue Bridge (an architectural landmark visible in the distance) and adjacent to Fairmount Park, where Schmitt won a championship rowing race on October 5, 1870. The artist reconstructed not only the exact site but also the season, time of day, and star player of that local event, though he omitted direct reference to the competition itself. For Eakins, context and character mattered more than dramatic content. Above all he wanted to produce great art that reflected the specific character of a place and its people at a given time. As he had said in an 1868 letter from Paris describing the features of a hypothetical masterpiece, “in a big picture you can see what o’clock it is afternoon or morning if its hot or cold winter or summer & what kind of people are there & what they

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are doing & why they are doing it.” Back home in Philadelphia, Eakins dedicated himself to producing “big” pictures by representing various human characters and environmental conditions associated with being “there.”2 As scholars have tirelessly demonstrated, Eakins’s efforts in this regard entailed a considerable commitment to scientific accuracy. Yet the results transcended mere empirical documentation to encompass a complex expression of personal identity, local civic pride, and cosmopolitan artistic ambition. An obvious clue to those telescoping concerns appears in the left background of The Champion Single Sculls, far behind the figure of Schmitt, where an old-fashioned scull crosses the river in a lateral direction, propelled by traditionally attired Quakers (see Fig. 5). In an interesting visual rhyme, their lateral movement finds an echo in the family of indigenous American wood ducks swimming in a line along the left bank of the river. Such background information provided a naturalistic metaphor of sorts, emblematically marking the setting as both “the United States” and “Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” or the “Quaker City,” just as the bull and matador in the background of A Street Scene in Seville (see Plate 3) signified “Spain.”3 Thanks to the wide dissemination of Benjamin West’s Penn’s Treaty with the Indians (1772, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) in reproductive prints as well as engravings on the same subject by the English artist Richard Westall and the many subsequent Peaceable Kingdom pictures by Edward Hicks, Quakers had become transatlantic icons of Philadelphia, the state of Pennsylvania, and the New World by Eakins’s lifetime. Thus they identified the setting of The Champion Single Sculls to a potentially broad audience (though the artist never actually exhibited the work abroad). By placing the Quakers far in the background navigating an antiquated boat across the Schuylkill, Eakins situated them conceptually in the past as quaint figures of local history. As such, they provided a foil to the nimble, finely tuned modernity of Schmitt’s scull and disciplined physique in the foreground. In effect, Eakins here strategically orchestrated different characters within the context of Philadelphia in order to construct an evolutionary narrative about modern American progress.4 The artist played a role in that narrative as well. In the middle background of the painting, closer to Schmitt, Eakins appears rowing a modern scull similar to that of his champion friend and inscribed “eakins 1871.” With this reflexive gesture, Eakins signed the painting and fictively located himself within the contemporary Schuylkill River context, in testimony to his firsthand knowledge of the depicted scene, action, and protagonists. He was an avid rower, too, actively involved in the so-called Schuylkill Navy, an association of private men’s boating clubs along the river across from Fairmount Park. In light of this self-representation, the Quakers also perhaps alluded to Eakins’s own family history, for his maternal grand-

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father, Mark Cowperthwait, had belonged to the Society of Friends. But the artist took care here to assert his modernity, not only by showing himself rowing in a boat and manner similar to Schmitt’s but also by investing the picture with a rigorous study of perspective and anatomy. Eakins thereby advertised his up-to-date, cosmopolitan artistic training at the École in France. A reviewer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin even noted that the artist was “lately returned from Europe and the influence of Gérôme.” At once painter, sculler, and embedded reporter, Eakins celebrated and identified with Philadelphia’s quaint past, its progressive modernity, and its distinctive environment or milieu, all the while laying claim to an international academic pedigree in art.5 Though set indoors and in the past, Eakins’s historical painting William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River (Fig. 36) aptly punctuated this unfolding artistic tendency to telescope local, national, and cosmopolitan themes of progress. William Rush specifically commemorated an important early Philadelphia artist and citizen in relation to the city’s natural water supply. In 1809, while serving as a member of the Philadelphia Water Committee, Rush had created an allegorical wooden statue personifying the Schuylkill River to decorate the innovative Centre Square waterworks, which used new hydraulic technology to bring clean river water to urban residents following the terrible yellow fever epidemics of the late eighteenth century. As represented by Eakins, Rush carves the statue in his workshop/studio on Front Street in Old Philadelphia, surrounded by several figures: a nude female model, her chaperone, and two other important sculptures by the elder artist: George Washington and The Allegory of the Waterworks. In the foreground, bright white clothing discarded by Rush’s model cascades over a chair, evoking foamy water in a subtle visual metaphor of the personified river.6 Evidently proud of his local historical research in preparation for William Rush, Eakins took the unusual step of writing a long description of the painting to be used as an accompanying exhibition label. After identifying the subject and explaining the sculptural allegory depicted, Eakins observed that “the shop of William Rush was on Front Street just below Callowhill and I found several very old people who still remembered it and described it.” Eakins’s interests also encompassed local natural history as it pertained to the Schuylkill River watershed, for in describing Rush’s allegorical statue he noted that “the woman holds aloft a bittern, a bird loving and much frequenting the quiet dark wooded river of those days.” Such comments even suggest an inkling of ecological change in the region over time, for apparently the bittern no longer was “much frequenting” the river in the present. Appropriately, William Rush seems to encode such change spatially by locating the sculptor and his carved bittern in the background shadows. Occupying a “quiet dark wooded” place at the rear of the studio, they effectively recede

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Figure 36. Thomas Eakins, William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River, 1876–77. Oil on canvas, 51.1 × 66.3 cm (201⁄8 × 261⁄8 in.). Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Mrs. Thomas Eakins and Miss Mary Adeline Williams, 1929.

into Philadelphia history even as they evoke the name “Schuylkill,” which means “hidden river” in Dutch.7 As art historians have noted, Rush appealed to Eakins as a local hero who prefigured his own workmanlike approach to art. At the same time, the subject resonated with the national mood of patriotic historicism fostered by the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. The realistically rendered nude, in turn, broached an international academic language of fine art, which Eakins sought to promote at home. Once again, then, the local, the national, and the international interpenetrated as areas of thematic and aesthetic concern for the artist, suggesting a cosmopolitan perspective—that is, a perspective not anchored exclusively to one particular place. In this work, human difference entered mainly by way of a class encounter between Rush’s model—a woman of polite Philadelphia society whose nudity embodied “Art” on a local pedestal—and the elder chaperone, a maid laborer whose knitting constituted “Craft.” Portrayed as a gentleman aspiring to represent the nude with the humble American resources available to him, Rush mirrored Eakins in his ambition to elevate local artistic practice to a more worldly level of achievement within the idiom or milieu of Philadelphia. Though couched

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Figure 37. After Thomas

Eakins, “The Only Gent that Lived to Tell About thet Spellin’ Bee.” Wood engraving, 9.8 × 8.6 cm (315⁄16 × 33⁄8 in.). Published in Bret Harte, “The Spelling Bee at Angel’s,” Scribner’s Monthly, vol. 17, no. 1 (November 1878), p. 40. Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY.

in a retrospective affirmation of craft traditions, the aesthetic message of William Rush concerned local and national evolutionary “progress” toward a cosmopolitan ideal in the fine arts.8 In exploring local-cosmopolitan themes during the 1870s and 1880s, Eakins did not limit himself to the traditional medium of painting and associated preparatory work (drawing, modeling, photography). Nor did he exclusively treat Philadelphia subject matter, for he always kept broader horizons in view even if he did not travel widely himself. Between 1878 and 1881, for example, Eakins submitted a number of pictures for commercial publication in Scribner’s Monthly, a cosmopolitan literary periodical based in New York. In 1878, he provided two illustrations to Scribner’s for a Western dialect poem by Bret Harte titled “The Spelling Bee at Angel’s,” set in California gold mining territory (Fig. 37). In the year following, Eakins illustrated a Scribner’s short story by Richard Malcolm Johnston, also written in vernacular speech, describing a backwoods Georgia preacher named Neelus Peeler (Fig. 38). Harte and Johnston were both nationally known writers of “local color,” a postbellum American literary movement dedicated to the realistic representation of regional dialects, customs, and places. Continuing in this vein, in 1880 Eakins allowed Scribner’s to reproduce his Schuylkill River rowing painting of The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake-Boat (Fig. 39) as an illustration ostensibly representing the Harlem River (Fig. 40) in a seasonal piece by Clarence Cook about springtime in New York. Within the space of three years,

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Figure 38. Alice Barber (after Thomas Eakins), “Thar’s such a thing as Calls in this world.” Wood engraving, 9.8 × 8.6 cm (315⁄16 × 33⁄8 in.). Published in Richard Malcolm Johnston, “Mr. Neelus Peeler’s Conditions,” Scribner’s Monthly, vol. 18, no. 2 (June 1879), p. 256. University of Iowa Library, Iowa City, Iowa. Figure 39. Thomas Eakins, The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake-Boat, 1873. Oil on canvas, 101.3 × 151.4 cm (397⁄8 × 595⁄8 in.). © The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection, 1984.1927. Figure 40. Alice Barber (after Thomas Eakins), “On the Harlem.” Wood engraving, 8.6 × 12.6 cm (33⁄8 × 415⁄16 in.). Published in Clarence Cook, “Spring Hereabouts,” Scribner’s Monthly, vol. 20, no. 2 (June 1880), p. 165. Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY.

Figure 41. After Thomas Eakins, “Rail-Shooting.” Wood engraving, 8.9 × 12.3 cm (31⁄2 × 5 in.). Published in Maurice Egan, “A Day in the Ma’sh,” Scribner’s Monthly 22, no. 3 (July 1881), p. 345. Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY. Figure 42. After Thomas Eakins, “A Pusher.” Wood engraving, 11.3 × 8.6 cm (45⁄16 × 33⁄8 in.). Published

in Maurice Egan, “A Day in the Ma’sh,” Scribner’s Monthly 22, no. 3 (July 1881), p. 348. Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY.

then, the Philadelphia artist had depicted three other distinct regions of the country for a national magazine audience, even though he never visited either California or Georgia (and we have no idea whether he actually saw the Harlem River on one of his trips to New York).9 Concluding his foray into commercial publication, Eakins illustrated an 1881 Scribner’s essay by Maurice Egan titled “A Day in the Ma’sh.” This essay provided a picturesque local color account of “the Neck,” Philadelphia’s marshy and rustically rundown southern suburb inhabited by poor immigrants and frequently visited by urban middle-class hunters (Figs. 41, 42). According to Egan’s text, “Every city holds out-of-the-way places unknown to the mere sojourner within its gates, and full of local oddities and delights which the stranger, however experienced, can never share with the citizen. . . . To the native Philadelphian,” said the author, “‘The Neck’” was one such place. In fulfilling this commission for Scribner’s, which also featured illustrations by his students Joseph Pennell and Henry Poore, Eakins again used his own preexisting work as source material. He recycled two paintings of hunters and laborers set in marshes of the Neck: Rail Shooting (Fig. 43), reproduced in its entirety, and Pushing for Rail (Fig. 44), from which he clipped the African American laborer at far left for reproduction as “A Pusher.” This last Scribner’s commission came about when the New York journal’s art editor, A. W. Drake, extended a special invitation to Eakins to participate. In a study examining all of the artist’s illustrations, Ellwood Parry and Maria Chamberlin-Hellman have observed that “Eakins was considered to be the primary painter or illustrator of Philadelphia scenes at this time, and an article on ‘The Ma’sh’ could not be pub-

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Figure 43. Thomas Eakins, Rail Shooting, 1876. Oil on canvas, 56.2 × 76.8 cm (221⁄8 × 301⁄4 in.). Yale

University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; Bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A., 1903. 1961.18.21. Photo: Yale University Art Gallery/Art Resource, NY. Figure 44. Thomas Eakins, Pushing for Rail, 1874. Oil on canvas, 33 × 76.4 cm (13 × 301⁄16 in.). The

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1916 (16.65). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

lished without including some examples of his work.” Contemporaries viewed Eakins, a “native Philadelphian” himself, as the natural, representative artist of his locality, regardless of medium.10 With all this in mind, the present chapter argues the following point: by frequently depicting Philadelphia’s environs and inhabitants during the 1870s and early 1880s, Eakins broadly and consistently engaged the period aesthetics of “local color.” In doing so, he participated in a cosmopolitan, premodern discourse on human difference, framed in terms of regional content but answering to the international expectations of fine art. Transposing lessons learned in Europe to his American domestic context, Eakins realistically represented various racial and class types—

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“what kind of people are there,” as he called them—along with their distinguishing looks, activities, and natural environments. Eakins’s pictures thereby collectively captured something like the particular diversity, or “cultures,” of Philadelphia, although the artist did not use that word to describe what he was doing. Rather, in picturing Philadelphia’s local color, Eakins meant to fulfill a more period-specific artistic imperative, namely the representation of national character. As we know, during the 1860s Hippolyte Taine had articulated that imperative influentially in books and in lectures at the École using the naturalistic, evolutionary language of “race,” “milieu,” and “moment,” which conflated social, contextual, and biological factors as determinants of human customs, including artistic traditions. In Taine’s view, a realistic work of art constituted a “fossil shell” of national character, embodying the specific history, environment, and racial blood of both its creator and its representative human subjects. Having absorbed Taine’s premodern cultural theory in Paris, Eakins proceeded to implement a version of it at home by projecting a realistic image of Philadelphia as a regional exemplar of American national character for a cosmopolitan audience. Although critical reception of Eakins’s work tended to be mixed, he did enjoy a few notable successes in this regard. For example, an 1880 exhibition of The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake-Boat (see Fig. 39) prompted Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer—one of America’s foremost cosmopolitan art critics—to offer the following praise of Eakins: “There is, perhaps, no artist in the country who can rival him for originality of conception, for adapting the matter-of-fact elements of our surroundings to artistic use, no one who imprints a sign-manual of individuality so strongly on everything he touches.” The words “our surroundings,” of course, here referred to the nation’s environment, exemplified in this case by the Philadelphia region.11

Local Color and teinte locale Today the term “local color” generally refers to a late nineteenth-century American regionalist literary movement that included writers such as Harte, Johnston, Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain), Sara Orne Jewett, Joel Chandler Harris, Charles Chesnutt, George Washington Cable, Hamlin Garland, Kate Chopin, and others. Each local color writer tended to represent a particular part of the country while responding to broader questions about national identity, diversity, and unity. For example, whereas Harte’s “The Spelling Bee at Angel’s” (or his more famous story “The Luck of Roaring Camp” of 1868) embodied California and Western character, Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) performed an analogous oper-

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ation vis-à-vis Maine and New England. Similarly, Garland represented Wisconsin and the Midwest, Harris and Chopin different parts of the South (Georgia and Louisiana), and so on. Clemens was one of the few such writers who successfully managed to capture the character of multiple regions, as he did with the Mississippi River valley and New England, respectively, in Huckleberry Finn (1884) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Notably, no such prominent literary representative of Pennsylvania or Middle Atlantic local color emerged during the late nineteenth century, unless we count Eakins’s student Joseph Pennell and Pennell’s wife, Elizabeth Robins Pennell. Between 1880 and the 1910s, the Pennells produced illustrated stories for The Century Magazine such as “A Ramble in Old Philadelphia” (1882) as well as the book Our Philadelphia (1916), among their many publications.12 As a designation for regional character, the term “local color” evolved from an older French academic technical term in painting—couleur locale—referring to the supposedly natural hue of objects in normal daylight apart from the subjective or ephemeral effects produced by shadows, reflections, and atmospheric conditions (which the French Impressionists made their stock-in-trade). During his studies with Gérôme at the École in Paris in the late 1860s, Eakins undoubtedly encountered “local color” in this academic, technical sense. Indeed, his vexed efforts to comprehend and represent color objectively in the bright, reflective sunlight of southern Spain constituted an extended struggle with that very concept, a struggle there conjoined with the problem of depicting exotic human customs and associated regional aspects of “local color” through objective signs of dress, posture, and other physical accoutrements (see Plate 3).13 The literary-regional sense of the term “local color” emerged in French beginning in the eighteenth century, partly as a result of colonial exploration and imperial conquest, which brought Western Europeans increasingly into contact with other places, peoples, and customs. By the early the 1800s, Romantic travel writers such as François-René de Chateaubriand, Prosper Mérimée, and Théophile Gautier regularly thematized the regional couleur locale of exotic Spain, North Africa, and the Near East in their orientalist works. Gérôme and other French painters essentially translated such literary exoticism into the visual arts. Thus, by extension, Eakins’s trip to Seville, where he wrestled with depicting street performers in the Mediterranean sunlight between visits to places like Triana, the tobacco factory of Mérimée’s Carmen, and other Gypsy haunts, constituted an excursion into “local color” in multiple senses. Before long, the term became more or less synonymous with the experience of tourism, such that by 1891 Scribner’s published a book by travel writer Henry Theophilus Finck titled Spain and Morocco: Studies in Local Color.14

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American prototypes for local color in literature can be found in the antebellum fiction of Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, but most scholars distinguish the postbellum movement for its heightened effects of realism, which more convincingly captured and preserved a sense of regional character in an era of dramatic social and economic transformation following the sectional crisis of the Civil War. During the late nineteenth century, amid rapid industrial development, mass production, scientific standardization, immigration, and other modern forces of change, regional character became a complex object of national concern, nostalgic curiosity, aesthetic delectation, and commercial consumption. The local color movement thrived under such conditions by seeming to protect regional distinctions against change even as it used the power of modern capitalism, specifically the publishing industry, to circulate representations of regional people, places, and customs to a cosmopolitan audience. In effect, local color became a commodity.15 The postbellum explosion of national interest in local color and regional character was hardly limited to American literature. One need only recall the Adirondack, Virginia, and Maine pictures by Winslow Homer, the Nantucket scenes by Eastman Johnson, the Massachusetts Puritan statues by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and the countless Western images by Frederic Remington to recognize the pervasive resonance of local and regional aesthetics in American visual art of the period. Contemporary critics repeatedly described Homer’s various pictures of Adirondack guides and New England seamen, for example, in terms of “local color.” As in the case of local color literature, such art did not simply consist of a folksy nostalgic throwback to the “good old days” but rather a subtler engagement with both historicism and modernity. The oeuvres of Homer, Johnson, and Eakins certainly exemplify that subtlety, as do the best stories by Twain, Jewett, Garland, and other writers. Although antebellum artistic precursors can be found in the regional genre paintings of George Caleb Bingham, William Sidney Mount, and others, the work of Eakins and his late nineteenth-century contemporaries stood apart in achieving unprecedented realism, site specificity, and cosmopolitan appeal. Except for a number of recent studies on New England artists, historians of nineteenth-century American art have yet to explore the critical significance of local color or regional aesthetics in great detail.16 Eakins’s contemporaries and even a few modern scholars already have suggested his embrace of such aesthetics, which were still evolving and by no means strictly defined in a theoretical sense during the 1870s and 1880s. The editor of Scribner’s Monthly, for example, obviously found Eakins’s illustrations to be consistent with the local color writing of Harte and Johnston, not to mention Egan’s description of the Neck as one of the “local oddities” of metropolitan Philadelphia. In the In-

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troduction, we encountered Earl Shinn’s 1878 review of The Dancing Lesson (see Plate 1) as a work evoking plantation “comedy” of the regional South under slavery, even as the painting alluded to Lincoln and emancipation. Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer’s praise in 1880 for Eakins’s ability to capture “our surroundings” fits into this regional line of commentary, as did another observation by her in the following year regarding his Gloucester fishermen picture Mending the Net (1881, Philadelphia Museum of Art), which she called “a fresh rendering of a distinctly local and unhackneyed theme” that showed how “our native material, unglossed and unpoeticized, may be made available in artistic work.” Although the artist left no theoretical statement about local color or regional character per se during this period, his widow, Susan Macdowell Eakins, later recalled that Eakins often went boating very early in the morning along the “marshy Jersey shores,” across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, in order, as she said, to “study the color and character of the scene.”17 More recently, the art historians Parry and Chamberlin-Hellman have observed that Eakins’s illustrations for Bret Harte’s poem were “in perfect keeping with the local color and dialect of the original.” Comparing the artist’s fishing scenes of 1880–82 with contemporary works by Winslow Homer, Kathleen Foster has said that “Eakins was able to see the picturesqueness of American working people. . . . The local character of shad fishing, like rail shooting or sculling, may have been part of its attractiveness for Eakins.” Also, in describing The Dancing Lesson as one of “the most popular items Eakins ever produced,” Foster relates that popularity to the contemporary fame of Joel Chandler Harris’s “old-timey” Uncle Remus stories, which were perhaps the best-known examples of local color literature in the nineteenth century. According to Foster, Eakins’s watercolor showed “a respectful sensitivity to ethnographic detail and a resistance to stereotype unusual at this period,” but she acknowledges that critics of the time (including the artist’s friend Earl Shinn) made no such distinction. Not unlike Eakins, local colorists such as Harris often viewed their work as painstakingly accurate, even a scientific corrective to earlier misrepresentations. Perhaps such a view helps explain why Eakins and his followers at the rebellious Art Students’ League of Philadelphia borrowed a local color dialect reference from Harris in celebrating the anniversary of their group’s split from the Pennsylvania Academy. In the programs of their “Annual Riots,” held during the early 1890s, they playfully referred to each other as “Brer,” or brother, after the character of Brer Rabbit in Harris’s Uncle Remus stories. By then, one of Eakins’s pupils, Arthur Burdett Frost, had become the main illustrator of those stories.18 Another interesting parallel between the work of Eakins and nineteenth-century local color fiction concerns the artist’s various acts of self-representation, a tech-

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nique roughly analogous to the literary use of a frame narrator or implied author within a text. Literature historian Tom Lutz has discussed this technique at length in relation to Hamlin Garland’s “Up the Coulee” (1891) and other local color stories of the period. As Lutz observes, the implied author in such stories functioned as both an insider and outsider whose resulting contextual “oscillation” provided readers with “a cosmopolitan overview.” For example, in “Up the Coulee,” the character of Howard (a successful actor living in New York) returns to his small hometown in Wisconsin after being away for several years. Once back in that native context, Howard invites reader identification with his “commanding view” or “cosmopolitan vista,” as Lutz calls it, leaving the story somewhat unresolved in its simultaneous evocation of locality and the broader “literary” world. As a cosmopolitan writer originally from Wisconsin himself, Garland thus fictively entered his own work via the character of Howard.19 In an analogous manner, albeit without quite the same sense of prodigal tension, Eakins reinserted himself among the locals in The Champion Single Sculls (see Plate 2) after having been away from Philadelphia. Recently returned from cosmopolitan Paris and the worldly atelier of Gérôme, Eakins enjoyed a rather commanding perspective on his native city during the 1870s. Interviewers and critics at the time often made a point of noting his École training and French teachers, perhaps after being reminded of such credentials by Eakins himself. To maintain his cosmopolitan connections and reputation, Eakins corresponded with Gérôme for years and even sent examples of his work to the master for consultation, exhibition, and sale. As we have seen, Eakins also frequently included in his works visual allusions to those of his former master. Although Eakins’s metropolitan native city was hardly the small Wisconsin town of Garland’s Howard, it was still artistically provincial compared with Paris. In his own way, then, Eakins carefully asserted his “cosmopolitan vista” within the local context of Philadelphia. A number of other pictures by him contain self-representations, including Swimming (see Fig. 35), in which the artist appears at the lower right as a participant-observer among friends at Dove Lake, a picturesque pond outside Philadelphia near suburban Bryn Mawr. An evocation of Greek classicism, noted by many scholars, lent this work a telescoping sense of cosmopolitanism from within its local context.20 The most important point of comparison between Eakins and the late nineteenthcentury local color aesthetic concerns their mutual debt to Hippolyte Taine, a debt then shared by many American intellectuals preoccupied with questions of national character and the wellsprings of art and literature. For such Americans, Taine provided an appealingly scientific explanation that portrayed creative work as the product of its natural environment, historical context, and the essential identity of its creator(s). Eakins had access to Tainean ideas not only at the École and in

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related Parisian artistic circles but also through his ongoing friendship with Earl Shinn, who was a great admirer of the French professor. Evidence of Taine’s broader influence in postbellum America can be found in many places, though. For example, approving references to the French professor appear frequently in the pages of Harper’s Weekly during the period. For example, in 1875, shortly after the publication of an English translation of Taine’s Philosophie de l’art (a compendium of his lessons at the École), an anonymous book reviewer for Harper’s observed the following: “There are no critical essays on art superior to those of Taine in clearness of thought and judgment, and we are glad to see that his American publishers, Henry Holt & Co., have issued them in one convenient volume.”21 Regarding the American local color movement in particular, a major statement of Tainean principles appeared in Hamlin Garland’s chapter “Local Color in Art” in the book Crumbling Idols (1894). Offering an antidote to industrial homogenization and slavish imitation of Eurocentric aesthetic standards, Garland encouraged American readers to embrace a more homegrown model of artistic (in this case literary) creativity, one attentive to difference rather than sameness: It is the differences which interest us; the similarities do not please. . . . Local color in a novel means that it has such a quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by any one else than a native. It means a statement of life as indigenous as plant growth. . . . From this it follows that local color must not be put in for the sake of local color. It must go in, it will go in, because the writer naturally carries it with him half unconsciously, or conscious only of its significance, its interest to him.22

Garland’s language of unconscious necessity, natural “plant growth,” and objectification rendered “it,” local color, as a material thing inevitably emerging from the artist. Despite his regional and nationalistic intent, Garland’s ideas clearly reflected a cosmopolitan understanding of Taine. As the literary historian Brad Evans has pointed out, Garland revered the French theorist and even claimed to have written notes from Taine’s Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863–64) all over the walls of his bedroom while reading the book. From that formative experience, Garland absorbed Taine’s influential ideas about literature (and art in general) as a “fossil shell” of national character, embodying “race,” “milieu,” and “moment.” It is no wonder, then, that Garland, elsewhere in the same text quoted above, also observed that “local color means national character.” Eakins responded to Taine in a similar fashion, artistically speaking, by representing colorful local differences— “what kind of people are there”—in the environs of Philadelphia.23 In tracing the intellectual roots of local color fiction and other kinds of American literary realism, scholars have noted that a preponderance of writers, aca-

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demics, and critics in the United States were Taineans during the postbellum period. For example, William Dean Howells, the prominent author and editor of Atlantic Monthly (a major organ of local color writing), echoed Taine by describing literature as “a plant which springs from the nature of a people.” Mark Twain cited Taine approvingly on several occasions, even praising the Frenchman (with ironic humor) as “The Father of English Literature!” In 1872, Yale professor T. R. Lounsbury published a review of Taine’s Histoire de la littérature anglaise in The Nation, saying that it was “the best history of English literature that has yet been produced.” Espousing Taine’s views in his own words, Lounsbury wrote: “Literature is bound up with the national life, and in order to know the characteristic of the one it is essential to study closely the other. Race, climate, political institutions, manners, and customs, all become of importance, for these all affect the man, and necessarily leave their impress upon the work he produces.” Such comments aptly illustrate what Alfred Kroeber would later describe as the evolutionary “confusion” regarding organic versus “superorganic” determinants of “culture.”24 Some nineteenth-century readers in the United States inchoately sensed that very confusion as a problem in the French professor’s thinking, though they were unable to articulate the problem in modern anthropological terms. A few objected to Taine’s emphasis on racial determinism over individuality as the dominant factor in human creativity. For example, in his otherwise favorable review, Lounsbury felt that Taine displayed “a tendency to push the doctrine of race too far.” Howells, while admiring many aspects of the Frenchman’s theories, thought that “M. Taine’s method does not take into sufficient account the element of individuality in the artist.” Similarly, Henry James praised Taine’s ability to see “with a magnificent objectivity,” but he felt the Frenchman played “fast and loose with his theory.” Other American writers, including the Christian theologians William Kingsley and Reverend John Bascom, criticized Taine for his atheism and his monist disregard for the traditional duality of body versus mind and spirit.25 Nevertheless, Taine enjoyed what one historian has called a “vogue” in late nineteenth-century American intellectual circles. Among his greatest admirers was the poet Walt Whitman, whom Eakins met, befriended, and portrayed in 1887. Writing for a literary magazine called The Critic a few years prior to posing for Eakins, Whitman said, “If Taine, the French critic, had done no other good, it would be enough that he has brought to the fore the first, last, and all-illuminating point, with respect to any grand production of literature, that the only way to finally understand it is to minutely study the personality of the one who shaped it—his origin, times, surroundings, and his actual fortunes, life, and ways. All this supplies not only the glass through which to look, but it is the atmosphere, the very light itself.” Whitman’s vague reference to the “origin” of the creative “personal-

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ity” suggests once again the familiar period confusion of biological and social factors. Later, in 1889, Whitman confided to his friend Horace Traubel regarding Taine, “I think his history [of English literature] one of the greatest books of our times: most genuine, most subtle, most profound.” As we have seen, it was in the Histoire de la littérature anglaise that Taine articulated his notion of “race, milieu, et moment.” Accordingly, as noted by Whitman biographer David Reynolds, the poet “was interested, like Taine, in the way literature grew out of society and people.” The same basic idea informed the work of Eakins, Garland, and other American local colorists.26 For such Americans, embracing Taine generally meant accepting racial and environmental determinism to some extent but also emphasizing the power of the New World and its dynamic social relations to construct a new national character, one not entirely continuous with, or beholden to, that of Europe. Hence this observation by Whitman in Democratic Vistas (1871): To formulate beyond this present vagueness—to help line and put before us the species, or a specimen of the species, of the democratic ethnology of the future, is a work toward which the genius of our land, with peculiar encouragement, invites her well-wishers. Already certain limnings, more or less grotesque, more or less fading and watery, have appeared. We too (repressing doubts and qualms) will try our hand.27

In a similar vein, Garland felt a “sincere wish to embody American life and characteristic American thought.” Conversely, he considered it “unnatural and artificial to find an American writing novels of Russia or Spain or the Holy Land. He cannot hope to do it so well as the native.” In Garland’s view, Americans must recognize and appreciate “the wealth of material which lies at hand, in the mixture of races going on with inconceivable celerity everywhere in America, but with especial picturesqueness in the West.” With a sense of inclusive optimism and openness reminiscent of Whitman, Garland continued, “In short, there is [in America] a great heterogeneous, shifting, brave population, a land teeming with unrecorded and infinite drama.” In 1882, Eakins’s student Joseph Pennell alluded to such shifting heterogeneity in his local color essay “A Ramble in Old Philadelphia,” saying, “The mixture of races in our cities is rapidly increasing, and we hardly notice it, because we have gradually grown accustomed to it.” For Garland, Whitman, and Pennell, as for Taine, race and custom seemed inextricable from one another but also dynamically in play in America.28 Eakins left no closely comparable verbal statement during the nineteenth century, but toward the end of his life he told a newspaper interviewer the following: If America is to produce great painters and if young art students wish to assume a place in the history of the art of their country, their first desire should be to remain in Amer-

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ica to peer deeper into the heart of American life, rather than spend their time abroad obtaining a superficial view of the art of the Old World. . . . It would be far better for American art students and painters to study their own country and portray its life and types. To do that they must remain free from any foreign superficialities. Of course, it is well to go abroad to see the works of the old masters, but Americans must branch out into their own fields as they are doing it. They must strike out of themselves and only by doing this will we create a great and distinctly American art.29

Taine would have agreed with this program for cultivating national character in art, for it basically echoed his own naturalistic theories. Although the statement by Eakins comes from a point late in his career, his outdoor pictures of the 1870s and 1880s already embodied the essential point about representing local Philadelphia examples of American “life and types.” His exhortation that Americans must “strike out of themselves” and “branch out into their own fields” closely approximates the Tainean, natural-environmental sensibility of Garland, who averred in Crumbling Idols that the art of local color was “rooted in the soil.”30 In a similar echo of Taine, some modern art historians have casually suggested that Eakins’s art was firmly “rooted” in the soil of Philadelphia. To embrace such an idea narrowly and uncritically, however, is to overlook many cosmopolitan aspects of the artist’s professional career: his French training, his subsequent letters and visual allusions to Gérôme, his efforts to exhibit and sell work nationally and internationally, his realist adaptation of the nude and other European academic principles, his forays into magazine illustration, and the like. Viewing Eakins and his art simply in terms of Philadelphia “roots” or American national character also misses the broader cosmopolitanism of “local color” itself as a widely circulating commodity in which he and many contemporaries traded. Local color functioned as an object of regional difference disseminated in an increasingly global marketplace of modernity. As Tom Lutz says regarding the literary realm, “The hallmark of local color and later regionalist writing . . . is its attention to both local and more global concerns,” requiring a commitment to “cosmopolitan ideals of cultural inclusiveness” and “a careful balancing of different groups.” In Eakins’s case, such balancing occurred in the attention he paid to racially diverse subjects, middle-class leisure and working-class labor, Fairmount Park and the Neck, fine art exhibition venues and magazine publications, Philadelphia and Paris.31 Vivid testimony of the commodity status and international cosmopolitan appeal of Philadelphia local color as depicted by Eakins can be found in a pair of French reviews describing unidentified hunting pictures (possibly including Pushing for Rail, see Fig. 44) that he sent to the Paris Salon in 1875. Critic Paul Leroi, writing in L’Art, referred to

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M. Thomas Eakins, a student of M. Gérôme, who sends from Philadelphia a very strange picture; it is, however, far from being without merit. “A Hunt in the United States” is a true work of precision; it is rendered like a photograph. There is a veracity of movement and details that is truly great and singular. This exotic product [“Ce produit exotique”] teaches you something and its author is not one to be forgotten.32

In the cosmopolitan journal Revue des Deux Mondes, another French critic named F. de Lagenevais wrote: The products [“Les produits”] that M. Eakins sends us from Philadelphia are the result of good training. You have undoubtedly seen them? These two canvases, each containing two hunters in a boat, resemble photographic prints overlaid with a light local hue [“une légère teinte locale”] in the manner of watercolor, such that one asks oneself whether these are not specimens of a still secret industrial process, and that the inventor may have maliciously sent them to Paris to upset M. Detaille and frighten the French school.33

Not only had Eakins sent convincing representations of “exotic” Philadelphia local color in both the painterly and regional sense, but his work resembled an industrial “product” of sorts—a foreign commodity that posed a challenge to French artistic manufacturers. By thus circulating objects of regional character in an international arena, Eakins detached them from their ostensible “roots” and participated in the cosmopolitan diffusion of “culture” avant la lettre. That is, by rendering Philadelphia’s local color as an aesthetic commodity to be disseminated nationally and even globally, Eakins harnessed the very forces of modern diffusion that would eventually necessitate articulation of the anthropological culture concept. As Brad Evans has explained in his rich study of local color fiction and other late nineteenth-century American realist literature, the culture concept came into use by the early twentieth century amid the increasingly discontinuous flow of customs, traditions, and artifacts irrespective of geographic origins, racial identities, or national boundaries. In other words, a concept of “culture” or “cultures” became necessary once race, nationality, and even language could no longer adequately account for the complex ways in which human identity formed and transformed in relation to circulating objects. According to Evans, “works of local color were positioned as cultural artifacts . . . they were positioned in the market as imaginary fragments of cultures, objects around which cultural communities could be imagined.” Yet their “circulation also elicited a sense of discontinuity,” says Evans, such that “when objects became marked and marketed as something like cultural things, attention was diverted from their connection to a particular people or place to the way they moved around, and moved around quickly.”34

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In the case of Eakins, evidence for such discontinuous movement and curious attention can be found, for example, in the critic Leroi’s description of his hunting picture as “a very strange painting” and an “exotic product” sent “from Philadelphia,” or in the playful adoption of the epithet “Brer” by the artist’s students at the Philadelphia Art Students’ League. Eakins’s recycling of images and image fragments in different contexts (see Figs. 39–44) as well as his additive use of various emblematic signs—the “Spanish” bull and matador (see Plate 3, Fig. 32), the “Negro” banjo, hat, and cane (see Plate 1), the “Pennsylvania” Quakers (see Fig. 5)—provide further evidence of the circulatory energies described by Evans. As we will see shortly, the artist’s use of multiple photographic projections as compositional templates for the production of a single painted image embodied certain discontinuities between depicted people and places on a technical level. Paradoxically, the circulation of local color as an aesthetic object at once depended upon and effectively deconstructed Taine’s materialist notion of art as the organic “fossil shell” of a particular national character. For, as Evans observes, objectifying art in that way “suggested not only its materiality but also its circulation and detachability. . . . Indeed, one of the discoveries stemming from the study of diffusion at the end of the century was just this recognition that the circulation of objects failed to correlate with the circulation of peoples and languages.” In other words, people began to recognize that there was no absolute or essential relation between works of art and particular social groups, but this recognition did not gain currency until the early twentieth century, after the anthropological studies of diffusion by Franz Boas. Only later, after that, would most people begin to understand group artistic traditions in terms of “cultures.”35 Eakins, of course, never acquired such a Boasian cultural understanding, even if his art unwittingly fostered and relied upon the diffusion of customs. Instead, he just wanted his pictures of Philadelphia to sell widely in an era of post–Civil War nationalism, industrialism, and cosmopolitanism. To that end, he proudly touted the city as a place marked by various positive characteristics: a progressive historical tradition, a salubrious environment, a vigorous outdoor life, and an inclusive acknowledgment of racial and class differences. Such references befitted an idealized vision of Philadelphia as a modern, Republican city committed to Northern principles of national unity. In other words, the artist represented the city as a model of American democracy. His civic-minded image of Philadelphia paid attention to local details of “race, milieu, et moment” even as it projected the city moving forward, evolving in a positive direction toward a “distinctly American,” democratic version of civilization.

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The Limits of Civic Realism Critical analysis of that constructed image in relation to the wider social and environmental history of Philadelphia sheds light on the selective and subtly hierarchical nature of Eakins’s realism. After all, in creating a product of national character that was also a product for sale and exhibition, Eakins needed to balance his realist pursuit of empirical truth with aesthetic standards and market expectations, which placed limits on artistic content. Although The Gross Clinic had infamously failed to maintain that balance, his many outdoor pictures of Philadelphia were never so controversial. Some commentators found Eakins’s outdoor pictures oddly conceived and aesthetically dull, while others praised their innovative approach to American subject matter; none, however, criticized their realism for violating social standards or parameters of decency. Regarding such standards in the literary realm, Lutz has observed that realism in local color writing achieved an inclusive “cosmopolitanism” and “careful balancing of different groups” while nonetheless tending to be “hierarchical” in representing human difference. Unlike twentieth-century socialist realism, says Lutz, realism in the local color era constituted a “bourgeois” mode that was “more convoluted” and “ideologically messier.” Basically the same thing could be said of Eakins’s realistic depictions of Philadelphia sportsmen and workers. In keeping with prevailing bourgeois aesthetics and social standards in that city, the artist projected a relatively restrained, even conservative, vision of democracy.36 Specifically, Eakins’s realism differentiated the various people and aquatic zones around Philadelphia according to a picturesque logic that embodied middle-class expectations and assumptions. For all the apparent empirical accuracy of his outdoor water scenes, they followed aesthetic decorum by selectively depicting certain kinds of people engaged in characteristic actions at places he deemed fitting and appropriate: “what kind of people are there . . . what they are doing & why they are doing it,” as he said. In particular, his sense of decorum led him to associate marginal sites such as the Neck—located downstream from the center of the city and notoriously polluted—with working-class labor and racial difference. Both literally and figuratively, for Eakins and his target audience, the marshes were a kind of “backwater” where such elements could be tolerated. Although workingclass labor and racial difference were ubiquitous in and around Philadelphia, Eakins mainly relegated them to the city’s environmentally degraded periphery (see Figs. 41–44). Conversely, he imagined the Schuylkill River at Fairmount Park and Dove Lake near Bryn Mawr (on the suburban Main Line railroad), as zones of heroic middle-class whiteness populated by athletic rowers and swimmers, including the artist himself (see Plate 2, Figs. 35, 39). When Eakins appeared in such

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pictures as one of the middle-class whites who occasionally visited the marshes and other marginal areas, he and they were clearly temporary tourists, like the “sportsmen” from the “city” that Maurice Egan said “swarm into the Neck” in the fall every year.37 Art historians have frequently praised the artist’s outdoor pictures as both empirical and “democratic” because they realistically projected a degree of inclusive human variety around the Philadelphia region. Yet, by clearly associating racial difference with certain zones and excluding it from others, Eakins helped naturalize aspects of nineteenth-century social hierarchy and environmental injustice that persist to this day. Moreover, his pictures promoted a civic myth about Philadelphia’s progressive modernity that ignored or denied a rapidly worsening ecological crisis then affecting city residents through its public water supply. Historically that water supply enjoyed a positive reputation, thanks to figures such as William Rush (see Fig. 36). By the mid-nineteenth century, however, Philadelphia became colloquially dubbed “Filthy Dirty” for its polluted rivers and political corruption. By the 1870s, the city was mortgaging its progressive image by failing to protect the public health from water-borne diseases, notably recurring epidemics of typhoid and other deadly fevers. When Eakins painted his William Rush and athletic rowers on the Schuylkill at Fairmount Park, the river was so badly polluted by untreated industrial sewage and domestic cesspool waste that disease in the city was reaching scandalous proportions, prompting regular sanitary investigations and growing political pressure to find new sources of fresh water. One official investigation in 1875 by the city’s Commission of Engineers, for example, reported that the Schuylkill River had become a natural “sewer.” Philadelphia’s proud heritage of civilized progress was in trouble and in danger of devolving. Major problems with water purity and disease plagued the city throughout the last quarter of the century and did not begin to subside until a series of enormous new filtration plants were constructed between 1904 and 1912.38 Rather than address such facts, Eakins looked the other way. His art performed a kind of aesthetic filtration without sacrificing the illusion of realism. In that respect, he again followed the example of his master Gérôme, whose orientalism carefully edited out the glaring unpicturesque evidence of modernity, as discussed in Chapter 1. For all of his careful attention to certain aspects of contemporary life, Eakins achieved none of the gritty frankness about modern environmental realities seen, for example, in David Gilmour Blythe’s Prospecting (ca. 1861–63, private collection) or Thomas Anshutz’s Ironworkers’ Noontime (Fig. 45). The latter painting, by a student of Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, shows industrial laborers resting in the dingy, cindered precincts outside a factory, from which plumes of black smoke belch into the air. Eakins’s pictures also

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Figure 45. Thomas Anshutz, The Ironworkers’ Noontime, 1880. Oil on canvas, 43.2 × 60.6 cm (17 × 237⁄8

in.). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd, 1979.7.4. Figure 46. James Tissot, On the Thames, 1876. Oil on canvas, 73 × 107.9 cm (283⁄4 × 421⁄2 in.). Wakefield

Art Gallery, West Yorkshire, England.

look rather sanitized compared with the urban river imagery of European artists of the period. For example, James A. M. Whistler’s Wapping (1860–64, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), William Wyllie’s London from the Monument (1870, Collection of Lord Lloyd Webber), and James Tissot’s On the Thames (Fig. 46) all represented the realities of urban pollution, congestion, and development along London’s signature river in an unflinching manner.39 Eakins’s civic vision of Philadelphia responded to a combination of Tainean principles, cosmopolitan aesthetic expectations, and nascent suburban sensibilities

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driven by bourgeois desires for picturesque retreat from urban pollution, congestion, and human difference. Though Eakins lived near Philadelphia’s inner city, less than a mile from Centre Square, his Fairmount neighborhood was solidly middle class. He and members of his family went on suburban getaways to places like Avondale, Pennsylvania, and Gloucester, New Jersey, on a regular basis. Edward Hornor Coates, the artist’s supervisor at the Pennsylvania Academy and a leading patron in these years, belonged to a privileged social set whose real estate acquisitions helped create picturesque new suburban developments along Philadelphia’s Main Line commuter railroad during the 1880s. Catering to the tastes of patrons such as Coates, Eakins carefully refined and purified his pictures to exclude the harsh environmental realities of modern Philadelphia while retaining the look of realism.40 In other words, despite persistent art historical claims that his realism was “uncompromising,” Eakins never actually confronted the grim truths of urban modernity in his native city, notably its scandalous water pollution, even when this had a direct impact on him personally. In 1873, the artist contracted malaria while hunting in the city’s outlying salt marshes, leaving him, as he put it, “bedridden 8 weeks, senseless most of the time,” such that “they believed that I would die.” Nine years later, just before Christmas in 1882, his beloved sister Margaret died from typhoid fever, a disease caused by drinking water tainted with human waste. For Eakins, such realities and their environmental causes were beyond the limits of representation and aesthetic propriety, never to be explicitly acknowledged in his work. They were not within the purview of realist painting, as he saw it.41 Eakins limited the scope of his realism for reasons that were not exclusively aesthetic. As an aspiring professional in Philadelphia, he hardly wished to jeopardize his career by drawing attention to glaring shortcomings in the city’s infrastructure or in its powerful Republican leadership. To do so would have been to challenge powerful interests and the prevailing evolutionary ethos of progress, both of which Eakins aligned himself with during the 1870s and early 1880s. He was an avowed Republican with important professional contacts among local party representatives. The Republican-dominated Union League organized his first public exhibition in 1871 and later arranged a commission for him to portray their party’s national standard-bearer, President Rutherford B. Hayes. At the 1871 exhibition, Eakins displayed The Champion Single Sculls (see Plate 2), a work that art historian Elizabeth Milroy has described as “an astute piece of civic boosterism certain to appeal to the Union League audience” because of its picturesque celebration of the Schuylkill River and the city’s newly established Fairmount Park.42 Over time, Eakins failed to live up to official expectations and eventually challenged authorities at the Pennsylvania Academy by insisting upon using nude mod-

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els and anatomical dissection in teaching—factors that eventually led to his resignation in 1886. But even when aggravating the authorities, Eakins had no interest in using his realism as a form of criticism with which to shine a light on Philadelphia’s growing problems of political corruption, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Rather, his outdoor scenes of salubrious activity set in suburban locations were infused with an affirmative sense of local color, civic pride, and national character. Indeed, they rather presciently modeled a white, upper middle-class, suburban vision of Philadelphia that was to become hegemonic.43 By exploring the broader social and environmental context surrounding Eakins’s regional image of Philadelphia during the 1870s and early 1880s, we glimpse some of the darker recesses of urban modernity that defined the boundaries of artistic representation and aesthetic-evolutionary “culture” (in the Arnoldian sense) in nineteenth-century America. Whereas scholars of modern European art have paid considerable attention to the history and politics of pollution, filth, sanitation, and public health in cities such as Paris and London, historians of American art have done relatively little of the kind. Sarah Burns has recently touched on environmental conditions in David Gilmour Blythe’s Pittsburgh, but as yet no such art historical study has explored Eakins’s Philadelphia. Nor have Eakins scholars thoroughly probed his outdoor pictures in relation to the racial or class politics of nineteenthcentury Philadelphia. The remaining pages of the present chapter endeavor to address these topics in tandem.44 Before proceeding, it is interesting to note that various odd and incongruous passages within Eakins’s outdoor pictures register his retreat from urban realities on the level of form and technique. Art historians typically attribute such incongruities to the artist’s obsessively rational working method and pragmatic commitment to science over aesthetic cohesion. Early commentators basically said the same thing, as when the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin reviewer described the artist of The Champion Single Sculls (see Plate 2) as “working upon well-supported theories” but producing a “somewhat scattered effect.” Taken together, the preponderance of stiff figure poses, awkward compositions, and other curious effects signal an important degree of studio artificiality in Eakins’s representation of outdoor subjects. His recycling of images and image fragments (both painted and photographed) further indicates a kind of distancing or vicarious engagement rather than empirical observation. In effect, Eakins’s working method provided him with a prosthetic technical retreat analogous to the real and thematic one already suggested by his suburban subject matter. The result was a very specific kind of realism that looked empirical and answered to prevailing aesthetic expectations without recording too much of the disconcerting truth about Philadelphia’s environment.45

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Local Taint For many years, social and environmental historians have recounted a litany of pollution and related public health problems afflicting Philadelphia’s rivers during the period in which Eakins produced his celebrated outdoor pictures. Art historians have not paid attention to such scholarship, even though it tells us a great deal about the world in which Eakins lived and what he chose to represent. In an essay from one standard history of Philadelphia, Nathaniel Burt and Wallace E. Davies have stated that during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, “No respectable person would drink the city water, which came from the polluted Schuylkill, and everyone who could bought spring water from private companies. The typhoid fever death rate was the highest of the major cities, three times that of New York after the turn of the century.” In another book examining the same topic and period in detail, Sam Alewitz has stated, “The history of sanitation and public health in Philadelphia during the last quarter of the nineteenth century . . . is a saga of corrupt politics and a contaminated environment.” Alewitz observes further that by the 1870s the two rivers [Schuylkill and Delaware] had become cesspools for the city’s sewage and the city had become an unhealthy place to live, threatening the welfare of its inhabitants. . . . It was not necessary to be an engineer, chemist, or a physician, a Councilman or a city bureaucrat to recognize the magnitude of the problem. It was only necessary to walk along the shore of the placid and picturesque Schuylkill River, particularly where the sewers drained into the river, to see the excreta, the offal, and industrial pollution lying along the shore.46

In addition to the Commission of Engineers report quoted earlier, Alewitz adduces many other official and unofficial contemporary sources that testified to the degraded state of Philadelphia’s rivers before, during, and after the 1870s. For example, in an 1866 article for the local periodical American Presbyterian, Reverend John W. Mears complained that the Schuylkill was being polluted by “the increase of population and manufactures on its banks, and of tillage of the territory which it drains.” According to Mears, “one of the guiltiest parties to the work of willfully corrupting the stream is the City itself which drinks it.” An 1869 Annual Report of the Water Department referred to the pool below Fairmount Dam (Philadelphia’s main public water source) as being tainted by “much of the sewerage of the City on the Schuylkill side, and the waste from the City Gas Works.” The latter public utility, founded in 1836, occupied a large facility along the Schuylkill near the Neck, just south of the city’s urban core.47 As indicated by the Water Department and other observers, though, sewage and industrial runoff from other sources also entered the river much farther north,

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even above Fairmount Park and Dam, upstream from the locations pictured in Eakins’s rowing scenes. In an 1871 pamphlet recommending establishment of a new public water reservoir at Flat Rock Dam (north of the city), James Haworth noted, “nearly all the abominations which contaminate the river (as set forth by the official reports) being at or below Manayunk,” a northwestern suburb along the Schuylkill about five miles upstream from central Philadelphia. In an 1879 article for an engineering journal, Charles Darrach observed, “The Schuylkill River, of world-wide fame as a source of potable water would be all that could be wished were it not for the sewage of the city itself and that of other cities and towns upon its tributaries” (emphasis in the original).48 In 1875, at the request of the Water Department, a prominent Philadelphia physician named Charles Cresson produced a study titled Results of Examinations of Water from the River Schuylkill, based on extensive samples taken at various locations near the city’s urban center during the preceding three years. His conclusion was measured but decisive: The pollution of the Schuylkill river has been increased to such an extent as occasionally to class the water as ‘unwholesome;’ prompt measures should therefore be taken to relieve it of sewage containing faecal and decaying animal matter. The greatest proportion of these are now received from the streams draining into the pool of Fairmount dam. . . . That portion of the sewage which is most dangerous, and which would in the presence of an epidemic produce fatal results, is derived from the cess-pools and the drainage of slaughter houses. Singularly, the river is tolerably free from such sewage until it enters the pool of Fairmount dam. Into this pool from both sides of the river is poured an enormous quantity of animal refuse from slaughter houses, in which I am informed not less than 25 per cent of the whole number of animals needed for our market are killed. . . . The amount of sewage found in Fairmount forebay . . . has been steadily increasing since [1872, when the study began], until the water is occasionally charged with an amount of sewage exceeding that carried by the river Thames at London (England), and is totally unfit for use.49

Industrial sewage and domestic waste from cesspool runoff created a lethal combination that resulted in hundreds of deaths in Philadelphia every year from typhoid fever and other diseases. On the basis of official annual reports by the city’s Board of Health, historian Michael McCarthy has compiled sobering statistics decade-by-decade about the growing death toll from typhoid fever alone: 4,357 fatalities between the years 1861 and 1869; 4,417 between 1871 and 1879; 6,394 between 1881 and 1889. The last decennial statistic, of course, included Eakins’s sister Margaret.50 Two years after Margaret’s death, the city’s chief engineer, Colonel William Ludlow, frankly observed the following in the 1884 Annual Report of the Philadel-

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phia Bureau of Water: “It has been proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that water which to every sense is pure may be charged with the most active and deadly potency.” Alewitz notes that when Ludlow, a Democrat, became publicly critical of Philadelphia’s water problems, this did not sit well with the city’s Republican leaders. Speaking to a meeting of the Master Plumbers Association in 1885, Ludlow complained that “the ground is saturated and polluted, the houses stand in bad soil a foot deep. The water is poisoned and unfit for use, the sewers are elongated cesspools, and the highways are reeking with filth.” Those statements led the city council shortly thereafter to pass a resolution ordering the chief engineer to “refrain at present from public agitation of the subject.” Undeterred, Ludlow continued his mission to publicize Philadelphia’s water woes while criticizing bureaucratic inaction. The situation attracted national attention when The Nation defended Ludlow against “the Republican Machine in Philadelphia,” calling the latter “second in corruption only to Tammany Hall in New York.” The “Machine” evidently found such publicity intolerable. In 1886—the same year Eakins lost his teaching job at the Pennsylvania Academy after removing the loincloth of a male model posing for a coeducational art class—Ludlow was fired for his outspokenness. As McCarthy observes, the Republican-dominated city council “felt he [Ludlow] was hurting Philadelphia’s image by his critical remarks about the city’s water.”51 Aside from the coincidence of Ludlow’s and Eakins’s terminations (unrelated events involving different intrusions upon public “taste,” as it were), it is interesting to note the complex visual dimension of Philadelphia’s water pollution problem. On the one hand, as Alewitz has indicated, “it was only necessary to walk along the shore of the placid and picturesque Schuylkill River, particularly where the sewers drained into the river, to see the excreta, the offal, and industrial pollution lying along the shore.” On the other hand, as Ludlow observed, “water which to every sense is pure may be charged with the most active and deadly potency.” Thus Philadelphia’s water was doubly degraded by pollutants, some of which were visible, while others remained invisible, requiring special instruments and analytical methods for detection. To quote Cresson’s 1875 study on the Schuylkill, “The extreme minuteness of the quantity which makes the difference between a good and bad kind of water renders this branch of inquiry difficult, and excludes the employment of all the ordinary methods of chemical analysis. The detection and measurement of the organic matters in water belong to the domain of micro-chemical investigation.” In other words, also coincidentally, in the years that Eakins and Eadweard Muybridge were busy at the University of Pennsylvania investigating the power of stop-action photography to reveal incremental phases of bodily motion that were otherwise invisible to the naked eye (1878–

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85), Philadelphia public health scientists were engaged in analogous explorations on the perceptual threshold of bacteriology or “germ theory.”52 Eakins portrayed many scientists, including several physicians and even a few chemists, but no bacteriologists or public health officials. Evidently, either he met none of the latter or they failed to capture his artistic imagination. Following Louis Pasteur’s germ theory experiments of the early 1860s, research by European scientists such as Joseph Lister and Robert Koch led to innovations in surgical asepsis and bacteriology. By the late 1870s, bacteriology was emerging as a vanguard science of preventive medicine that would eventually make older “miasma” theories of airborne disease obsolete. The new science was slow to take root in Philadelphia, however, despite the efforts of public health officials like Cresson and Ludlow. In an 1885 address to the County Medical Society of Philadelphia, Ludlow expressed his frustration using a striking combination of evolutionary and orientalist metaphors: Philadelphia is, in this country, the mother of medical science, educating yearly in the art of healing, and sending out to the world, hundreds of bright young minds infused with professional enthusiasm, and ambitious, not only for success, but for that greater crown, the laurel wreath of the benefactor. Can it be that, in this city of science and culture, these things that lie before us, patent to every sense, have escaped all observation? Or is it that the fatalism of the East has seized upon the intellects that should have grasped the situation so that instead of sending out the cry of warning, they have shrouded their heads and awaited the inevitable coming of the destroyer?53

For Ludlow, the failure of Philadelphia’s medical community to respond to the public health crisis posed by water pollution evoked Eastern “fatalism” (of the sort we encountered in Chapter 1), threatening the city’s progressive “science” and Arnoldian “culture” with devolution. As Alewitz has pointed out, echoing Ludlow, most physicians in Philadelphia at this time were conservatives who hesitated to embrace the vanguard science of bacteriology and preventive medicine, preferring curative methods that were more familiar and lucrative. According to Alewitz, an important factor contributing to the city’s lack of action in public health reform was “the established role of the physician to cure and not prevent disease.” In other words, says Alewitz, “The dominant force of the healer prevailed in Philadelphia.”54 As the leading portraitist of Philadelphia healers, Eakins held that dominant force in high regard and helped buttress its authority. Indeed, his famously controversial work, The Gross Clinic (Portrait of Dr. Samuel Gross) of 1875, showing a bloody operation to save a patient’s diseased leg from amputation, ran afoul of some art critics precisely for its aggressive dramatization of surgical healing as a visual spectacle or performance. Like Dr. Gross himself, the portrait by default ignored the new science of bacteriology, which by 1875 already had led some Euro-

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pean contemporaries to change out of their business clothes when conducting surgical operations. Moreover, compared with Gross’s surgical performance, the scientific processes of bacteriological prevention were anticlimactic and practically invisible, making them rather less conducive to artistic dramatization. Incidentally, some scientists at the time were beginning to speak of “cultures” in the bacteriological sense, but this hardly offered auspicious subject matter for an ambitious young painter. Eakins only indirectly registered his awareness of bacteriology in one subsequent medical group portrait, The Agnew Clinic (1889, University of Pennsylvania Art Collection, Philadelphia), in which the black business suits worn by Dr. Gross and his assistants have been replaced by white antiseptic gowns.55 If Eakins’s pictures barely acknowledged the new science of bacteriology and avoided any signs of pollution on Philadelphia’s waterways, his surviving letters reveal that he was keenly aware of filth and dirt in many aspects of daily life, both at home and abroad. During his four-year period of study in Europe, for example, he repeatedly complained to his family about dirt that he encountered there. For example, in a letter of 1867, he described the floor of his Paris apartment: [It] was impossible to keep it clean. I bought a big broom but the way the dirt would stick in those bricks was a caution. I spread a piece of carpet down by my bed to tread on for if I trod on the bricks I had to go wash my feet. Then I had to be very careful to tuck in the bed clothes well at night for if they touched the bricks they were soiled too.56

Traveling with friends in Switzerland in 1868, Eakins ranted angrily about dirty peasants he had encountered at Zermatt, a place that he considered to be decidedly lacking in enjoyable local color, for he described it as the most God forsaken place I ever saw or hope to see. The people are all either cretins or only half cretins with the goiter on their necks. They live in the filthiest manner possible the lower apartment being privy and barn combined and they breed by incest altogether. Consequent goiters and cretins only. If I was a military conqueror and they came in my way I would burn every hovel and spare nobody for fear they would contaminate the rest of the world. . . . They are dirty as they can be and so have become contented as they can never become dirtier. . . . They stink their houses stink worse, the water of the valley stinks, and the valley itself stinks except in a few places for instance the big French hotel we are now in. Out in Poland and down in Italy they have the cholera. It is to be hoped it will get up some of these valleys.57

Conversely, writing from Spain in 1869, Eakins praised Madrid as “the cleanest city I ever saw in my life. . . . The people all cover the nose & mouth & wrap themselves very warm & I do the same thing. . . . I don’t think they are much more soiled when they come home than if they had been to a ball. The hotels are clean the privies are large commodious & built on the American not French pattern.”58

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Other verbal observations by Eakins illustrate what literature historian William A. Cohen has identified as a distinctive “conjunction of literal and metaphorical filth” in modernity. That is, in addition to noting examples of real filth (or its absence), Eakins also frequently used dirt metaphorically in a complex manner that negotiated personal beliefs and even cosmopolitan art-theoretical ideas. For example, in decrying the exuberant baroque painting style of Peter Paul Rubens, Eakins described the Flemish old master as “the nastiest most vulgar noisy painter that ever lived. His men are twisted to pieces. His modeling is always crooked & dropsical & no marking is ever in its right place. . . . His pictures always put me in mind of chamber pots & I would not be sorry if they were all burnt.”59 The most elaborate metaphorical use of dirt by Eakins occurs in a letter to his father, written in Paris during 1868, in which he referred to coal scuttles, boating, and river mud in concocting his own version of the academic theories about artistic imitation that he encountered at the French Academy: 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. Then he’s got a canoe of his own smaller than Nature’s but big enough for every purpose. . . . With this canoe he can sail parallel to Nature’s sailing. He will soon be sailing only where he wants to selecting nice little coves & shady shores or storms to his own liking, but if ever he thinks he can sail another fashion from Nature or make a better shaped boat he’ll capsize or stick in the mud & nobody will buy his pictures or sail with him in his old tub. If a big painter wants to draw a coal scuttle he can do it better than the man that has been doing nothing but coal scuttles all his life. That’s sailing up Pig’s run among mud & slops & back houses. The big painter sees the marks that Nature’s big boat made in the mud & he understands them & profits by them.60

In keeping with his cosmopolitan perspective, Eakins here adapted ideas from his training at the École. As Elizabeth Milroy has observed, Hippolyte Taine used a similar boat metaphor in lecturing on the general predicament of the artist. According to Taine, “The organized being whom nature subjects to the struggle for existence is like a ship which has just glided from the stocks into the water. . . . It is accordingly necessary that the artist should adapt his situations to his characters.” Further evidence of Eakins’s metaphorical concern with dirt appears in another letter from Paris, praising Gérôme in evolutionary terms by saying that the French painter stood above other men “as man himself is raised above the swine.” From this we can deduce that Eakins viewed “Pig’s run” not simply as a filthy metaphor for misguided artistic methods but also as a figure of absolute debasement—the absence of evolutionary progress.61

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Yet the words “Pig’s run” and other American colloquialisms used by Eakins to represent academic theory have the vernacular ring of domestic local color, for they undoubtedly drew upon his personal experience on Philadelphia waterways. While condemning both Rubens and the “dungpile,” “coal scuttle” realism of unidentified Dutch artists, he praised the hypothetical “big painter” for avoiding “Pig’s run among mud & slops & back houses” and for following “the marks that Nature’s big boat made in the mud.” For Eakins, “Nature’s” “mud” was clearly different from, and preferable to, that associated with pigs and human waste, which increasingly polluted the water of his native city at the time. Cohen defines filth as “a term of condemnation, which instantly repudiates a threatening thing, person, or idea by ascribing alterity to it.” As he says, filth can be “so disturbing that it endangers the subjective integrity of the one who confronts it. By the time one has encountered and repudiated filth, it is too late—the subject is already besmirched by it. In this way, filth challenges the very dichotomy between subject and object . . . the filth of the object defiles the subject who, identifying it as such, has had to rub up against it.” Cohen’s observations provide a useful lens through which to read the metaphorical references to dirt in Eakins’s letters. The disturbing power of filth to defile and disassociate the subject helps explain why Eakins could not confront the modern reality of Philadelphia’s dangerously contaminated water in his paintings. Simply put, such filth was not “Nature’s” “mud.” It also presumably hit too close to home for an artist who so closely identified with his progressive native city, who became infected with malaria, and who was later traumatized by the death of his sister from typhoid fever. His reference to the bittern’s disappearance from the Schuylkill River in his label for the William Rush takes on new meaning in such a context. For Eakins to represent, pictorially, the pollution fouling his beloved Schuylkill would have been to rub up too closely against actual filth, not to mention the metaphorical filth of Dutch realism, the “chamber pots” of Rubens, and the “cretins” of Zermatt.62 In addition to his words, some of Eakins’s actions also tacitly acknowledged filth as a growing problem in the Philadelphia environment. For example, the artist’s decision to have his body cremated may have reflected an awareness of the effects of cemetery runoff, which attracted considerable attention from public health officials and writers during the late nineteenth century. In a book titled History of Earth Burials and Its Attendant Evils and the Advantages Offered by Cremation (1892), author Augustus Cobb cited a Philadelphia newspaper report attributing some of the pollution in the Schuylkill River to “little drops of water squeezed by ‘Father Time’ from the dead, and loaded with sure death for the living who drink it.” Cobb’s book also listed the names of many prominent figures who by then publicly supported cremation for hygienic reasons, including Harvard professor Charles Eliot

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Norton, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, railroad tycoon Charles Francis Adams Jr., and Dr. Samuel D. Gross.63 Also worth pondering in the context of this discussion of dirt and filth is Eakins’s obsessive fascination with linear perspective, mechanical drawing, and other rational, systematic tools of representation. Broadly speaking, those tools presupposed a special sensitivity to both spatial order and disorder. In a classic discussion of such concerns, anthropologist Mary Douglas has defined the cultural significance of dirt in terms of “matter out of place” because of the ways in which it violates socially defined systems of spatial order and discipline. As we have seen, Eakins associated the art of Rubens with “chamber pots,” complaining that “no marking” by the Flemish painter “is ever in its right place.” Conversely, precise spatial order and discipline were hallmarks of the perspective grids that Eakins drew in preparation for his rowing pictures and other outdoor scenes. Art historian Kathleen Foster has noted in this regard that the “qualities of linear perspective reflect upon the character of an artist who faithfully accepts its system.” For Foster, Eakins was definitely one such artist, as he used perspective in order “to project the orderliness and truthfulness of science and mathematics onto the endeavor of artistic representation.” In doing so, Eakins also effectively upheld a long-standing civic tradition dating back to Philadelphia’s famous city grid plan, designed by Thomas Holme for William Penn in 1682. To represent the realities of modern pollution along the Schuylkill or elsewhere around the city amounted to violating principles of rational order that Eakins held dear and upon which Philadelphia had been founded.64

The Space and Race of Rowing In the words of art historian Elizabeth Milroy, The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull) (see Plate 2) shows “a landscape in which nature, technology, and history coexist—a new kind of public space available only in the modern city—a setting Eakins’s contemporaries would have recognized instantly as a section of the Schuylkill River, lately incorporated into the massive and unique public works project that was Philadelphia’s grand new Fairmount Park.” As such, in Milroy’s view, the work “fit in neatly” with the art exhibition program of the Union League, some of whose members belonged to the city commission then overseeing management and construction of the park. In 1867, the Pennsylvania state legislature passed an Act of Assembly empowering Philadelphia to expropriate over two thousand acres of city land for “an open public place and park, for the health and enjoyment of the people of said city, and the preservation of the purity of the

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water supply.” According to the Fourth Annual Report of the Commissioners of Fairmount Park, published five years later in 1872, “Whole blocks of buildings, including large hotels, have disappeared, railway tracks have been taken up; furnaces, foundries, and iron mills have been removed; huge ditches and broad canals have been obliterated; the adjacent banks of the Schuylkill have been relieved from contaminations.” Milroy has compared such activity to the massive program of urban streamlining that Eakins witnessed in Baron Haussmann’s Paris during the 1860s, suggesting that the artist’s rowing pictures responded to both public works projects by expanding “upon the theme of motion through ordered space.”65 Noting the strains placed upon Philadelphia’s historic grid plan by a rapidly growing urban population, Milroy believes The Champion Single Sculls embodied such conditions by “circumscribing the Herculean task that confronted the newly appointed administrators of Fairmount Park.” In other words, Eakins approached the painting as a kind of spatial model of the civic enterprise then being undertaken by city leaders. Such a model inherently had more to do with envisioning an ideal future than with accurately representing the present, as suggested by Milroy’s further observation about how the artist and his subject “had to make their way through construction in order to launch their racing shells from the riverside boathouses” because of the “extensive demolition along the east bank of the Schuylkill.” As indicated by the commissioners’ report, walking through such construction also would have entailed witnessing “contaminations” and their removal.66 Participating pictorially in that removal process, Eakins omitted the grittier details of contemporary reality, confirming art historian Helen Cooper’s assessment of The Champion Single Sculls as “a wholly contrived studio production.” Addressing a related work by Eakins, Cooper adds that “like all the rowing pictures, The Biglin Brothers Racing [1872, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.] was a studio work, preconceived and invented; nothing was spontaneous or improvised.” Recent analysis of The Champion Single Sculls by Michael Leja, citing the implausible regularity of wave patterns depicted on the river surface and other details, further underscores the fact that a combination of aesthetic, narrative, scientific, and social concerns trumped “realism” in any strict empirical sense.67 Using works such as The Champion Single Sculls as a key example, art historians also frequently have asserted the “democratic” and “egalitarian” character of American rowing—and, by extension, of Eakins’s paintings—citing the sport’s accessibility to some working-class men and middle-class women during the nineteenth century. For example, Elizabeth Johns has observed that rowing “appealed to the developing American advocacy of leisure that was instructive, elevating, and democratic.” In Cooper’s view, rowing “was the ideal egalitarian and therefore American sport,” and Eakins’s pictures depicted “symbols of a kind of democratic

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American morality.” Referring to the distant crowd of onlookers and pedestrians in The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake-Boat (see Fig. 39), Milroy avers, “The landscape is expansive, public, and emphatically egalitarian.” These interpretations appear to owe something to historical understandings of Fairmount Park, a place that did enjoy a democratic reputation in the writings of some commentators during the nineteenth century. One such commentator was Eakins’s friend Earl Shinn, whose book A Century After: Picturesque Glimpses of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania (published under the pseudonym Edward Strahan in 1875) observed, “Nothing makes the ordinary citizen feel so much like a landed proprietor” as Fairmount Park, a place “foot-beaten, crowded, and democratic.”68 In assessing the egalitarianism of Eakins’s pictures and subjects, though, art historians have failed to contemplate another important historical fact: few sports in America have been whiter than rowing, especially in Philadelphia. With the notable exception of a successful African American professional rower from Boston named Frenchy Johnson—an exception proving the rule—the sport was overwhelmingly dominated by white athletes across the nation during the late nineteenth century. Johnson competed in races in New York, Pittsburgh, and Canada during the 1870s and 1880s, but his activity in Philadelphia (if any) has not been documented. In any case, neither he nor any other African American rower apparently belonged to one of the “Schuylkill Navy” clubs on Boathouse Row during the period. A reputation for exclusive whiteness marked Philadelphia rowing well into the twentieth century, as demonstrated by numerous news stories heralding rather tentative steps to desegregate the sport only in recent years. As late as the 1990s, racial tensions continued to overshadow local political debates in Philadelphia about access to Boathouse Row. In a 1994 article in the Philadelphia Tribune (a historically African American local newspaper), reporter Winslow Mason described meetings held by then mayor Ed Rendell, Councilman John Street, and the Fairmount Park Commission on “trying to figure out ways to make Blacks feel welcome to the [annual Regatta] celebration and to teach them the art of boating and rowing.” In a 1998 piece in the Philadelphia Weekly, writer Solomon Jones summarized the contemporary culture of Philadelphia’s Boathouse Row in these terms: “Their facades are carved from stone. Their membership is overwhelmingly white. Their traditions predate the Civil War.”69 For another historical indicator of the racial politics in Philadelphia rowing during the late nineteenth century, let us consider the case of Benjamin Howard Rand, Eakins’s chemistry teacher at Central High School and the subject of an important early portrait by the artist in 1874 (Fig. 47). By the time he painted Rand’s portrait, Eakins had known the sitter for more than ten years, very likely in multiple contexts. Since 1864, Rand had been professor of chemistry at Jefferson Medical Col-

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Figure 47. Thomas Eakins, Professor Benjamin Howard Rand, 1874. Oil on canvas, 152.4 × 121.9 cm

(60 × 48 in.). Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photo courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art.

lege, where Eakins studied anatomy before and after traveling abroad. Rand also served as president of the Undine Barge Club, one of the rowing clubs on Boathouse Row. Thus an ongoing acquaintance fostered by mutual participation in the “Schuylkill Navy” led Eakins to portray Rand without commission in 1874. Only a few years before, in 1870, Rand had refused to lecture at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia when that organization admitted as a new member the prominent African American educator Octavius Catto. Covered in local newspapers, the dis-

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pute became a public controversy that called attention to ongoing racial tension and segregation in postbellum Philadelphia. According to historian Harry Silcox, “While many city whites supported Rand and agreed that Catto should be ousted, the institute did not. The lecture [by Rand] was cancelled and Catto retained his membership.” Rand may not have been able to change the institute’s decision, but as president of a private rowing club he wielded more executive power. His racial views provide a barometer of the unspoken consensus about membership criteria on Boathouse Row at the time. Whether by design or acquiescence, Eakins and his rowing pictures belonged to a world of white male exclusivity and privilege in Philadelphia, not democratic egalitarianism in the sense we now understand it.7 The portrait of Rand, with its informal profusion of variously textured objects and materials—desk, microscope, flower, cat, scarf, and fur rug, among other things—has prompted some scholars to see in the work a tender expression of complex masculinity accommodating different “male” and “female” signs. Yet the portrait may also be read as an imaginative invention expressing solidarity with a man whose toleration of difference had definite limits. At the same time, if scholars are correct in finding various signs of gender and sexuality in the painting, one wonders why they have not made more of the black cat standing so prominently on Rand’s desk. Facing the beholder with upturned tail, the cat recalls and domesticates the most racially, sexually, and hygienically charged feline in nineteenthcentury art: the one depicted by Manet only a decade before in Olympia (see Fig. 18). Other American painters subsequently domesticated Olympia, so it should not be surprising to see Eakins taking his turn, especially given his recent French sojourn. As the art historian Frances Pohl has noted, for example, a restrained but obvious quotation of Manet’s painting appeared in Cecilia Beaux’s Sita and Sarita (Fig. 48), in which the telltale black cat stands on the shoulder of the artist’s cousin, who strokes the animal in a subtle metaphoric gesture of self-gratification. A onetime student of Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy and an artist of French ancestry who trained at the Académie Julian in Paris, Beaux subtly referenced Manet’s icon of European modernism in order to give her work a cosmopolitan cachet for the cognoscenti. The Rand portrait provided Beaux with an important American prototype in this regard.71 Given Rand’s racial attitudes and Eakins’s training in the ethnographic orientalist circles of Paris shortly after Olympia shocked the French art world, the professor’s black cat may carry more than just a vague cosmopolitan inflection, however. As Griselda Pollock has observed in discussing the reception of Manet’s painting, “The cat and the African attendant are the same color: black,” a fact that prompted contemporaries to associate both with “dirt [as] a metaphor for sex, and for the filth of disease associated with commercial sexuality.” The notoriety of

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Figure 48. Cecilia Beaux, Sita and Sarita (Young Woman with Cat), 1893–94. Oil on canvas, 94 × 63.5 cm (37 × 25 in.). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Manet’s painting made it impossible for American artists such as Eakins and Beaux to ignore, so they adapted it to their own strategic artistic purposes—including showing off their international training—while toning down its raunchier aspects for a domestic audience. That process of negotiation helps explain the rather awkward and stiff manner in which Rand appears to stroke the cat in Eakins’s portrait, as if holding the animal in place. In effect, the professor here once again attempted to keep blackness in check, along with associations of filth to which a Philadelphia chemist and rower (not to mention Eakins the artist) would have been particularly sensitive.72 Obviously, Eakins did not intend the Rand portrait or his rowing pictures to be read as explicit racial manifestos. His paintings instead simply illustrate some of the common ways in which whites historically maintained hegemony: through tacit assertions of social and spatial privilege amid outward claims about “democracy,” science, and order. Ironically, Lloyd Goodrich, one of the most conservative Eakins scholars, was the first art historian to acknowledge the imperfect egal-

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itarianism of rowing in Philadelphia when he noted that the sport was “practiced by gentlemen of the city’s upper class and by athletes of the less upper classes.” As he observed, rowing was “a curious combination of athletic democracy and social exclusiveness.” Until now, though, the historically dominant race of rowing has gone unnoticed in the Eakins literature. Considerable evidence of post–Civil War racial segregation in Philadelphia, not just on Boathouse Row but in public schools and other institutions, makes persistent scholarly claims about democracy and egalitarianism in both rowing and the art of Eakins seem not only problematic but insensitive. The Champion Single Sculls and related pictures by the artist foreground the heroic white body as central to his civic vision of the Schuylkill at Fairmount Park. Eakins’s paintings thus performed a double exclusion, of racial difference on the one hand and local taint on the other, while upholding a tradition of white privilege.73

Racial Difference and “Oozy Green Mire” If Eakins touted the monochromatic complexion of rowing on the Schuylkill at Fairmount Park, he accommodated racial heterogeneity in scenes of hunting and fishing downstream in areas south of central Philadelphia. In picturing the marshes of the Neck and the shores of the Delaware River at Gloucester, New Jersey, Eakins juxtaposed middle-class white leisure-seekers with black and white laborers. By carefully depicting various people, actions, and related accoutrements in multiple locations, the artist again captured something approximating the “culture” or “cultures” of Philadelphia outdoor life, even if this was not exactly his conscious intent. Again, in Eakins’s mind this was a matter of showing “what kind of people are there . . . what they are doing & why they are doing it.” Individually and collectively, his works represented the sort of “differences” that Hamlin Garland would cite as naturalistic determinants of “local color” and “national character” in art. Or, to borrow the words of another Tainean contemporary, Eakins’s attention to differences paralleled Whitman’s interest in the “democratic ethnology of the future” in America. However we frame the artist’s achievement historically, though, his work also clearly circumscribed such human differences within particular social and spatial limits, notably by relegating African American and other manual laborers to especially marginal areas then widely known to be more impoverished and egregiously polluted than the picturesque upper Schuylkill along Fairmount Park (which, as we have learned, was far from pure). Such marginal areas were already then being written off by the dominant bourgeoisie of Philadelphia as places of

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industrial development, where pollution and residential poverty could be countenanced. Middle-class whites who visited the Neck or Gloucester did so to enjoy the vestiges of a dwindling rustic open space that industrialism had not yet consumed, but those temporary visitors would not have imagined living in such places. In depicting life downstream, Eakins once again chose not to represent pollution or other unsavory conditions, preferring instead to use a purified realism that rendered Philadelphia’s rustic southern suburbs in their best light, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. By thus purifying the Neck and Gloucester aesthetically, he not only made them acceptable as subjects for fine art but he also effectively naturalized existing social relations, along with the environmental realities such relations presupposed. Eakins’s ambition was not to engage in social criticism but rather to create a “big picture” that could sell and circulate widely to a cosmopolitan audience. Nowhere is the purifying aesthetic tendency of Eakins’s realism more evident than in his various representations of the Neck (see Figs. 41–44). That area, located directly downstream from central Philadelphia on the peninsula where the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers converge, was still a marshy, semirural space during the late nineteenth century, though increasingly populated by poor immigrants and other newcomers. By the early twentieth century, its pastures and tidal marshes had been largely displaced by factories, oil refineries, the workingclass neighborhoods of South Broad Street, and the massive League Island Navy Yard, opened officially in 1876 after several years of construction. Today only a small patch of the earlier wetlands survives at Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park, located adjacent to the Navy Yard (which the United States government decommissioned in 1995).74 Maurice Egan’s article “A Day in the Ma’sh,” published in Scribner’s Monthly in 1881 with illustrations by Eakins and his students, presented the Neck as a picturesque getaway from the urban metropolis for adventurous middle-class hunters and other hardy visitors. The article creates a general impression of the Neck as both conveniently nearby and rustically exotic, a domestic developing country of sorts, easily accessible on weekends. Compared with Eakins’s pictures, though, the text by Egan and the illustrations by Joseph Pennell and Henry Poore provide much more information about modern social and environmental conditions at the Neck. According to Egan, the area was not frequented by “fashionable Philadelphians,” but it did attract a heartier pleasure-seeker from the city: the “native Philadelphian.” The author also observes that “many foreigners inhabit the Neck,—principally Irish,” a comment indicative of a “native Philadelphian” point of view. Egan explains further that “in the fall . . . sportsmen, boatmen, and ‘pushers’ . . . swarm into the Neck” together. “Pushers,” also called polemen, were man-

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ual laborers hired by white, middle-class hunters to propel and navigate small, two-person boats for the purpose of shooting reed-birds such as plover. These are the elements represented in the illustrations by Eakins (see Figs. 41, 42).75 In contrast to the bright, clean, anthropocentric imagery of Eakins, however, Egan’s text repeatedly emphasizes the Neck’s quaint but decrepit environmental conditions, referring to the area as a “swamp” with “a weird and uncanny look.” The author also notes that the Neck was “celebrated for its cabbages, its pigs, its dogs, its dikes, its reed-birds, its inhabitants, and, above all, for its smells.” With a combination of condescending humor and descriptive realism, Egan frequently refers to “stagnant” water, along with “dirt,” “odors,” “manure,” “iridescent coal-oil floats,” “oozy green mire,” and “malarious” conditions. Such references were intended to amuse Egan’s urban, cosmopolitan readers by invoking stereotypes of rural poverty and foreign backwardness, but they also accorded with other nineteenth-century accounts, including the health reports studied by historian Sam Alewitz. As Alewitz notes, the Neck was regularly cited as a breeding ground for disease due to the marsh environment, immigrant overcrowding, and growing pollution from urban sewage and industrial dumping along Philadelphia’s rivers. Even as early as 1849, Dr. Isaac Parrish of Philadelphia reported that conditions were so bad in the Neck that he feared it contained the “seeds of scrofula, tuberculosis of the lymph gland and consumption.” Alewitz also observes that “some of the prize radishes grown in the ‘Neck’ were fertilized by the city’s [human] waste, and it was not prohibited for use on vegetables and grains for human consumption until 1913.” In a study of the Philadelphia Navy Yard, historian Jeffrey Dorwart explains that early official inquiries into the feasibility of building a military facility in this area complained that League Island was an “unhealthy swamp.” According to Dorwart, “weeds and rotting vegetation choked League Island, reportedly breeding disease that made the low-lying muddy place too unhealthy for engineers and laborers to lay out a navy yard there.” Thanks to the efforts of Philadelphia’s Republican machine, the navy built on League Island anyway, after turning down a competing bid from New London, Connecticut.76 Although Eakins drew attention to none of the Neck’s industrial development, dire poverty, or unsavory environmental conditions, his students Pennell and Poore explicitly addressed such conditions in their illustrations for Scribner’s Monthly. Pennell’s “Oil Refinery” (Fig. 49), for example, shows an enormous modern industrial complex towering over the marsh landscape. In a manner reminiscent of the contemporary works by Anshutz and Tissot (see Figs. 45–46), Pennell depicted smokestacks pumping black clouds of exhaust into the air. On the same page, Egan’s text alluded to such scenery with understated irony:

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Figure 49. Joseph Pennell, “Oil Refinery.” Engraving published in Scribner’s Monthly 22, no. 3 (July 1881), p. 346. Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY.

Oil-refineries are not unknown [in the Neck], and in many places whole plantations of the primeval Jamestown-weed have been destroyed by the loads of refuse from the soapfactories that have been cast upon them. But even the evidences of encroaching civilization assume a picturesque aspect in this mural yet rural territory. The spatter-dock may disdain to show its spiky leaves in the rainbow-hued pools that surround the oilrefineries, but the scrub-willow grows in clumps and the Jamestown-weed, crushed to earth, raises its ribbed white bugle among heaps of rubbish.77

Egan’s dark humor verged upon social realist critique but avoided stridency by masking its ironic observations about “civilization” in mock celebration. Such irony seems to have eluded Eakins, whose more aesthetically refined images revealed no “factories,” “loads of refuse,” or “rainbow-hued pools.” For an image of dire poverty in the Neck, we must consult Poore’s “Outdoor Tenants” (Fig. 50), depicting a child seated on the porch of a rundown shack, surrounded by dogs, chickens, puddles, and trash as he stares forlornly into space. This picture corresponds to text on the following page, describing houses that were made up of odds and ends picked up here, there, everywhere—they are patchwork structures, some dark, weather-beaten, others immaculate. Bones, bits of broken glass, and

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Figure 50. Henry Poore, “Outdoor

Tenants.” Engraving published in Scribner’s Monthly 22, no. 3 (July 1881), p. 347. Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY.

roba of all kinds, strew the ground. The houses front the main street. Stagnant water is everywhere visible; each house seems to have its own pond. Ducks, pigs, children, and the silent frog are happy in the abundant moisture. Dogs abound.78

Eakins’s “A Pusher” (see Fig. 42) appears on the page containing this text, and though his image depicts none of the specific realities mentioned therein, the average Scribner’s Monthly reader would not have thought twice about associating the barefoot, baggy-clothed black laborer with the “weather-beaten” setting described by Egan. For such a reader, this was a space appropriate for the representation of racial and class difference. In other words, by emphasizing this particular laborer, Eakins achieved an aesthetic sense of social and environmental decorum without actually having to show pollution. After contracting malaria while hunting at the Neck in 1873, Eakins stopped going to the marshes himself, either to shoot rail or conduct artistic studies. Thus his pictures of the area, all postdating 1873, amount to historical reconstructions based on his sketches, photographs, and personal memories. Moreover, by omitting the modern factories, oil refineries, pollution, and dire poverty, Eakins created an idealized or purified, albeit realistic-looking, image of the Neck, untainted by Egan’s encroaching industrial “civilization.” Precisely in erasing such encroachments, Eakins responded to civilization’s aesthetic discourse of fine art and

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the related ambition to paint a “big picture.” A similar strategy had informed the work of Gérôme and the orientalists, whose realistic reconstructions of exotic locales likewise excluded much, if not all, evidence of modernity. No doubt with his master’s example in mind, Eakins had painted hunting pictures such as Pushing for Rail (see Fig. 44) and then shipped them off to the Salon in Paris, where they prompted French critics to remark about their “exotic” qualities and “local color.” Wanting his work to circulate even more widely, Eakins later allowed them to be reproduced as magazine illustrations.

Fish Culture Around the time Scribner’s Monthly published those illustrations, Eakins began a new series of paintings with outdoor themes that similarly accommodated racial and class heterogeneity. The series began in 1881 with Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River (Fig. 51), representing a group of well-dressed, urban, white tourists standing leisurely on the shore and watching manual laborers, including several blacks, in the act of hauling a seine or large fishing net. The tourists include members of the Eakins family: his father, at least one sister, and their dog, an Irish setter named Harry, all cast in a detached, observational role similar to that occupied by the artist in other pictures. Though not used for any magazine illustration, Shad Fishing reiterated the picturesque, regional aspect of Eakins’s Scribner’s Monthly images by depicting another quaint local tradition on one of Philadelphia’s signature waterways south of the city center.79 Eakins was not alone in viewing that particular tradition as worthy of representation at the time. In the same year, for example, Howard Pyle illustrated shad fishing in an article for Harper’s Weekly that described the various nets and techniques employed by fishermen on the Delaware. According to the article, the “gill” net (which Pyle depicted) was designed with wide meshes through which “all [fish] are allowed to escape but the shad,” whereas the “seine” (which appears in Eakins’s picture) was a bigger net with smaller openings that caught “every kind of fish, big and little” and thus required more workers. Neither Eakins nor Pyle showed the latest industrial fishing processes involving enormous seines mechanically hauled by steam-powered windlasses. Though both artists addressed “modern” subject matter in a broad sense (that is, not classical mythology or history), their avoidance of industrial machinery remained consistent with the postCentennial aesthetics of historicism and local color. Such aesthetics emphasized the continuity of picturesque traditions, an idea then favored by most American tourists and art enthusiasts.80

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Figure 51. Thomas Eakins, Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River, 1881. Oil on canvas, 30.8 × 46 cm (121⁄8 × 181⁄8 in.). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of Mrs. Thomas Eakins and Miss Mary Adeline Williams, 1929.

Historian Chester Hardy has observed that during this period “eating shad on the banks of the Delaware became a cultural ritual, a culinary, equinoctial sacrament in which urban Anglo-Americans could re-connect with the natural world and with their rural, pre-industrial ancestors.” Hardy also points out that the shad fishermen themselves were a disappearing “relic” of the past, threatened by new industrial techniques that dramatically lowered fish stocks on the river while displacing manual labor. A further threat to both human and fish populations was posed by worsening water pollution from chemical factories and other sources upstream. As early as 1866, the Philadelphia Board of Health described water from the Delaware River as “a sanitary evil” that was “dangerous” to “the health of the inhabitants.” In 1880, a study by the United States Fish Commission documented a rapid decline in shad fisheries in all Atlantic coastal rivers. Four years later, in July 1884, the Public Ledger (one of Philadelphia’s leading newspapers) observed, “The catch of shad in the neighborhood of Philadelphia is decreasing.” According to Hardy, state and federal fish commissions viewed “shad as one of the nation’s major food fish,” so they responded to these problems during the 1880s by committing massive resources to artificial propagation of the fish through hatcheries and transplantation. Nineteenth-century scientists referred to these efforts as “fish culture.”81 Such realities prompted writers and artists, including Eakins and Pyle, to document shad-related activities while it was still possible to do so. Between 1880 and

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1910, Delaware shad would experience a comeback and then a decisive decline, but when Eakins painted Shad Fishing the future remained uncertain. At that time, the artist and his family frequently visited Gloucester’s shad fisheries and riverside restaurants, a leisure practice consistent with the sort of suburban “native Philadelphian” excursions described by Maurice Egan. As Eakins’s friend and pupil Arthur Burdett Frost humorously wrote to his fiancée in 1882: The tribe of Eakins, will come forth from the wilderness and gather at the wharf called South, and taking unto themselves a boat (Ferry) will even cross the raging Delaware and go into the land of sand, called Jersey, then will they gaze on the hauling of the net and the catching of the toothsome shad, and having satisfied themselves that the fish are alive will sit themselves down to eat of the same cooked on a plank and eked out with waffles (called by the vulgar and flippant Undine men, ‘door-mats’) and coffee and radishes and such pleasant and indigestible edibles.82

Frost’s reference to the Eakins “tribe . . . having satisfied themselves that the fish are alive” hints at contemporary ecological concerns about the dwindling shad, though the overall tone of his description seems to joke, in a friendly way, about the artist’s detached relation to the locale and activities in question. Eakins and his family observed the seasonal traditions of shad fishing as modern tourists, temporarily reconnecting with what Hardy called the “natural,” “pre-industrial” world of suburban Philadelphia. They were consumers not so much of fish as local color. In keeping with that complex relation to tradition and nature, Eakins created his picturesque vision in Shad Fishing by using—and deliberately concealing— distinctly modern procedures of mechanical reproduction. As confirmed by recent conservation analysis, the artist secretly constructed the fictive visual encounter between tourists and laborers by projecting multiple photographic views from disparate sites and tracing them on a single canvas. The same technique has been detected in several other outdoor pictures by Eakins around this time. One source photograph for Shad Fishing, probably taken by him on an excursion to Gloucester, provided a shoreline view of the fishermen, with the artist’s family nowhere to be seen (Fig. 52). Through lantern projection, he combined that image with another photographic view taken at an entirely different locale away from the water, representing the foreground group of his family members (Fig. 53). The resulting montage on canvas, though carefully sutured together and occluded with paint, nevertheless produced an awkward visual effect that led one contemporary reviewer to criticize the work as “utterly dull” and showing “little or no effort at composition.” Echoing that early criticism, art historian Kathleen Foster recently has acknowledged an “emotional flatness” about the painting, while William Innes

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Figure 52. Thomas Eakins, Shad Fishing: Setting the Net, 1881. Dryplate negative, 10.2 × 12.7 cm (4 × 5 in.). Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection. Purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust. Figure 53. Thomas Eakins, Three

Women, Man, and Dog near the Delaware River, 1881–82. Dry-plate negative, 10.2 × 12.7 cm (4 × 5 in.). Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection. Purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust.

Homer has described the figures as “almost motionless” and “visually isolated” in a work lacking “pictorial unity.” Indeed, looking closely at the foreground, we do not even see footprints leading to the figures’ present location, as if they had dropped to the beach from the sky.83 Such techniques and effects in Shad Fishing reprised the studio artificiality noted by contemporaries and modern scholars in Eakins’s rowing pictures and other outdoor works. Studio production of this sort bespeaks the artist’s vicarious, mediated relation to the scene depicted. His artistic procedures in Shad Fishing aptly paralleled the artifice of modern scientific fishery-stocking methods then being used to prop up the ailing shad industry along the Delaware River. By constructing the work using a process of recycling and recombination of projected photographs, Eakins once again bent empirical truth to artistic necessity and cosmopolitan aesthetic taste, as in “On the Harlem” and the other illustrations for Scribner’s

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Monthly (see Figs. 40–42). On a technical level, his work revealed the circulation of images put in motion by modern media and mass production. The artist’s methods also invite interpretation as to their deeper significance regarding the representation of human difference. For one thing, the awkward lack of technical resolution embodies and reinforces the rather artificial juxtaposition of social groups imagined by Eakins. As a result, we do not witness a rapprochement between those groups so much as an opposition starkly defined by class difference encoded in the artist’s production process, which in hindsight unwittingly seems to anticipate collage or even cinematic montage. Although Eakins obviously strived in Shad Fishing to accommodate a “democratic” American sense of racial and class heterogeneity, the failure of his montage techniques to cohere effectively mirrored fissures in Philadelphia’s social fabric after the collapse of Reconstruction, when the city faced growing labor-management tensions exacerbated by union mobilization and black migration from the South. As suggested by Anshutz’s contemporaneous Ironworkers’ Noontime (see Fig. 45), the labor force in Northern industrial factories during the late nineteenth century tended to be white as a result of segregation. Neither Eakins nor his contemporaries readily acknowledged such social fissures, but Shad Fishing alluded to them obliquely in its awkward pictorial fabric and its consignment of black labor to nonindustrial work on the urban periphery.84 Tempting though it may be to view the depicted encounter between different groups in Shad Fishing as a meeting of “cultures” or as capturing a sense of Philadelphia’s diverse outdoor “culture” (in the anthropological as opposed to ichthyological sense), such an interpretation would be anachronistic. Nor would Eakins have understood his picture as portraying anything like the kind of intercultural diffusion theorized by Boas and other modern anthropologists in the twentieth century. Instead, for Eakins, the encounter represented in Shad Fishing consisted of different “kinds” of people engaged in regionally characteristic activities: urban gentry enjoying the leisurely tourist pursuit of watching laborers at work. Even as this particular encounter emblematized the local color of “Philadelphia,” it also partook of an international artistic discourse on racialized class difference, evident in works by many of Eakins’s contemporaries. Among such works, for example, were drawings by Arthur Munby, a Victorian English flâneur fascinated with white female miners in Lancashire whose skin became “blackened” by coal dust (Fig. 54).85 For purposes of the present argument, the most important point regarding Shad Fishing concerns the way in which Eakins here again purified Philadelphia’s regional character. His choice of subject matter and artistic procedures tells us a great deal about the aesthetics of human difference in an era before the modern culture concept. Framed in terms of race, class, and nation, human difference functioned for him as an artistic sign of cosmopolitan refinement, not an-

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Figure 54. Arthur Munby, Eliza

Hayes, Rose Bridge, and Arthur Munby, ca. 1873. Drawing in Munby Album (unpublished), Munby Collection, Trinity College Library. Courtesy of Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.

thropological “cultures.” The artist produced Shad Fishing using multiple fragments of local scenery wrenched from various locations and combined through a modern photographic process that filtered out industrial iconography, pollution, and other unwelcome visual markers of modernity. Accordingly, the art historian Marc Simpson has described Shad Fishing as a “selectively edited” work created by Eakins “back in his studio.” Though the artist did not publish the painting as an illustration, the editing techniques he used belonged to a world of modern publishing and image circulation in which information about human difference and regional customs was increasingly disseminated far beyond supposedly natural origins or “roots.” Eakins circulated Shad Fishing widely to exhibitions around the United States, including venues in New York, Cincinnati, Providence, and Chicago. As was often the case, his representation of local color partook of the broader flow of modernity.86

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Suburban Arcadia In 1885, Eakins completed Swimming (see Fig. 35), the last of his outdoor scenes set in the vicinity of Philadelphia. The painting shows a group of six naked men and a dog in various poses and actions, swimming and relaxing at a picturesque pond. Judging from the angle of sunlight on their bodies, Eakins meant the scene to take place during the summertime around midday. The figures congregate at an abandoned stone pier, behind which appears a shady green forest. Beyond that, in the right background, the pond extends toward a brightly illuminated field bounded by more distant trees. In contrast to the vaguely defined foliage and landscape, the figures have been delineated with considerable clarity, enabling art historians to identify them as friends and/or students of the artist: Talcott Williams (reclining at left), John Laurie Wallace (seated and turning), Jesse Godley (standing), Benjamin Fox (rising from the water), and George Reynolds (diving). The sixth human figure, in the right foreground, is Eakins himself, partially submerged but still recognizable as he watches the group from a slight distance. Similarly immersed nearby is the artist’s Irish setter, Harry, whom we saw resting on the shore in Shad Fishing.87 Scholars also have identified the specific setting depicted in Swimming as a reservoir called Dove Lake. Located along Mill Creek about ten miles west of downtown Philadelphia, Dove Lake was not far from the suburban villages of Gladwyne and Bryn Mawr. Art historian Sarah Cash notes that Dove Lake was “a weekend and vacation retreat for wealthy Philadelphians in need of respite from urban life” and that “Eager buyers snapped up tracts of land along the creek, appreciating the area for its natural beauty and historic significance.” Adding to the natural local color of Mill Creek were the rich historical associations of its numerous pre-Revolutionary structures, including Dove Mill (built 1748), which produced paper for the early Continental government. In 1873, however, local landowner Samuel Croft artificially created Dove Lake by damming Mill Creek, a tributary of the Schuylkill River, in order to power his nearby copper-rolling mill and to create a recreational space. Consistent with the approach we have seen in other works by Eakins, no sign of modern industrialism appears in Swimming. The artist and his friends traveled to Dove Lake during the summer of 1884 by taking the Pennsylvania Railroad, or Main Line, from downtown Philadelphia to Bryn Mawr. After walking to Dove Lake from the Bryn Mawr station, they swam, wrestled, and took photographs of each other, all to assist Eakins in his artistic preparations for the painting.88 Eakins produced Swimming on commission for his boss, Edward Hornor Coates, a successful Philadelphia financier and chairman of the Committee of In-

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struction at the Pennsylvania Academy. Unfortunately for Eakins, Coates did not like the painting and politely rejected it by requesting another work by the artist as a substitute. When Swimming debuted at an Academy exhibition in October 1885, critics derided it as “very strange” and “evidently intended to show the results of instantaneous photography, but it does not convey the impression of any possible motion.” A little more than one year later, Eakins witnessed his career go into a tailspin when he was forced to resign from his teaching post at the Academy amid scandal, following the incident in which he removed the loincloth of a male model in front of a coeducational class. With its realistic revelation of male nudity (though no genitalia), Swimming seems to contain the writing on the wall foreshadowing the artist’s public debacle of 1886. Not surprisingly, art historians have had much to say about the work, interpreting it as a manifestation of Eakins’s interests in, among other things, anatomy, physiology, photography, masculinity, community, classicism, and homosocial desire.89 Departing from those previous readings, the final pages of this chapter critically examine Swimming as an aesthetic vision of suburban retreat to a contemporary, local Arcadia outside downtown Philadelphia. The painting coincided with, and in effect modeled, the historical phenomenon now known as “white flight” at an early phase in its development. By the middle 1880s, elite white Philadelphians were building homes in exclusive suburban real estate developments on the Main Line in order to escape urban congestion, pollution, crime, and racial difference. One such Philadelphian was Edward Hornor Coates. In October 1886, shortly after Eakins completed Swimming for him, Coates purchased a large Main Line estate near the setting depicted. Coates’s brother, George Morrison Coates, already had made such a purchase in November 1885. Eakins may not have known of his patron’s real estate plans, but he certainly would have been aware of burgeoning suburban development on the Main Line as well as Coates’s personal familiarity with the area. As a young man, Coates had studied at nearby Haverford College and was acquainted with other members of the elite social set that owned real estate there, including Pennsylvania Academy president James L. Claghorn.90 In an effort to appeal to his rich and well-educated patron, Eakins conceived Swimming with a calculated but unwieldy mix of aesthetic strategies. Specifically, he attempted to reconcile classicism and realism by naturalistically updating ancient Greek culture in the modern Philadelphian terms of suburban “brotherly love,” or philos adelphos. We do not have a signed affidavit from the artist declaring his intent to invoke that particular emblematic meaning, but it seems inescapable given the pattern of similar local-cosmopolitan references traced in this chapter. For a long time, scholars have noted various allusions to Greek classicism in Swimming, especially the pyramidal figure composition and reclining “pedi-

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ment” pose of Talcott Williams. Kathleen Foster, for example, has said that “Swimming recovered the spirit of classical art in the beauty of contemporary life.” Similarly, Simpson has observed that the picture portrayed a “local, idyllic substitute” for Arcadia, “modern in subject and execution but classical in intent.”91 Such scholarly observations are confirmed by numerous other classicizing motifs in works by Eakins during the early 1880s, some of which explicitly quoted casts of ancient Greek sculptures by Phidias then owned by the Pennsylvania Academy (Fig. 55). Unlike idealists of the period, though, Eakins used photographic studies to render his classical figural allusions in frankly naturalistic terms, believing, as he said in an 1879 interview, that “the Greeks did not study the antique. The ‘Theseus’ and ‘Illyssus’ and the draped figures in the Parthenon pediment were modeled from life, undoubtedly. And nature is just as varied and just as beautiful in our day as she was in the time of Phidias.” Regardless of whether Eakins properly understood ancient Greek art, the failure of Swimming to reconcile competing aesthetic impulses aptly illuminates the predicament he faced in an era before the modern culture concept, when ideas about classicism, modern democracy, and social evolutionism existed in tandem and tension with one another.92 To some degree, the Greek aspects of Swimming accorded with the late nineteenth century’s dominant social evolutionary concept of “culture,” famously articulated in terms of “Hellenism,” the “pursuit of perfection,” and “sweetness and light” by the English writer Matthew Arnold. In his widely read and influential manifesto of 1869, Culture and Anarchy, Arnold stated his high regard for Greek art and society as the pinnacle of human achievement: [The] true grace and serenity is that of which Greece and Greek art suggest the admirable ideals of perfection,—a serenity which comes from having made order among ideas and harmonized them; whereas the serenity of aristocracies, at least the peculiar serenity of aristocracies of Teutonic origin, appears to come from their never having had any ideas to trouble them. . . . Greek art, again, Greek beauty, have their root in the same impulse to see things as they really are, inasmuch as Greek art and beauty rest on fidelity to nature,—the best nature,—and on a delicate discrimination of what this best nature is. To say we work for sweetness and light, then, is only another way of saying that we work for Hellenism. . . . [Let] us consider how Greek freedom and Greek gymnastics have attracted the love and praise of mankind, who give so little love and praise to ours. And what can be the reason of this difference? Surely because the Greeks pursued freedom and pursued gymnastics not mechanically, but with constant reference to some ideal of complete human perfection and happiness.93

Eakins may not have read Arnold, but Swimming and the artist’s recorded statement about Phidias suggest that he would have agreed in principle with the Englishman’s valorization of Greek “freedom,” “gymnastics,” and “fidelity to nature.” Even

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Figure 55. Thomas Eakins, Arcadia, ca. 1883. Plaster relief, 29.8 × 61 × 6 cm (113⁄4 × 24 × 23⁄16 in.). Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the J. Stogdell Stokes Fund, 1975.

if Eakins was not directly familiar with Culture and Anarchy, the artist probably knew that Coates admired Arnold and his theory of “Hellenism.” In 1883, shortly before Eakins began preparations for Swimming, Coates and his wife, Florence Earle Nicholson Coates, hosted Arnold in their downtown Philadelphia mansion during the Englishman’s celebrated American tour. Mrs. Coates in particular was an avid follower of Arnold and later eulogized him in The Century Magazine by echoing his views about “Culture,—the sentiment for beauty, the passion for perfection, [quoting Arnold] ‘the acquaintance with the best that has been thought and said in the world,’—this he deemed the remedy for the unideaed [sic] frivolity of the barbarian, the arid, self-complacent dullness of the Philistine, the hopeless intellectual squalor of the populace.” As art historian Doreen Bolger has observed, Edward Coates’s “admiration of the classical past was nurtured by his wife.” The Hellenic inflections of Swimming strongly suggest that Eakins knew of, and catered to, his patron’s Arnoldian inclinations.94 The painting’s failure to please both patron and critics obviously indicates Eakins’s idiosyncratic view of what constituted “the best nature.” With that in mind, we should not make the mistake of equating Eakins and Swimming uncritically with the social evolutionary views of Arnold and the Coateses. Despite its “Greek” overtones, Swimming chafed against Arnoldian idealism by showing actual people inhabiting a real place in the present rather than selecting ancient mythical heroes and situating them on Olympus or another classical topos. To put it another way, Eakins miscalculated by embracing what Arnold called “fidelity to nature” while ignoring the Englishman’s exhortation about the need for “constant reference to some ideal of complete human perfection.”

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Eakins’s miscalculation had much to do with his particular niche in Philadelphia’s social hierarchy. Addressing the question of class, Bolger observes that “the Coateses inhabited a very different part of Philadelphia than Eakins,” a fact that explains why Andrew Carnegie and not the artist received an invitation to their gala reception for Arnold. Bolger aligns Eakins with Whitman, who once complained of Arnold’s idealism and aversion to earthly matters, including dirt, by saying, “everything comes out of the dirt—everything; everything comes out of the people, the everyday people, the people as you find them and leave them.”95 Those organic comments reconfirm Whitman’s debt to the naturalism of Taine, a debt shared by Eakins. Yet the Frenchman’s assessment of the Greeks and Greek art did not differ dramatically from that of Arnold, for both European thinkers held Greek bodies and exercise in high regard. According to Taine, the Greeks were a “noble race” that produced “strong, robust bodies, the most beautiful and the nimblest possible. . . . In their eyes the ideal man was not the man of thought, or a man of delicate sensibility, but the naked man, the man of fine stock and growth, well-proportioned, active, and accomplished in all physical exercises.” Accordingly, said Taine, “The [Greek] marble or bronze effigy is not an allegory, but an exact image . . . [a] truthful portrait.” Whereas Arnold believed that the ancient Greek artist imaginatively selected “the best nature” for representation, Taine held that such an artist could not help but depict the best through empirical observation of any given Greek model, since the Greeks had cultivated “the most beautiful and the nimblest possible” bodies. In construing classicism in realist terms, Eakins erred on the side of Tainean naturalism in recasting local Philadelphia Americans as the best and most beautiful modern bodies that nature had produced.96 To associate Eakins and Swimming uncritically with Whitman’s valorization of “dirt,” however, is just as problematic as equating the artist and his work directly with Arnold’s “sweetness and light.” For, as we have seen, Eakins had his own aversion to dirt, which compelled him to purify his works by editing reality. In Swimming, as in The Champion Single Sculls, we see specific bodies and identifiable settings, but certainly no dirt, or, for that matter, pollution. Nor do we see genitalia. Indeed, the artist ambitiously attempted to encompass both his patron’s Arnoldian “Hellenism” and Tainean dictates about realism in a rather conciliatory, cosmopolitan way. The failure of Swimming had less to do with a desire to scandalize than with an ill-fated attempt to accommodate competing aesthetic theories. A powerful personal motivation also may have guided Eakins in representing his purified, real Arcadia in suburban Philadelphia: the death of his sister Margaret from typhoid fever at Christmas in 1882. Various scholars have suggested that the contemplative mood of Swimming and other classical works produced by Eakins beginning shortly after his sister’s death constituted an artistic gesture of

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mourning, since Margaret had often accompanied the artist on outdoor excursions around the city. As Kathleen Foster has observed regarding Eakins’s classical relief Arcadia (see Fig. 55), “It may be Maggie, the sturdy companion of so many outdoor jaunts, whose spirit inhabits these Elysian fields, or perhaps these are her friends, sobered by the knowledge that death comes even to Arcadia.” In light of the personal impact of urban water pollution upon Eakins and his family, it is no wonder that he envisioned a suburban Arcadia well outside downtown Philadelphia, on the relatively untainted waters of the Main Line.97 At that time, the Main Line was becoming increasingly untainted by human difference. Historian Margaret Marsh has examined the suburban development of Bryn Mawr and Mill Creek from a sociological perspective that helps us understand the wider context and significance of Swimming (though she does not discuss Eakins or his work). Marsh points out that until as late as 1880, Mill Creek had been a fairly diverse, sparsely populated area inhabited by farmers and manual laborers, including a number of immigrants and African Americans. By the end of the 1880s, however, hundreds of Philadelphia’s wealthiest urban white citizens had purchased land in expensive new real estate developments along the Main Line and Mill Creek. Many of these elite residential commuters established male fraternal organizations (some with separate women’s branches) that helped create a sense of cohesiveness in the suburbs. According to Marsh, “The expansion of such groups during this period illustrated both the need of people to maintain a sense of community in an increasingly impersonal environment, and the inability of work or neighborhood to totally fulfill that need any longer.” As Marsh notes further, “Many of the new social organizations that developed in the outer city during the late nineteenth century were nativist or otherwise exclusionary, demonstrating that a desire for cultural and ethnic homogeneity was a part of suburbanization from its inception.” The historian says that although “widespread ethnic and racial segregation was still some years in the future for the outer city, its groundwork was laid in this period.”98 Swimming constructed a timely artistic vision of fraternal relations by situating Philadelphian-Greek “brotherly love” in a picturesque suburban retreat along the city’s developing Main Line. The glaring whiteness of the male figures depicted by Eakins modeled the increasingly exclusive complexion of the area. We already detected the main vectors of this development in the social and environmental context of The Champion Single Sculls (see Plate 2). Not unlike that earlier picture, painted with the elite Republican civic leaders of the Union League in mind, Swimming projected the suburban sensibilities of another powerful Philadelphia patron, Edward Hornor Coates. Ironically, Swimming literally struck too close to home for Coates, who politely paid Eakins for the work and then refused to accept it. Swim-

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ming also too vividly evoked aspects of Eakins’s academic teaching program at the Pennsylvania Academy that were already becoming controversial. Swimming echoed and surpassed The Champion Single Sculls in offering an even more rarefied, exclusively suburban retreat from the tainted local rivers and marshes downstream amid the city’s growing pollution, disease, and demographic diversity. In keeping with the classicizing turn that art historians have noted in Eakins’s art generally at this time, Swimming represented the suburban Main Line as an Arcadian escape from the downtown by emblematically visualizing local color in terms of philos adelphos or “brotherly love.” Despite the artist’s empiricism in delineating the specific identities of his protagonists, the picture constituted another studio production, technically and spatially divorced from problematic urban realities. In that respect and in its fraught effort to reconcile realism and classicism, the local and the cosmopolitan, Swimming engaged the increasingly complex circulation of art in the years before “cultures.” During that period, Tainean naturalism and Arnoldian Hellenism constituted overlapping aesthetic strategies within a dominant, overarching evolutionary paradigm. At the same time, cosmopolitan diffusion of aesthetic artifacts—including those of local color—increasingly detached customs and other information about human difference from supposedly natural roots. The resulting flow of such information, like the flow of Philadelphia’s polluted waterways, exposed epistemological problems with evolutionary categories and called into question conventional beliefs about the linear progress of civilization. In a major blow to the progress of his own professional career, Eakins was forced to resign amid scandal at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1886. After that personal devolution, Eakins would turn to an alternative professional community within Philadelphia for affirmation: scientists in the discipline of anthropology.

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chapter 3

“To Learn Their Ways That I Might Paint Some” Cowboys, Indians, and Evolutionary Aesthetics

On February 8, 1886, only two months after rejecting Eakins’s Swimming picture, Edward Hornor Coates sent a letter to the artist demanding his resignation as director of the schools and professor of painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In early January, Eakins had transgressed official policy at the Academy by removing the loincloth of a male model while lecturing on anatomy in the presence of female students. That incident, together with mounting tensions over anatomical dissections and nude modeling by female students, forced Academy officials to take action. Responding to criticism from outraged parents and from a disgruntled faction of students, including Eakins’s brother-in-law Frank Stephens, Coates and the Committee on Instruction decided that the professor needed to go. Despite the protests of Eakins and a loyal cadre of his male pupils, the decision was final. He tendered his resignation in a letter to Coates on February 9, saying, “The thing is a nightmare” and “It seems to me that no one should work in a life class who thinks it wrong to undress if needful.” Aghast at the reaction his action had provoked, Eakins asked Coates rhetorically, “Was ever so much smoke for so little fire?” Two other Philadelphia organizations at which Eakins taught, the Academy Art Club and the Sketch Club, soon followed suit by severing ties with him.1 The complex web of allegations, rumors, family intrigues, and recriminations surrounding Eakins’s professional devolution in 1886 has been explored extensively by Kathleen Foster and other scholars, so there is no need to retrace the details here. For our purposes, one of the most striking aspects of this episode concerns its publicity. Described as “the eakins affair” in one of several related front-page newspaper headlines, the Pennsylvania Academy scandal captured considerable public attention. In a manner strangely befitting the artist’s recent efforts to circulate his name and work in magazines (see Figs. 37, 38, 40–42), Eakins became the focus of a modern media spectacle of sorts. Far from heralding his

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professional promise or progress, however, now critics pronounced his demise. A headline in the Philadelphia Evening Item even declared “the end of eakins,” and a subsequent story in that newspaper asked, “does anyone imagine he will not sink into obscurity and leave the city?” 2 Eakins did sink into obscurity and leave Philadelphia for two and a half months during the summer of 1887. Suffering from depression and a paralyzing creative block, he followed the advice of a physician friend named Horatio Wood, who suggested that the artist take a rejuvenating trip West. Wood, a specialist in nervous disorders at the University of Pennsylvania, was well known for advocating what he called the “camp-cure,” a therapeutic return to nature for those experiencing severe mental exhaustion and related ailments that were, in his words, “peculiar to our civilization.” In an 1885 book titled Brain-Work and Overwork, Wood promoted the camp-cure as holding “the promise of renewed life and vigor—yea, even of renewed youth.” Following the doctor’s prescription, Eakins lived and worked with cowboys at the B-T Ranch in the Dakota Territory from late July through the end of September 1887. The ranch no longer exists, but it was located in the Badlands, near present-day Dickinson, North Dakota. Wood owned a financial interest in the ranch, and his son George frequently lived there, so Eakins had the perfect entrée for a curative Western ranch retreat.3 The doctor’s prescription evidently produced its desired effect, because Eakins reveled in cowboy life and quickly began to revive his art in the Badlands. In letters to his wife, Susan, from the Dakota Territory, Eakins enthusiastically described his participation in roundups, an encounter with a horse thief, and exciting tales told by an “old Indian fighter,” among other things. Thriving on the hard work and often sleeping on the ground, he exclaimed to Susan, “I am in the best of health.” Writing to his former student John Laurie Wallace toward the end of his Western sojourn, Eakins said, “I have been out here living, sleeping and working with the cowboys since July to learn their ways that I might paint some. A nicer set of fellows I never met with.” Taking up Dakota life as a new regional American subject matter, the artist photographed cowboys on location and executed oil sketches of their characteristic terrain (Fig. 56). These he later used in his Philadelphia studio to create finished paintings, including Cowboys in the Badlands (Fig. 57), a work technically and compositionally reminiscent of his earlier Gloucester fishermen picture (see Fig. 51). While still in the Badlands, Eakins acquired a cowboy outfit (Fig. 58) and two horses, which he transported home to the East on a cattle train car, personally accompanying the animals in their stall. Arriving in Philadelphia late at night, Eakins rode his new “broncho,” Billy, from the train station through the city to his Mount Vernon Street residence while leading the other horse, a mustang “Indian Pony” named Baldy, with his gear in tow. Later, at the Avon-

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Figure 56. Thomas Eakins, Two Cowboys with Horses in B-T Ranch Yard, Dog in Foreground, 1887. Dry-plate

negative, 10.2 × 12.7 cm (4 × 5 in.). Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection. Purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust. Figure 57. Thomas Eakins, Cowboys in the Badlands, 1888. Oil on canvas, 81.9 × 114.3 cm (321⁄4 × 45 in.).

Private collection. Photo: © 2009 Christie’s Images Ltd. All rights reserved. Image ID Number AMP220503032 01.

dale, Pennsylvania, farm of his sister Frances and brother-in-law Will Crowell, Eakins wrote of cavorting on horseback with his young nieces and nephews, at one point saying how “we scampered home like cowboys.”4 Playing cowboy produced a noticeable sense of personal and professional renewal in Eakins. As his friend Walt Whitman would later observe, the artist had been “sick, rundown, out of sorts: he went right among the cowboys: herded: built up miraculously.” Echoing Taine’s naturalism and foreshadowing the nationalis-

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Figure 58. Unknown manufacturer, Eakins’s cowboy suit, ca. 1887. Fringed buckskin (coat and pants), felt (hat), cloth (necktie), rope (lariat). Charles Bregler Archival Collection, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

tic interpretations of many later art historians, Whitman averred that Eakins’s Dakota trip “must have done much toward giving him or confirming his theory of painting: he has a sort of cowboy broncho method: he could not have got that wholly or even mainly in the studios of Paris—he needed the converting, confirming, uncompromising touch of the plains.” Thus, in addition to repairing his ego, Eakins reputedly became even more firmly rooted in American soil after the Pennsylvania Academy debacle, thanks to his experience in the West.5 Eakins shared Whitman’s Tainean environmental appreciation of the Plains and their “uncompromising touch,” but the artist’s own reference to the cowboys and “their ways” points once again to his premodern curiosity about different human customs and traditions. Cowboy ways were theirs, not his, though he admired, depicted, and even performed them for a time. To Eakins, a depressed urban artist from Philadelphia, the Dakota cowboys constituted an identifiable and attractively exotic American subgroup—a nice “set of fellows,” as he called them—whose vigorous lifestyle he represented and emulated as a means of self-renewal. That the artist never described cowboys explicitly in racial terms indicates an assumption of familiarity about their whiteness, but he still recognized them to be different from himself in other respects. Viewing the alien Dakota ranch life and characters as an aesthetic opportunity, Eakins observed, “The cowboy subject is a picturesque one,” such that “if I can sell any cowboy pictures at all they will be a good investment for me.” Thus his trip to the Dakota Territory acquired a number of overlapping medical, professional, and economic imperatives. As we will see in the present chapter, Eakins harbored an interest not only in cowboys but in Indians as well, though he viewed neither “set” as a “culture” in the modern anthropological sense.6

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Rather, Eakins’s artistic perspective hewed fairly closely to the period’s dominant aesthetic and social evolutionary discourses, according to which most Americans regarded the West as a symbolic theater of frontier civilization and progress, with heroic (white) cowboys leading the way and leaving little space for vanquished Native Americans. In a manner consistent with his own earlier works, Eakins selectively constructed an affirmative, realistic image of picturesque cowboy life that he hoped would attract buyers and jump-start his career. Predictably, Cowboys in the Badlands failed to sell or garner attention, but that painting and related efforts by Eakins provide an interesting glimpse into his artistic negotiation of Western “ways” during the waning years of the nineteenth century, before the anthropological concept of culture came into being. Significantly, Eakins treated those “ways” as something portable, not necessarily rooted in any particular soil. By collecting souvenir tokens of the Western frontier— buckskin suit, lariat, horses, and images—then transplanting them to the East for artistic purposes, he manifested a tacit disregard for the integrity of the Plains as the natural site of Dakota cowboy customs. For Eakins, such souvenir objects maintained a virtual connection with the West’s “uncompromising touch,” as Whitman put it, while embodying a cherished aspect of America’s characteristic environment. In using those objects as authentic props for painting Cowboys in the Badlands and other works, Eakins continued to fulfill Taine’s call for a national art of “race, milieu, et moment.” Yet, by reconstructing the West (along with his career) from dislocated fragments, Eakins provided another instance of the ever-widening diffusion of customs and objects in modernity. As discussed in previous chapters, that process of diffusion gradually exposed discontinuities in received categories of knowledge about human difference, opening an epistemological space for the anthropological culture concept articulated by Franz Boas and his students during the early twentieth century. Eakins and most of his late nineteenth-century American contemporaries only contributed to such diffusion unwittingly. In a quirky way, his work helped transform the West—and specifically the American frontier—into a powerful metaphor of national renewal, progress, and civilization at a pivotal moment of modernization. Accordingly, the present chapter explores the significance of the frontier and premodern perceptions of human difference in the artist’s late work. By the dawn of the twentieth century Eakins would turn his gaze upon an even wider, global frontier represented by the burgeoning scientific discipline of anthropology, which found a new institutional home in 1889 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Free Museum of Science and Art. In a series of late portraits depicting prominent figures associated with that institution’s anthropological collections, Eakins touted Philadelphia as an important center for the differential study of

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“man.” Yet the sitters portrayed by Eakins all remained committed to social evolutionism, even as Boas subjected their premodern paradigm to withering critique with his innovative scientific arguments about diffusion and culture. Standing chronologically on the threshold of the modern culture concept but never really encountering or comprehending it, Eakins and his art marked the twilight of nineteenth-century anthropological thought. The portraits in question thus serve as the visual epitaph to an obsolescent paradigm.

The Primitive Touch By seeking regeneration out West during the late 1880s, Eakins did not just pursue narrow personal and professional ends. He and his work embodied a timely dilemma, or paradox, in broader perceptions of civilization in the years leading up to 1890, when the United States Census Bureau officially declared the nation’s frontier to be closed. On the one hand, as we have seen, “civilization” signified the pinnacle of human achievement for most Americans and Europeans, who viewed “savagery” and “barbarism” as inferior stages on a linear scale of evolution. According to the evolutionary ideas of Lewis Henry Morgan, Matthew Arnold, and other prominent thinkers of the period, civilization also entailed the progressive extension, domestication, and refinement of European traditions. Toward the turn of the twentieth century, however, that uplifting vision of civilization-asrefinement became complicated by a troubling alternative version of itself. For Eakins and many of his urban, white, male, professional contemporaries, achieving success in an increasingly civilized but starkly competitive modern world paradoxically seemed to require an atavistic, de-evolutionary detour of sorts, a temporary touch of primitive “savagery.” Naturalist novels like Frank Norris’s McTeague or Vandover and the Brute (both written in the 1890s), Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903), and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1912) exemplify the extreme forms of this popular primitive trend, as do various images of prehistoric men by American visual artists at the time, including Edgar Walter’s Primitive Man (bronze, 1902–3, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Frederic Remington’s Paleolithic Man (bronze, 1906, Rockwell Museum, Corning, New York). At first glance, such an artistic theme flew in the face of conventional aesthetic notions about the civilized “higher life” and “sweetness and light,” but it hardly dispensed with the social evolutionary paradigm upon which more uplifting theories of civilization had depended. Instead, the primitive vogue merely adjusted social evolutionism’s linear logic by recalibrating it in Darwinian naturalist terms. Eakins did not exactly “go Tarzan” but his bracing

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encounter with what Whitman called the “uncompromising touch of the Plains” pointed in that direction.7 An index of such concerns already appeared in Dr. Wood’s chapter on the “campcure” in his book Brain-Work of 1885. The chapter in question, titled “Rest in Recreation,” begins with a stirring reference to “stern Miles Standish, at the head of his Puritan bands, roaming the wild woods in search of the wilder savage.” According to Wood, Standish “no doubt would have smiled grimly had any one suggested that recreation of some sort is a necessity for the highest development of man. Mayhap, however, sturdy Miles himself tingled with a profane joy as he smote right vigorously those enemies of the Lord—the red Indians.” For Wood, Standish represented a historical phase in which English civilization “girded itself with strength for the conquest of the world.” Compared with the violent colonial activities of Standish and his generation, in the doctor’s view, “much that passes for enjoyment in this world, so far from being a re-creation, is, in verity, a dissipation— not a gathering, but a scattering, of force.”8 We might call such rhetoric the medical “call of the wild.” Foreshadowing the primitive vogue made famous only a short time later by Norris, London, and Burroughs, Eakins’s personal physician embraced a more aggressive vision of civilization— less refined, perhaps, than that of Matthew Arnold, but no less evolutionary in orientation. Wood exhorted Eastern white professional men such as Eakins to renew their primordial “force” through vigorous recreation as a way to counteract the enervation “peculiar to our civilization.” Ironically, of course, opportunities for doing so became ever more difficult as civilization progressively encroached upon the frontier around 1890, consigning the Old West to historical memory along with “stern Miles Standish.”9 In 1893, evolutionary concerns about that historic process of encroachment were famously enshrined in Frederick Jackson Turner’s lecture “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” delivered to the American Historical Association at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At once celebrating and lamenting the victory of civilization in the West, Turner wistfully reflected that “American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line,” such that “American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier.” For Turner, “This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the great West.” According to the historian, “In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization.”10

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In light of Turner’s references to “beginning over again,” “new opportunities,” and “continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society”—the latter phrase closely echoing Whitman’s “uncompromising touch”— Eakins’s Badlands adventure unmistakably mirrored larger impulses in American evolutionary discourse. In a version of Turner’s perennial “rebirth” on the frontier, Eakins undertook his Western trip at the behest of a physician who prescribed the camp-cure for “renewed life.” Eakins scholars have not thoroughly considered the Dakota trip in this historical context, but the artist’s excursion there in search of personal and professional regeneration certainly illustrates the already established status of the West as an evolutionary crucible of American civilization and progress. No one had done more to promote such ideas than Theodore Roosevelt. Almost a decade before Turner’s Chicago address and just prior to Eakins’s Dakota trip, Roosevelt temporarily left New York for the Badlands to engage the cowboy life. Ridiculed as a weakling state legislator at home, Roosevelt saw the West as offering an opportunity to change his reputation and launch a national political career. In 1884, he acquired two Dakota cattle ranches, the Elkhorn and the Chimney Butte, both near the town of Medora—only a short distance from the B-T Ranch. Shuttling back and forth between the Plains and New York during the 1880s, he published thrilling accounts of his Western adventures for a receptive national audience. Eakins never cited Roosevelt explicitly in his Dakota letters, but the artist undoubtedly knew about the celebrity tenderfoot-turned-rancher through such publications, especially since one of his own students, Arthur Burdett Frost, had provided illustrations for them. In 1885, Frost illustrated Roosevelt’s first book, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman: Sketches of Sport on the Northern Cattle Plains, based on the author’s experiences in the Dakota Territory. Frost also illustrated popular magazine article versions of the same stories by Roosevelt, whose image as the paradigmatic Easterner conquering personal weakness in the American West thus became ubiquitous.11 By the middle 1880s, East Coast fascination specifically with the Plains as a place of personal renewal and opportunity had become such a craze that Roosevelt himself felt the need to pass critical judgment on the phenomenon in an 1886 magazine article for Harper’s Weekly titled “Who Should Go West?” In Roosevelt’s words, “It is really pathetic to any one who has lived in the West to see the number of young men who annually go out there with a vague hope that they will somehow make their fortunes, only to find that they have reached the very place in which their qualities of mind and body least fit them for success.” Unlike the foolish, unfit “young men” chastised by Roosevelt, however, Eakins impressed his cowboy hosts during his brief stay in the Dakotas. Albert Tripp, manager of the B-T Ranch, valued Eakins’s labor so much that he even refused payment from the artist for room and board.12

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According to historian Gail Bederman, Roosevelt’s popular writings and public image crystallized the “discourse of civilization” pervading American society at the time—a discourse combining social evolutionism, hypermasculinity, and assumptions about white racial supremacy. Textual corroboration of Bederman’s assessment can be found readily in the opening chapter of Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, titled “Ranching in the Bad Lands”: It is but little over half a dozen years since these lands were won from the Indians. They were their only remaining great hunting-grounds, and towards the end of the last decade all of the northern plains tribes went on the warpath in a final desperate effort to preserve them. After bloody fighting and protracted campaigns they were defeated, and the country thrown open to the whites, while the building of the Northern Pacific Railroad gave immigrants an open impetus. There were great quantities of game, especially buffalo, and the hunters who thronged in to pursue the huge herds of the latter were the rough forerunners of civilization. No longer dreading the Indians, and having the railway on which to transport the robes, they followed the buffalo in season and out, until in 1883 the herds were practically destroyed. But meanwhile the cattle-men formed the vanguard of the white settlers.13

This synopsis of Western settlement (which Roosevelt would later recount in detail in his four-volume epic The Winning of the West, 1889–96) alerts us to the broader contemporary significance of cowboys as figures admired, emulated, and depicted by Eakins. As Roosevelt observed, they constituted “the vanguard of the white settlers,” following an evolutionary progression that began with “bloody fighting” against “the Indians” and the parallel decimation of buffalo herds by white hunters, “the rough forerunners of civilization.” In a deliberate evocation of those “rough forerunners,” Roosevelt projected a carefully constructed self-image as modern frontier hunter for the frontispiece of Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (Fig. 59). Based on a studio photograph taken in New York by George Bain, the frontispiece shows Roosevelt standing in a fictive woodland setting and holding a modern Winchester rifle. In an early corporate endorsement foreshadowing twentieth-century promotions of “the gun that won the West,” Roosevelt’s text hailed the Winchester specifically as “by all odds the best weapon I ever had,” “absolutely sure,” “deadly accurate,” and “unapproachable for the rapidity of its fire and the facility with which it is loaded.” Seemingly at odds with the modernity implied by such a weapon, Roosevelt’s frontispiece image presented him clad in a primitive-looking fringed “Native American” buckskin suit—an outfit similar to the one acquired by Eakins only two years later (see Fig. 58). Elsewhere, Roosevelt described such clothing as “in great part borrowed from . . . Indian foes.” According to Bederman, “although [Roosevelt] bears the weapons and manly de-

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Figure 59. Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman: Sketches of Sport on the Northern Cattle Plains, frontispiece (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1885). Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

meanor of civilized man, he wears the clothing of savages . . . he is at once like the Indians and superior to them.”14 As a hybrid of savagery and civilization, Roosevelt’s costume also anticipated the following description of primitive clothing from Turner’s famous 1893 lecture on the Western frontier: The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. . . . In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe. . . . The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.15

Roosevelt’s actual relation to the frontier had a romantic, literary quality not unlike that of Turner’s primordial “colonist” or Wood’s “stern Miles Standish.” For Roosevelt, wearing “the hunting shirt and the moccasin” had more to do with a

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performance for the sake of modern publicity and political survival than any life or death situation in the West. In that respect, he also joined a long historical tradition of whites for whom playing Indian and “going primitive” served purposes that usually had nothing to do with modern anthropological understanding of Native American “culture.” Philip Deloria and other historians have traced that tradition from the rebel colonists who wore Mohawk costumes at the Boston Tea Party to New Age spiritualists of our time. In the case of Roosevelt, “going primitive” allowed him to construct and capitalize on a new reputation for toughness. In 1886, he ran for mayor of New York as the “Cowboy of the Dakotas,” one of many incarnations of a now painfully familiar figure in American politics. Even though the mayoral bid was unsuccessful, Roosevelt had managed through skillful choreography and self-fashioning to shed his earlier reputation as an effete, bespectacled, Eastern rich-boy.16

“The Rifle as an Aid to Civilization” Eakins never ran for public office, but like Roosevelt he embraced the empowering, transformative image of the West and its personal accessories. In addition to acquiring a fringed buckskin cowboy outfit and horses, the artist at some point purchased his own Winchester rifle, perhaps following Roosevelt’s endorsement. Eakins’s nephew, Will Crowell, Jr., later recalled, “With the cowboy horses, Uncle Tom brought to the [Crowell family] Farm firearms that he had had in the West, a 44 calibre Winchester rifle, a double-barreled shot-gun and a 22 calibre squirrel rifle.” As that list suggests, the Winchester brand already had acquired considerable mystique and name recognition during the nineteenth century, beyond the writings of Roosevelt. If not from Roosevelt, Eakins could have learned about the brand from a Winchester display at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia or any number of contemporary magazine advertisements. Winchester rifles also figured prominently in dime-novel adventures about Western hunting, law enforcement, and “Indian fighting” by the early 1880s. The weapon had become a household name as a powerful metaphor of frontier settlement and as a commodity fostering wide diffusion of “the West” as an idea.17 In letters from the Badlands, Eakins repeatedly referred to his rifle and its maker in terms that confirm the cachet of “Winchester” at the time. For example, when cowboys from the B-T Ranch rode out to apprehend a horse thief, they left Eakins behind to stand guard with his gun: “They told me to keep my Winchester constantly at hand, not to leave the place and mind the dog. If he [the horse thief ] should appear I am to hold him up, cover him with my Winchester . . . I am not

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to hesitate to shoot him.” In another letter mentioning the rifle brand, Eakins alluded to the historic conflict between Western settlers and Native Americans: “There is no longer danger of Indians here but a few years ago a man never went from his house to his barn without his Winchester.” In Eakins’s eyes, the gun clearly had a special status. He mentioned various other weapons in his Dakota letters, but Winchester was the only commercial arms manufacturer he bothered to identify by name at the time.18 In addition to his many verbal references to firearms, Eakins also carefully choreographed two unidentified cowboys aiming weapons in a pair of Dakota photographs (Figs. 60, 61). One cowboy points a revolver, or “six shooter,” as the artist described this type of weapon in a different letter. The other cowboy aims what appears to be a Model 1886 Winchester Sporting Rifle, identifiable from its leveraction design and long barrel with attached cartridge tube or magazine—features that distinguished it from the Model 1876 Winchester brandished by Roosevelt in the frontispiece to Hunting Life of a Ranchman (see Fig. 59). Contemporary advertisements in Forest and Stream and other periodicals regularly touted the Model 1886, referred to as “A New Repeater” (Fig. 62), so Roosevelt wasted no time in adding one to his well-known collection of Winchesters. Eakins’s photograph of the cowboy with rifle even seems to mimic such advertisements in their straightforward aesthetics of display, with weapon positioned horizontally in profile—an object as legible as the accompanying text. Art historian Cheryl Leibold has noted that the cowboy in Eakins’s photograph wears a fringed buckskin outfit and hat identical to those acquired by the artist. Evidently, Eakins viewed the latest Winchester as a necessary part of the ensemble as well.19 Leibold also suggests that the standing poses of both armed cowboys photographed by Eakins “recall the stereotypical images of Buffalo Bill show posters.” Though Leibold provides no corroborating example of such a poster, the suggestion remains intriguing in light of the artist’s reference in another Dakota letter to seeing “bucking horses like at the Buffalo Bill show every day.” Evidently, Eakins was personally familiar with the biggest popular entertainment spectacle of his era. Founded in 1883 by entrepreneur Nate Salsbury in collaboration with the famous military scout and buffalo hunter, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, the Wild West show quickly became known as “America’s National Entertainment” for its popular, “realistic” reconstructions of frontier history using hundreds of authentic cowboy, Indian, and animal actors. Cody himself publicly endorsed the Model 1873 Winchester rifle, calling it “the boss” for “general hunting or Indian fighting” in the company’s 1875 sales catalogue and lauding it as his weapon of choice in performances of the Wild West. After traveling around the country for four years with his Winchester and his massive troupe of entertainers during the mid-1880s,

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Figure 60. Thomas Eakins, Cowboy Aiming Rifle, 1887. Modern print (dry-plate negative), 10.2 ×

12.7 cm (4 × 5 in.). Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection. Purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust. Figure 61. Thomas Eakins, Cowboy Aiming Revolver, 1887. Modern print (dry-plate negative), 10.2 ×

12.7 cm (4 × 5 in.). Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection. Purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust.

Figure 62. Winchester Repeating Arms Company, “A New Repeater,” advertisement for the Model 1886 Winchester rifle. Published in Forest & Stream, vol. 28, no. 16, May 12, 1887, p. 359. Special Collections, Linderman Library, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Cody met with international acclaim when the show toured Europe in 1887 for the first time. As an engine for the diffusion of popular American ideas about the frontier, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was unparalleled.20 Eakins could have seen the show when it came to Philadelphia during the summer of 1885. This seems more than a little likely when we recall the artist’s enthusiasm for circuses in Paris. Regardless of whether Eakins actually attended a Buffalo Bill performance, he certainly would have known about the show’s sensational feature attractions, including horse riding stunts, demonstrations of marksmanship, and Western battle reenactments such as “Custer’s Last Stand.” The Lakota chief Sitting Bull, one of Custer’s notorious Indian adversaries, even left the Pine Ridge Reservation at Cody’s invitation to perform with the Wild West for one season in 1885. In that year, the sharpshooter Annie Oakley also joined the troupe, thrilling audiences with her stunning accuracy in firing Winchester rifles and other weapons. Perhaps such demonstrations were at the back of Eakins’s mind in 1887 when he admiringly identified Albert Tripp, manager of the B-T Ranch, as “an old Indian fighter and sharp shooter.” In medium and composition—even the stagy use of background trees—Eakins’s pictures of aiming cowboys resemble souvenir publicity photographs circulated to promote Oakley and the Buffalo Bill show (Figs. 63, 64). In effect, the artist reconstructed a reconstruction of the West by choreographing his own versions of such carte de visite imagery circulating in the East. Not unlike the show itself, Eakins’s photographs indicate that “the West” was a region increasingly rooted not in any firm soil but rather in the shifting terrain of metaphor and imagination.21 However spurious or artificial the Wild West’s claims of historical “realism”

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Figure 63. J. Wood, Phoebe Ann Moses (Annie Oakley) with Shotgun, ca. 1887. Black and white cabinet photograph, 10.8 × 16.5 cm (41⁄4 × 61⁄2 in.). Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming; P.69.1590. Figure 64. Nate Salsbury, American Horse, Warrior Chief of the Sioux Nation, Member of the Cast of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, ca. 1886. Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, NS 86.

might seem today, nineteenth-century audiences—including Eakins—had no reason to doubt the show’s overarching social evolutionary message, articulated relentlessly in terms of “civilization” advancing on America’s primitive frontier. In 1886, for example, Salsbury and Cody (with help from New York dramatist Steele Mackaye) advertised a colossal new production of the Buffalo Bill show at Madison Square Garden titled The Drama of Civilization. Organized into a series of four “epochs,” beginning with “The Primeval Forest” and proceeding through “The Prairie,” “The Cattle Ranch,” and “The Mining Camp,” this spectacle reinforced popular assumptions about the inevitability of white settlement and Manifest Destiny. Historian Louis Warren has detected a strategic modicum of “moral ambiguity” in the show’s presentation of frontier conflict, enough to guarantee its wide appeal across different class groups and other audience constituencies without calling into question the basic evolutionary theme. The Wild West thus contributed immeasurably to the broader “discourse of civilization” discussed by Gail Bederman in relation to Roosevelt. Indeed, the epochal arrangement of The Drama of Civilization provided a thrilling visual counterpart to the epic literary history of westward expansion told by Roosevelt in his multivolume Winning of the West between 1889 and 1896.22

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As in Roosevelt’s writings, the Wild West reverently enshrined guns at the center of America’s sacrosanct history of settlement. In addition to featuring demonstrations of marksmanship, Cody and Salsbury included in their published program a long didactic statement titled “The Rifle as an Aid to Civilization.” The statement was adapted from James W. Buel’s 1881 book Heroes of the Plains, a dime novel about the “Lives and Wonderful Adventures of Wild Bill, Buffalo Bill . . . and other Celebrated Indian Fighters.” The following excerpt from the Wild West program statement provides a sense of the esteem with which audience members were invited to regard firearms and ammunition: There is a trite saying that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword.’ It is an equally true one that the bullet is the pioneer of civilization, for it has gone hand in hand with the axe that cleared the forest, and with the family bible and school book. Deadly as has been its mission in one sense, it has been merciful in another; for without the rifle ball we of America would not be to-day in the possession of a free and united country, and mighty in our strength. . . . It is in the far West of America, however, and along our frontier, that the rifle has found its greatest use and become a part of the person and the household of the venturesome settler, the guide, the scout, and the soldier; for nowhere else in Christendom is it so much and so frequently a necessity for the preservation of life and the defence [sic] of home and property. It is here, too, among the hunters on the plains and in the Rocky Mountains, that one sees the perfection of that skill in marksmanship that has become the wonder of those who are not accustomed to the daily use of weapons.23

Eakins never espoused the sort of strident Christian moralism evident in this statement, but he nevertheless embraced the main historical and practical points about frontier life. For Eakins—an artist weaned on the discipline of writing as an essential tool for his own (and his family’s) advancement—the linkage of “pen” and “bullet” would have resonated strongly, especially in light of his lifelong fascination with weapons and shooting. Just as the Wild West program declared “the rifle has found its greatest use and become a part of the person and the household of the venturesome settler,” Eakins had written to his wife, Susan, that “there is no longer danger of Indians here but a few years ago a man never went from his house to his barn without his Winchester.” In other words, for both artist and entertainer, the rifle played a central role in defending the home and domesticating the West. Having learned hunting and other practical skills at an early age, Eakins took a personal interest in marksmanship while in the Dakotas. Shortly after arriving there, he wrote to Susan about firing at an antelope (probably with his 22-caliber squirrel rifle): “I got a shot at one 400 yards off. . . . The ball must have struck very close by the dust it threw, Tripp said within six inches at the furthest. . . . Tripp was much pleased both with the little gun and the way I shot, and he will take me

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out hunting.” Later, after carrying a dead antelope back to the ranch on his horse, he acknowledged that the animal was “almost too pretty to kill,” but his interest in shooting and marksmanship remained undeterred. Consistent with such interests, the artist photographed his cowboys carefully aiming their weapons, as if demonstrating “the perfection of that skill” mentioned in the Wild West program.24 The Dakota correspondence of Eakins also reveals his belief that marksmanship differentiated cowboys from Indians. In the letter identifying Albert Tripp as “an old Indian fighter and sharp shooter,” the artist recounted an important lesson that he had learned from the ranch foreman: Tripp was a sharp shooter in the Minnesota wars & when he shot he killed the man he shot at. He says Indians can’t shoot well. They have no practice. They always sneak up on their game & carry a little crotched stick to rest the gun in. They cannot repair arms nor make cartridges. Tripp shoots nearly all his game deer, etc. running & his son George can shoot chickens flying with his rifle.25

This assessment of Native Americans as incapable of effectively shooting or repairing modern weapons brings to mind the comparative comments by Eakins in his earlier letter from Paris about Egyptian craftsmen, whom he said “never thought of making the strings themselves go up and down . . . like our weaving machine would do it.” In other words, both the Indians and “Moors” seemed unable to comprehend modern machinery or technical discipline. Whereas Eakins felt the Egyptian craftsmen at least merited some “credit” for their dexterity, he paid no such compliment to the unpracticed Indians. Eakins’s observations about cowboy sharpshooters and Indian fighters recall the rhetoric of dime-novel Westerns, another popular vehicle of comparative discourse on civilization during the late nineteenth century. As with the Buffalo Bill show, the artist probably was familiar with that literary form before he went out West, thanks to a personal acquaintance. His Philadelphia friend Robert C. V. Meyers enjoyed considerable success as an author of such popular fiction beginning in the 1880s. Eakins scholars know Meyers as the model for one of the seated medical students depicted in the background of the artist’s masterpiece, The Gross Clinic. Meyers also may have posed as the figure standing at left, wielding an Indian tomahawk in a contemporary photographic parody of that painting staged by the artist and his friends (Fig. 65). Among the many dime novels written by Meyers was a book titled Life and Adventures of Lewis Wetzel, the Renowned Virginia Rancher and Scout, published in 1883, just a few years before Eakins went to the B-T Ranch. Set in the older frontier context of Revolutionary-era Virginia and Ohio, the book featured a long-winded subtitle, reminiscent of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West programs: “Comprising a Thrilling History of this Celebrated Indian Fighter, with his Per-

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Figure 65. Circle of Thomas

Eakins, Parody of ‘The Gross Clinic,’ ca. 1875–76. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of George Barker, 1977.

ilous Adventures and Hair-Breadth Escapes and including other Interesting Incidents of Border-Life.”26 In the novel’s penultimate chapter, titled “The Last Indian,” Meyers described the aging Wetzel in terms that conflated Native Americans with game animals: “He was forever hunting, and his deer-hides found ready purchasers; for the more peaceful deer were his victims now. With advancing years and experience, he seemed to regard the taking of human life with more thought, though his hatred for the Indians had never deserted him. The savages were not so plentiful now as formerly.” After a momentary hesitation, Wetzel could not resist killing one more Indian when presented with an opportunity to do so during his return from a day’s hunt. “I can’t help myself,” the character exclaimed, as he concocted a plan “which displays to the fullest the superiority of the sagacity of the white man over the natural simplicity of the savage.” Noticing that the Indian foe “had his rifle lodged in a knot of the tree”—to steady the characteristically unpracticed Native American aim—Wetzel deceived his foe into firing at a decoy. The Indian then threw a tomahawk, which “leaped from the tawny hand, but not before Wetzel’s bullet had sped on its work of death.” Evolutionary stereotypes about “savage” Indians and their lack of discipline were thus firmly ensconced in Eakins’s Philadelphia mi-

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lieu, promoting civilization while effectively reducing genocide to a topos of literary sensationalism.27 Eakins never explicitly endorsed genocide against Native Americans, but his visual and verbal output quietly acquiesced in that dimension of national policy by privileging the avatar of frontier civilization: the cowboy. Obviously, Eakins was hardly alone among his contemporaries in doing so, but it seems important here to acknowledge his mainstream perspective in this respect, given the tendency of art historians to idealize his “sympathy” and “cultural” attitudes. Like most whites at the time, Eakins viewed Native Americans ambivalently at best. In a manner roughly analogous to the way in which Jean-Léon Gérôme’s paintings mediated Eakins’s perception of Egyptians, the Wild West show and popular literature seem to have shaped his understanding of American Indians. There is no evidence that Eakins participated in, or even noticed, the activities of the Indian Rights Association, a relatively progressive organization founded in Philadelphia in 1882 to promote the assimilation (as opposed to the extermination and mistreatment) of Native Americans. Significantly, his one early painting of an Indian, based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem The Song of Hiawatha, engaged the stereotypical theme of Native American assimilation through agriculture. In Hiawatha (Fig. 66), Eakins represented the titular Ojibwa leader melancholically pondering the civilized future of his race after conquering the corn spirit, Mondawmin, in a symbolic acceptance of agricultural life. Disgusted by Longfellow’s allegorical approach and perhaps also the New England poet’s sentimental liberalism, Eakins abandoned the painting in an unfinished state.28 Another expression of Eakins’s views about Native American people appears in a striking letter that he wrote from the Dakota Territory, describing the attempt of “an old Indian chief ” to get a tooth pulled at “the old gunsmith’s” shop in Dickinson. The passage in question rambles on for nearly a thousand words recounting various details, including the quiet manner of the Indian as he walked into the shop and sat down on a nail keg, “without a word like in Quaker meeting.” After several minutes, the Indian finally “grunted” and “made a motion that he would like the gunsmith to pull a bad tooth for him.” Not knowing each other’s languages, the Indian and the white people at the shop were forced to communicate through various facial expressions and hand gestures, which Eakins referred to in one sentence as “pantomime.” At first the Indian implored the shop owner and then his son to extract the tooth, but they preferred to fetch the local dentist, for whom “the Indian opened his mouth like a fire place,” according to Eakins. After the dentist probed the decayed gum around the tooth for a time, the Indian’s pain suddenly stopped, prompting him to leave without proceeding with the extraction. Thereupon, Eakins observed the following:

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Figure 66. Thomas Eakins, Hiawatha, ca. 1874. Oil on canvas mounted on wood panel, 35.7 × 44.6 cm

(141⁄8 × 175⁄8 in.). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966. Photograph by Lee Stalsworth.

Then he got up slowly & gravely went out straight footed looking neither to the right nor left. The dentist looked sheepish the cashier looked pathetic Dad looked sort of I told you so & I don’t know I looked like I felt or not my emotion was of such a mixed character, and a general sorrow pervaded the whole assembly that nobody had helped the noble red man out of the bank. When I told my story with the pantomime to the Texas boys that night around the fire it had a wild success. They were brought up amongst Indians and credited me with fine observation.29

The most startling aspect of this statement by Eakins, aside from his garbled grammar, is the way in which he acknowledged his own ambivalence only to brush it aside a moment later. Although his “emotion was of such a mixed character” regarding “the noble red man,” Eakins apparently disavowed those complex feelings in recounting the “wild success” of his “pantomime” for “the Texas boys that night around the fire.” His sudden disavowal recalls that of Meyers’s Louis Wetzel, who could not resist indulging in fun at an Indian’s expense. Eakins killed no Indians, but he preferred sensational entertainment, white fraternalism, and even the stories of “Indian killers” to dwelling on sympathy for the oppressed minority.

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Figure 67. Frederic Remington, A Dash for the Timber, 1889. Oil on canvas, 122.6 × 213.7 cm (481⁄4 × 841⁄8 in.). Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. 1961.381.

Eakins also painted no pictures of Indians while out West, and his only photograph of a Native American has been lost without a trace or description. The one major work resulting from his Dakota experience depicted cowboys (see Fig. 57), the successful new white majority in the region. As a celebration of Roosevelt’s “vanguard of the white settlers,” though, Cowboys in the Badlands fell flat, such that the artist had no success exhibiting or selling it during his lifetime. No doubt Eakins would have been bemused to learn that a private collector would purchase the work over a century later for several million dollars, producing a large but rather belated return on his “investment” in “picturesque” cowboy subject matter. Unfortunately for Eakins, his contemporaries generally preferred the more stirring Western visions offered by Frederic Remington, as seen in the latter’s breakthrough painting of the following year titled A Dash for the Timber (Fig. 67). Remington’s work caused a sensation when it was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1889. By comparison, Eakins’s cowboys seem listless and inert, even rapt in meditation, as they stare out onto the shimmering Dakota landscape in the distance. Not unlike the passive observers standing blankly on the shore in Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River (see Fig. 51), the Dakota cowboys appear to belong somewhere else, thanks in part to the artist’s additive approach to composition using photographs (see Fig. 56).30 Perhaps the sense of displacement informing those cowboy figures also has something to do with the fact that Eakins once again looked to a comparative prototype from the oeuvre of his French master, Jean-Léon Gérôme. The work in question, Oedipus: Bonaparte before the Sphinx (Fig. 68), was quite familiar to the for-

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Figure 68. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Oedipus: Bonaparte before the Sphinx, 1867–68. Oil on canvas, 92.7 × 137 cm (36 × 54 in.). Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument, California. Photograph by Victoria Garagliano/© Hearst Castle/CA State Parks.

mer pupil. When he saw it at the 1868 Salon in Paris, Eakins admired the work so much that he purchased and kept a souvenir photographic reproduction. Judging from the compositional similarities between Oedipus and Cowboys, Eakins must have kept a close eye on his master’s example in adapting it to American subject matter. Not only do Eakins’s cowboys occupy a position in the Dakota landscape analogous to that of Gérôme’s Napoleon at Giza, but they even stare at a rather Sphinx-like rock formation at the far right, with sloping sides and geological striations that recall the ancient Egyptian monument in a ghostly manner.31 In keeping with the pervasive contemporary discourse of civilization, as well as with his own pattern of comparative analysis and domestication of European models, Eakins’s painting subtly cast Dakota cowboys as America’s frontier colonial vanguard. Characteristically downplaying visual drama in favor of figurative realism and emblematic meaning, Cowboys in the Badlands depicted its protagonists not literally in the act of conquest but rather as the human embodiments of modern progress in the West. That is, the cowboys themselves represented an important historical marker in the process of settlement, which Eakins recognized was already largely complete. As he told Susan, “there is no longer danger of Indians here,” so apparently there was no need to depict conflict. Whereas Remington nostalgically dramatized and reanimated a frontier that no longer existed, Eakins hailed its pacification as a fait accompli. All that remained for Eakins’s cowboys to tame was the Western environment. Despite obvious differences, both artists cre-

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ated works that bespoke modernity even as they represented the West as an exotic region at once mysteriously apart from and also within the United States. Not unlike Napoleon/Oedipus before the Sphinx, or Hiawatha standing over the body of Mondawmin, Eakins’s pistol-packing cowboys contemplated a mystery: the future of their race in a conquered, colonized, and cultivated American West. Two years later, on December 29, 1890, the United States Seventh Cavalry (George Armstrong Custer’s former unit) would dramatically punctuate that historic process of conquest by massacring over two hundred Miniconjou Lakota Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek, also in the Dakota Territory. For Eakins and his cowboys, including the “old Indian fighters” among them, the evolution of the West was well in hand by 1887.32

Science and Art Around the turn of the twentieth century, Eakins found new artistic subject matter in another vanguard “set” of people: professionals and patrons on the frontier of anthropology, then an emerging academic discipline in Philadelphia. Between 1889 and 1901, he painted portraits of seven individuals variously associated with anthropological collections and research at the University of Pennsylvania’s new Free Museum of Science and Art (now known as the University Museum), which opened to the public in 1889. In that year, Eakins portrayed his friend Talcott Williams (Fig. 69), a founding member of the museum’s board of trustees, an avid orientalist, and an amateur collector of anthropological specimens, among other avocations. We already know Williams as the so-called pediment figure in the artist’s Swimming picture (see Fig. 35). Both men were also Whitman enthusiasts, Williams having introduced the painter to the poet in 1887. In February 1889, only a few months before his portrait sessions with Eakins, Williams traveled to Morocco, a country not far from Andalusian Spain, to take ethnographic photographs and collect anthropological specimens, some of which he later donated to the newly opened University Museum. Although Eakins made no explicit reference to such activities in Talcott Williams, the portrait marked a convergence of multiple interests pertinent to both sitter and artist. It also inaugurated an important series of portraits by Eakins, whose subjects shared an association with the museum.33 In format, the works in question ranged from conventional head-andshoulders treatments to some of the artist’s largest and most elaborate portraits d’apparat. For example, Daniel Garrison Brinton (Fig. 70) repeated the straightforward approach seen in Talcott Williams. The Brinton portrait represented the scion of an old Quaker family who, in 1886, became the first professor of anthropology

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Figure 69. Thomas Eakins,

Talcott Williams, ca. 1889. Oil on canvas, 62.2 × 50.8 cm (241⁄2 × 20 in.). National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., partial gift of the Kate and Laurens Seelye Family and purchased with a generous contribution from the James Smithson Society, NPG.85.50.

at an American university. In that position, Brinton also served as the museum’s intellectual figurehead. Like Williams, he was an amateur collector of anthropological artifacts, but both men were better known for their publications and administrative activities, a fact that may explain the simple format chosen by the artist for their portraits. By contrast, the monumental Antiquated Music (Portrait of Sarah Sagehorn Frishmuth) (see Plate 5) exemplified the more grandiose, object-oriented type of composition evidently preferred by Eakins. It showed a major collector surrounded by a selection of the hundreds of world musical instruments that she acquired and donated to the University Museum. Such a subject afforded Eakins an unusual opportunity to represent multiple exotic forms, bringing to mind the orientalist bric-a-brac in pictures by his French master, Gérôme (see Figs. 4, 15, 22) and in examples of his own earlier work (see Fig. 16, Plate 7).34 As with Antiquated Music, Talcott Williams, and Daniel Garrison Brinton, the four other pertinent portraits by Eakins depicted individuals who studied, donated, procured, or attempted to sell works of anthropological value to the University Museum. And likewise, all were painted voluntarily by the artist without commission, in most cases at his behest. The sitters included an anthropologist noted for ethnographic fieldwork, a second major collector, a curator, and a painter of ethnographic portraits. Unfortunately, Eakins’s portraits of the latter two individuals have since disappeared. Also, the second collector portrait, Mrs. Joseph H. Drexel

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Figure 70. Thomas Eakins, Daniel Garrison Brinton, 1899. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 63.5 cm (30 × 25 in.). American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

(1900, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.), Eakins left unfinished when his sitter refused to comply with his demand for many long posing sessions.35 Such gaps and unfinished business, combined with the variations in format noted above, help explain why scholars have never before considered Eakins’s seven museum-related portraits as a group. While he did not necessarily conceive the pictures from the beginning as a programmatic series, they nevertheless constitute a rich and historically interconnected sample from which to assess his perspective on institutional constructions of human difference at the threshold of the culture concept. As the portraits suggest, that perspective was a vicarious one, focusing mainly on exotic objects and the disciplinary representatives of anthropology, not living specimens of human difference. Even so, no American artist of the period produced anything comparable to this visual dossier on the nascent science of “man.” In one respect, the artist’s selection of sitters suggests a strategic professional move on his part to attract patronage and reestablish his career after the Pennsylvania Academy debacle of 1886. We could also consider this new group of subjects from the scientific world of Philadelphia anthropology to be a collegial alternative community of sorts, with which Eakins identified as a therapeutic substitute for the artistic one that had ostracized and largely abandoned him. Collegiality between the artist and such sitters should not be surprising given his long-

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standing contacts within the broader Philadelphia scientific community, notably among professionals in medicine and anatomy, both fields historically related to physical anthropology in their emphasis on the human body.36 For example, Eakins probably was well acquainted with Daniel Garrison Brinton (see Fig. 70), a former Union military physician who turned from medicine to anthropology after the Civil War. During the early 1860s Brinton had studied at Jefferson Medical College, where Eakins himself took courses in anatomical dissection only a short time later. Between 1876 and 1899, Eakins taught or portrayed four other members of Brinton’s extended family and even produced a picturesque painting of their ancestral home in Dilworthtown, Pennsylvania. In 1892, both painter and professor were listed among the honorary pallbearers at Walt Whitman’s funeral, along with Talcott Williams. Brinton also was a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences, another Philadelphia scientific institution with which Eakins had informal ties during the 1890s. When the professor died in 1899, Eakins volunteered to paint a posthumous portrait of him from a photograph. Upon learning of Eakins’s willingness to do so, Brinton’s widow privately expressed confidence that the artist would “put more real heart into the work than anyone else.” Despite having to rely upon a mediating image, Eakins managed to breathe a modicum of warmth and vitality—evident in the professor’s ruddy cheeks and upward glance— into an otherwise rather formal, restrained image. On his lapel, Brinton wears a pin signifying membership in the American Philosophical Society, one of the country’s oldest scientific organizations, founded in 1745 by Benjamin Franklin.37 An even more vivid example of artist-sitter collegiality concerns the nationally famous ethnographer Frank Hamilton Cushing (Plate 9), who referred to the painter as “my friend, Thomas Eakins, the scientist-artist of Philadelphia” in an 1895 scholarly article published in the journal American Anthropologist. The Cushing portrait, painted by Eakins during that year, constitutes one of the grandest and most extraordinary visual tributes ever painted by the artist. It shows the ethnographer dressing and playing the part of his Native American subjects at Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico, where he had conducted almost five years of live-in fieldwork for the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology a decade before. Cushing was not directly employed by the University Museum, but he helped organize some of its exhibitions, donated various specimens to the collection, and was a friendly colleague of professionals there in the area of Native American anthropology, including Brinton. In preparation for the Cushing portrait, artist and anthropologist collaborated in temporarily transforming the painter’s Philadelphia studio into a Zuni ceremonial kiva, complete with wood-burning fireplace-altar and a selection of regional Native artifacts collected by the sitter. We will examine this striking portrait later in greater detail.38

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Such friendships and activities indicate a level of engagement by Eakins surpassing mere careerism or compensatory identification to encompass a degree of enthusiastic participation in the personal and intellectual lives of his sitters. In addition to attending special events at the University Museum, Eakins took the unusual step of arranging to have Antiquated Music and Frank Hamilton Cushing temporarily exhibited within its related anthropological displays. The artist also was an invited guest at meetings of the University Faculty Club and similar professional organizations, including the Oriental Club of Philadelphia, to which Brinton, Williams, and other museum people formally belonged. How much Eakins understood or contributed to discussion about anthropology on such occasions we do not know, but the artist evidently developed more than a passing curiosity about the field, its professional representatives, and its patrons.39 Mirroring the collecting habits of such sitters, albeit on a much smaller scale, Eakins and his wife, Susan, acquired their own exotic specimens of art and craft around the turn of the twentieth century. Visual evidence of such interests already appeared in The Artist’s Wife and His Setter Dog of 1884–89 (Fig. 71), a domestic portrait of Susan seated in the family parlor, holding an unidentified book of Japanese pictures. In addition to projecting a reflexive aesthetic image of nervous exhaustion through the languid body of his wife, as some scholars have noted, Eakins here acknowledged his and his wife’s shared curiosity about non-Western art. According to early biographer Margaret McHenry and other sources, the Eakinses frequently read magazines about Asian art and avidly spoke to friends and family members who traveled abroad. Surviving letters from Thomas and Susan after 1900 confirm the couple’s acquisition of Japanese drawings and small Native American baskets, some of which they received as gifts from University Museum curator Stewart Culin, a close friend and the subject of a lost portrait by the artist. We also know that Thomas and Susan Eakins gave Asian objects, including Japanese kites, to their friends. A part of their small collection of exotica probably survives among the items recently bequeathed by Susan’s heirs to the Art Museum of Western Virginia. Lack of precise provenance information concerning individual works in that bequest has hindered efforts to identify which objects were owned by the Eakinses among the many others obtained by Susan’s relatives, including her sister Elizabeth Kenton Macdowell, an amateur orientalist who purchased many items on trips to Japan around the turn of the twentieth century.40 Through his museum portraits, friendships, and related activities, Thomas Eakins again intimated the existence, diffusion, aesthetic appreciation, and scientific study of different “cultures” avant la lettre, in a premodern way. Significantly, however, the sitters in question remained firmly entrenched in nineteenth-century social evolutionary thought. The likelihood that Eakins ever encountered, much

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Figure 71. Thomas Eakins, The Artist’s Wife and His Setter Dog, ca. 1884–89. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 58.4 cm (30 × 23 in.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1923 (23.139). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

less comprehended or consciously embraced, the ideas of Franz Boas in this context seems doubtful given the orientation of Philadelphia anthropology at the time. As historian Regna Darnell has noted, “it was only in the twentieth century [after 1910] that the University of Pennsylvania was important as an outpost of Boasian academic anthropology.” Indeed, as we will see shortly, three of Eakins’s sitters— Cushing, Culin, and especially Brinton—became the focus of pointed criticism by Boas himself as part of his broader scientific attack on social evolutionism in the discipline.41 Darnell even identifies the University Museum’s central institutional goal around 1900 as recounting “the past history of human civilization from an evo-

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lutionary perspective.” Accordingly, Eakins’s sitters engaged in the collection, comparative analysis, classification, and display of objects using frameworks borrowed from the natural sciences, as in the Smithsonian Institution’s spindle exhibit (see Fig. 3). Objects displayed in such an arrangement were not thought to reveal the existence of different “cultures” or the fluid “diffusion” of “culture” as a socially constructed phenomenon. Rather, they functioned in a more static and essentialist manner, akin to Hippolyte Taine’s “fossil shell.” That is, they constituted the metonymic residue of national character, defined by an amalgam of racial, historical, and environmental factors and ranked on a Eurocentric sliding scale. In other words, the evolutionary “confusion” cited by Arthur Kroeber in 1917 still very much prevailed in Philadelphia anthropology at the turn of the century.42 Historian Steven Conn has made the same point in a study of turn-of-thecentury American museums and academic institutions, including the University Museum at Penn. According to Conn, “Just as natural scientists had done for some years with the specimens with which they dealt, the new anthropologists used objects to stand for whole cultures and replaced original contexts with classificatory schema.” Although the pluralist Boasian terminology of “whole cultures” deployed here by Conn did not actually enter wide circulation in American anthropology until well after 1900, his basic observation about natural science and the metonymic use of specimens is quite pertinent to Eakins’s turn-of-the-century context. At that time, American anthropologists continued to view each artifact as the product of a primordial nation or racial group, whose distinct and resilient “blood” might have adapted somewhat to changing environmental conditions over time but without undergoing qualitative transformation. Such science effectively translated Taine’s “race, milieu, et moment” into anthropological terms for the purposes of museum exhibition design.43 In the interests of encyclopedic classification and international scope, the University Museum dedicated itself to displaying as many specimens as possible from around the world. The collectors Frishmuth and Drexel alone contributed thousands of objects to the institution’s holdings in the space of only a few years around 1900. After occupying the old university library for its first decade, the museum moved into a large, new building specially constructed to accommodate the rapidly growing collections. Designed by leading local architect Wilson Eyre and completed in 1899, the new museum building powerfully asserted the importance of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania in the disciplinary rise of anthropology. With this grand edifice, the University Museum attempted to compete with other contemporary American institutions of its kind, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., Chicago’s Field Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Clearly sensing a propitious

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moment, Eakins painted most of the portraits under discussion here during or shortly after the year in which the new University Museum building opened to the public in 1899, at a time when Philadelphia academic anthropology seemed poised to make a dramatic debut upon the world’s scientific stage, illuminated by the dawn of a new century.44 In design and exhibition structure, the new University Museum unmistakably conformed to the prevailing evolutionary paradigm in American anthropology. Like most of its peer institutions around 1900, the museum embodied what Conn has called an “object-based epistemology,” in which displays of artifacts constituted quasi-linguistic “visual sentences” promoting “almost without exception . . . the metanarrative of evolutionary progress.” Conn observes that “the symbolism of the design of the [University] museum was not subtle: from the entrance landing, one rose to find the civilizations of the Near East and the Mediterranean; conversely, the visitor went downstairs to find Native Americans from all parts of the New World, Buddhism, and the objects from the primitives of Borneo” (emphasis in the original). Such a distinction obviously privileged not only the Western classical tradition but also the discipline of European archaeology. Conversely, anthropology and its so-called primitives were consigned to the basement because they were considered less refined and less advanced. Even though Frishmuth’s collection of musical instruments and Drexel’s collection of decorative fans from around the world both contained many European objects, their inclusion of Asian, African, Oceanic, and Native American artifacts as well prompted museum officials to display them downstairs, near the Borneo exhibit. By portraying Frishmuth, Drexel, and other figures mainly associated with non-Mediterranean collections at the museum, Eakins effectively aligned himself with those in charge of managing the “primitives.” Such an alignment may indicate his disavowal of European classicism on some level, but by no means does it suggest a Boasian critique of social evolutionism.45 On every level of the University Museum, upstairs and down, Conn observes, “The institution’s collections were assembled to facilitate comparisons between different groups in order to plot the location of each on [a] universal scale of social development. The point of comparing cultures, of course, was to observe how far each one had traveled along the social evolutionary path. Moreover, just as human beings represented the triumph of biological evolution, a comparison of the world’s cultures would unambiguously demonstrate that Western civilization marked the highest achievement of social evolution.” Roughly the same comparative logic structured official government exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution (see Fig. 3) and the international world’s fairs (see Figs. 2, 11), including the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle, which featured the Egyptian craftsmen whose tools

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and techniques Eakins had described as “primitive.” Although the University Museum’s Romanesque Revival architecture subtly acknowledged Europe’s own primitive past, it also clearly celebrated Western moral authority as the governing framework for the institution.46 Eakins and his contemporaries were well primed to understand the University Museum’s collections in social evolutionary terms, even before the new building opened in 1899. Scientific publications and public lectures in the city during the 1890s regularly examined the comparative development of specimen types like those in the museum’s collections, including musical instruments. For example, Talcott Williams addressed the Oriental Club of Philadelphia in 1892 on “Music and Musical Instruments of North Morocco,” a presentation he likely illustrated with his own photographs and specimens acquired there only a few years before. In 1897, Daniel Garrison Brinton wrote about “Native American Stringed Musical Instruments” for an issue of American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal. According to Brinton, stringed instruments constituted the “third and highest” class, above percussion and wind instruments. Every imaginable artifact type, from the musical bow to the bow-and-arrow, became the subject of social evolutionary analysis and classification during these years.47 A more popular manifestation of such anthropological discourse can be found in an 1895 Philadelphia Times newspaper article describing Mrs. Frishmuth’s collection of musical instruments. In a dramatic headline, the newspaper caught readers’ attention by referring in bold letters to “the savage way of making music. frishmuth collection of primitive musical instruments. nearly four hundred pieces.” Commenting on the collection’s disposition, the article noted, “It will Ultimately be Lodged in the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. How Mrs. Frishmuth Has Gathered Her Treasures. Besides Savage Instruments There Are Fine Specimens of Early Civilized Instruments.” In its blithe juxtaposition of “Savage” and “Civilized,” the newspaper story suggests not only the popular currency of such terms by the late nineteenth century but also a certain looseness, or even pluralist inclusiveness, regarding their application.48 As we know, Eakins had been familiar with the general significance of “savage” and “civilized” at least since his student years in Paris and probably from his grammar school days. His title for Antiquated Music (see Plate 5) affirmed the progressive, evolutionary assumptions behind such words by highlighting the temporal theme of obsolescence in modernity. That same theme informed the overarching “metanarrative” of progress at the University Museum, as noted by Conn. Appropriately, Eakins arranged to have Antiquated Music exhibited at the museum for several years, beginning in 1901. Hanging within the museum galleries, adjacent to the very objects depicted by Eakins and collected by his sitter, the portrait func-

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tioned at once commemoratively and ethnographically, in a sense. That is, it paid tribute to Frishmuth while participating indirectly in the museum’s anthropological program by visually documenting specimens alongside their knowledgeable donor. One might say Eakins provided a metarepresentation of the museum’s metanarrative. In addition to including some of the Asian, African, Indian, and other “primitive” instruments mentioned in the Philadelphia Times, the artist’s vision of antiquation encompassed the figure of Mrs. Frishmuth herself along with certain “early civilized” European specimens.49 As often happened with Eakins’s portrait sitters, Mrs. Frishmuth found his approach unflattering because it did not exempt her from the evolutionary process of aging. The artist even may have visually accelerated that process in her case, as a way of emphasizing the experience and personal character she brought to her collection. Evolution thus permeated the picture as an artistic conceit operating on multiple metaphorical levels, merging sitter and object. “Antiquated” but hardly primitive or uncivilized, the collector occupies the heart of this dark composition, “a somber, cluttered cave,” as Lloyd Goodrich called it. There Mrs. Frishmuth (née Sarah Emma Sagehorn) touches objects closest to her Anglo-Saxon national character: an eighteenth-century English square piano and a viola d’amore of either English or German manufacture. In this way, she projects an image of the authoritative, if aging, connoisseur—an experienced paragon of Western “civilization.” The portrait also subtly presents “character” as an overlapping set of personal and national-racial traits, conveyed through Mrs. Frishmuth’s stolid bearing, stark ivory skin, and penetrating blue eyes, all of which underscore her intellect, taste, and presumptive social privilege. A beacon of whiteness surrounded by tokens of worldly difference—a Tibetan trumpet, a Japanese barrel drum, a French hurdy-gurdy, a Congolese iron gong, a North Indian oboe, and many others—the collector seems at once surrounded and in control, residing firmly at the center of attention and institutional authority.50

“As Wide as the World” Not unlike Mrs. Frishmuth’s expansive collection, anthropological research at the University of Pennsylvania knew no geographic boundaries. Its theoretical leader and spokesman, Professor Brinton (see Fig. 70), was a specialist in Native American languages, literature, and physical anthropology, among other things. His extensive list of publications and professional affiliations made him a prominent international figure in anthropology from the early 1880s until his death in 1899. Despite Brinton’s bookish approach to research (he did no fieldwork) and the nar-

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row focus of his inquiry in specific cases, he entertained a broad, cosmopolitan view of anthropology’s mission. Merging local, national, and international concerns, Brinton’s research paralleled the University Museum’s growing collections as well as the telescoping aims and evolutionary orientation of contemporary American regionalist literature, as discussed earlier in Chapter 2. He was even an avid enthusiast of literature and poetry, including that of Whitman.51 Brinton’s many intellectual pursuits also included the study of folklore, which already had become an established scientific subdiscipline within anthropology by the 1880s. The professor’s active interest in exploring folklore from a social evolutionary perspective makes the analogy with literary regionalism even more pertinent, for it reconfirms the wide reach of naturalism in the Tainean mold across multiple disciplines during the late nineteenth century in America. As literature historian Brad Evans has observed, Brinton’s analyses of Native American folklore “coincided neatly with the move to conceptualize this work as a second-order, public artifact.” By translating folklore into such an artifact or specimen (like Taine’s “fossil shell”), Brinton put it into wider circulation. And yet, according to Evans, an “overarching sense of evolutionism” ultimately prevented Brinton from comprehending such circulation in the Boasian terms of diffusion. For the professor, culture remained a static natural property of objects, not a socially constructed behavioral phenomenon that could disseminate freely irrespective of racial and geographic origins. Brinton believed in a vague “psychical unity of man,” as he called it, but only as this pertained to groups “in the same degree of development.” He paid little attention to historical processes of human migration or the transmission of customs across space and time.52 Brinton’s 1892 manifesto, Anthropology: As a Science and as a Branch of University Education in the United States, provides a convenient point of reference for the present discussion because it underscored the educational importance of museum collections and the various physical specimens they contained. In Brinton’s view, an anthropological museum should include “crania and osteological specimens; art-products, arranged both ethnologically, that is, in series showing their evolution, and ethnographically, that is, illustrating the geographical provinces and ethnic areas from which they are derived; and archaeological specimens typical of prehistoric and proto-historic culture.” In words that recall the naturalism of Taine, Brinton exclaimed more generally that “the Study of Man, pursued under the guidance of accurate observation and experimental research, embracing all his nature and all the manifestations of his activity, in the past as well as in the present, the whole co-ordinated in accordance with the inductive methods of the natural sciences—this study must in the future unfailingly come to be regarded as the crown and completion of all others—and this is Anthropology” (emphasis in the original).53

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In Brinton’s grand vision, there seemed to be no limit to the discipline’s reach or significance, for, as he said, “Anthropology alone furnishes the key and clue to History” and “The world of science has been recognizing more fully, year by year, the paramount importance of the systematic study of Anthropology to the aspirations of modern civilization. . . . The subject is a broad one,—in space, as wide as the world; in time, longer than all history; in depth, reaching to the innermost consciousness.” A similar sense of anthropology’s “world” perspective was regularly communicated in the Bulletin of the Free Museum of Science and Art, specifically in reports describing the scope and growth of museum holdings. For example, in 1897, as Mrs. Frishmuth prepared to deposit her collection of musical instruments, the Bulletin reported that it “now numbers over five hundred specimens from all parts of the world” (her donations would eventually exceed 1,100). The periodical also announced: “The formation of a collection of the fans of the world has been undertaken by Mrs. Joseph Drexel.” Subsequent issues of the Bulletin contained regular notices of additions to these and other expanding collections, arranged by geographic origin of specimens, from Africa to the Arctic.54 The global ambition of Brinton’s scientific mission and the museum’s collecting directly mirrored the imperial trajectory of contemporary American foreign policy. In 1898, for example, Brinton explicitly described the assertion of U.S. authority over the Philippines during the Spanish-American War as an important scientific opportunity. Writing for American Anthropologist, he remarked that “the prospect of adding the Philippine archipelago, in whole or in part, to our own territory lends peculiar interest at this time to the study of its strange and varied population.” The following year, a few months after Commodore George Dewey entered Manila Bay with the U.S. Navy and destroyed a Spanish squadron there, Brinton offered this scientific exhortation in the same journal: “Now that the Philippine islands are definitely ours, for a time at least, it behooves us to give them that scientific investigation which alone can afford a true guide to their proper management. Here, as everywhere, man is the most important factor in the problem of government, and a thorough acquaintance with the diverse inhabitants of the archipelago should be sought by everyone interested in its development.” Brinton’s somewhat vague reference to “development” in this context suggests a conflation of political, economic, and evolutionary principles, consistent with his belief in anthropology’s real-world practicality for “proper management” and American imperial “government.”55 Talcott Williams (see Fig. 69) echoed Brinton’s robust international vision in a contemporary opinion piece titled “The Ethical and Political Principles of ‘Expansion,’” published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science for 1900. The piece did not directly address anthropology, but it shared

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the global evolutionary perspective then governing research and collections at the University Museum. According to Williams, “Disorganization and disorder will not be long permitted in a world grown as small as ours.” Using language eerily foreshadowing later American arguments in favor of free trade and regime change, Williams observed: “civilized nations have found it necessary to maintain a uniform level for the purposes of trade, communication and the free diffusion of moral and religious ideas. . . . The maintenance of a uniform level for the protection of the ordinary rights of men and women has become impossible in all that broad region which consists of semi-civilized nations, lying in the tropics, or in sub-tropical regions, except through colonial annexation.” Extrapolating from what he considered to be America’s justified domestic program of Indian removal and reservation-building, Williams averred that “no tribe, no people, and no nation has a moral or political right, simply because it is in possession, to hold any given tract containing great natural advantages under a poor government which prevents its development.” By justifying the separation of indigenous people from their land, Williams might be said to anticipate modern cultural anthropology’s disarticulation of the superorganic from organic Tainean roots, albeit in the name of imperialism and free trade. During the early years of the twentieth century, a rebel insurgency by Philippine nationalists hindered the “development” envisioned by Brinton and Williams, along with efforts by the University Museum to pursue “scientific investigation” there. Nevertheless, the expansionist perspective of key figures in Philadelphia anthropology circa 1900 closely tracked that of U.S. foreign policy.56 Surviving letters written by Eakins around that time contain no explicit endorsement of America’s imperial enterprise, but the global array of objects depicted by him in Antiquated Music offered a timely aesthetic analogue, even if Mrs. Frishmuth’s collection apparently did not yet include specimens from the Philippines. The “primitive” instruments strewn carelessly at her feet in the portrait provide a fitting visual metaphor for the “disorder” of “semi-civilized nations” described by Williams, to which the figure of Mrs. Frishmuth supplies an imperious counterpoint with her firm gaze, disciplined bearing, and decisive gesture at the European piano. Behind her in the right background, the round Japanese drum recalls the navigational globe represented in an analogous location in Eakins’s The Chess Players (see Plate 4). The drum’s circular surface also finds a number of visual echoes in the various tilted, round-shaped instruments below, some of which have been cropped by the frame, producing a radiating pattern of elliptical forms extending outward from the Anglo-Saxon sitter. Her bulbous facial features and concentric strings of pearls create further wavelike visual reverberations—apropos of both music and empire—even as her stolid, seated figure formidably anchors the com-

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position. Antiquated Music thus models contemporary American expansionism indirectly on a number of formal and iconographic registers. Though not part of the museum series, another portrait painted by Eakins at the turn of the century aptly illuminates his awareness of global events. In 1903, he painted Rear-Admiral Charles D. Sigsbee (Private collection), a work that represented the man who had served heroically as captain of the battleship Maine when it was blown up in Havana harbor in 1898. Eakins surely understood the worldly significance of that incident, which prompted the United States to enter into war against Spain in Cuba and in the Philippines. When Eakins volunteered to portray him, Sigsbee was stationed at Philadelphia’s League Island Navy Yard, where the Maine had been built (and near where the artist had hunted marsh birds at the Neck as a young man). By then, the rear admiral had become a national icon and— not unlike Brinton—another professional avatar of America’s ascendant power in the world. As such, he evidently struck Eakins as a worthy portrait subject.57

“America the Cradle” In addition to mirroring the scope of American foreign policy, Philadelphia anthropology around 1900 encoded aspects of contemporary nationalism and social relations at home. Here, once again, Professor Brinton provides a useful illustration. He saw anthropology as not only complementing American imperial “government” abroad but also potentially benefiting domestic order in an era of proliferating human difference. In Brinton’s view, the discipline offered “a positive basis for legislation, politics, and education as applied to a given ethnic group,” as he wrote in an 1896 article, “The Aims of Anthropology,” in Popular Science Monthly. In effect, the professor thereby supplied a timely scientific corollary to findings by the United States Supreme Court, which handed down its “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson during the same year.58 Brinton produced a body of work now widely recognized as methodologically flawed and racially biased. Despite claiming to affirm the monogenetic origins, “humanity,” and “psychical unity” of mankind, he ultimately believed that nothing could change or bridge entrenched, environmentally hardened racial differences and hierarchical relations. As Brinton also stated in the article for Popular Science Monthly, “The black, the brown and the red races differ anatomically so much from the white, especially in their splanchnic organs, that even with equal cerebral capacity, they never could rival its results by equal efforts.” Lee Baker, Stephen Jay Gould, George Stocking, and other historians of science have noted the empirical limitations and racial prejudice of Brinton’s “armchair” compara-

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tive methods. Jay Custer, a historian of anthropology, even recently compared Brinton’s ideas to those found in “Nazi racial laws,” saying, “similar arguments are made by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf.”59 Nevertheless, as an eminent descendant of seventeenth-century Anglo-Saxon colonists, Brinton probably felt a closer bond (however fictive) with America’s indigenous “natives” than he did with the horde of recent arrivals from southern and eastern Europe. He certainly considered “the American race” (as he called such natives) to be pure, autonomous, and therefore crucial to the history of human evolution. In the introduction to his important 1890 book titled Essays of an Americanist, the professor wrote, “they [Native Americans] constitute as true and distinct a sub-species as do the African or White Race.” Brinton zealously defended the scientific legitimacy of Native American anthropology and archaeology both locally and within the broader discipline. His efforts in this regard were partly a response to internal politics at the University Museum, where the classical archaeology of Mediterranean and Near Eastern “civilization” enjoyed a privileged position above anthropology and its “primitives.” At the same time, Brinton’s scientific assertions indirectly echoed and affirmed the segregationist, anti-immigrant attitudes shared by many white citizens in the United States during the Jim Crow era.60 As the historian John Higham has noted in a classic study of American nativism and xenophobia, Brinton was an “exceptionally speculative American anthropologist” who “championed the white race.” Laying claim to special knowledge about the racial origins and uniqueness of Native Americans enabled Brinton to imaginatively project his own native status, thereby maintaining a sense of white authority and historical privilege amid the dramatic demographic changes wrought by immigration around the turn of the twentieth century. Beginning in 1890 with Essays of an Americanist, he asserted polemically and provocatively that the “American race” constituted an original, “autochthonous” product of the American environment. For Brinton, Native Americans were truly native in an evolutionary sense, for he believed that they did not inhabit North and South America as the result of prehistoric immigration eastward across the Bering Strait from Asia, as many contemporaries believed. Rather, he said, “their origin is American.” Summarizing the evolutionary history of the major “sub-species of Man,” Brinton further explained that each of the great continental areas moulded the plastic, primitive man into a conformation of body and mind peculiar to itself, in some special harmony with its own geographic features, thus producing a race or sub-species, subtly correlated in a thousand ways to its environment, but never forfeiting its claim to humanity, never failing in its parallel and progressive development with all other varieties of the species. America

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was no exception to this rule, and it is time to dismiss as trivial all attempts to connect the American race genealogically with any other.61

Such environmental theory should sound familiar, for it basically restated the Tainean naturalism of Hamlin Garland’s literary regionalist aesthetic in anthropological terms. Whereas Garland affirmatively compared “local color” writing to “native . . . indigenous plant growth” and criticized European classicism as unsuited to American “soil,” Brinton claimed that Native Americans were “autochthonous” and dismissed what he called “pretended affinities to Asiatic peoples.” In terms that Garland would have endorsed, Brinton observed “that American culture was homebred, to the manor born: that it was wholly indigenous and had borrowed nothing—nothing, from either Europe, Asia, or Africa. . . . This typical, racial American culture is as far as possible, in spirit and form, from the Mongolian.”62 Brinton’s vision of “racial American culture” was itself about as far as possible from the idea of diffusion articulated by Boas beginning in the same years. Despite Brinton’s powerful position as president of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (among other posts), Boas carefully singled out the University of Pennsylvania professor’s ideas for criticism in various publications around 1900. For example, in response to Brinton’s 1895 paper, “The Aims of Anthropology” (also given as a presidential lecture to the aforementioned academy), Boas published an essay titled “The Limits of the Comparative Method of Anthropology” in the journal Science the following year. After noting that certain “farreaching theories have been built on weak foundations,” Boas asserted the importance of diffusion: We have another method, which is in many respects much safer. A detailed study of customs in their relation to the total culture of the tribe practicing them, in connection with an investigation of their geographical distribution among neighboring tribes, affords us almost always a means of determining with considerable accuracy the historical causes that led to the formation of the customs in question and to the psychological processes that were at work in their development.63

For Boas, the “customs” that constituted part of “the total culture” of a group were subject to “geographical distribution”—diffusion—in an ongoing “psychological” process with “historical causes.” Nothing could be more different from Brinton’s metaphysics of “psychical unity” or environmental determinism, but Boas respectfully avoided criticizing the Philadelphia professor by name during the latter’s lifetime. After Brinton died, however, in a 1904 Science article Boas complained that “there are investigators who would exclude the consideration of transmission altogether, who believe it to be unlikely and deem the alleged proof irrelevant, and who ascribe sameness of cultural traits wholly to the psychic unity of mankind

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and to the uniform reaction of the human mind upon the same stimulus. An extremist in this direction was the late Daniel G. Brinton.”64 Brinton’s extremism epitomized the fraught convolutions of “Americanist” social evolutionary anthropology in turn-of-the-century Philadelphia. Not only did he deny the mounting evidence of diffusion, which showed that prehistoric people had, in fact, migrated from Asia into North America. On a more fundamental level, Brinton overlooked contradictions at the heart of his own theory. Whereas he acknowledged a degree of “plasticity” in race as something “moulded” in the mists of prehistory, the professor tenaciously and tendentiously asserted the permanence of racial characteristics in the historical era. In another passage of his Essays, describing “what constitutes races in anthropology,” he observed, “To me they are zoological sub-species marked by fixed and correlated characteristics, impressed so firmly that they have suffered no appreciable alteration within the historic period either through time or environment.” Not unlike Taine, the nativist Brinton saw racial differences and their behavioral effects as essentially set in stone long ago.65 Brinton had a close professional and theoretical ally in Stewart Culin, a curator of Native American and Asian anthropology at the University Museum who specialized in the evolutionary history of games. Culin joined the museum staff in 1889 after working for several years as a merchant and self-taught amateur collector of artifacts. He had no university training in anthropology or archaeology. Assisting and collaborating with Professor Brinton on various projects, however, Culin rose quickly through the ranks to become a curator and eventually director of the museum from 1892 to 1903. In that position, he applied archaeological techniques of comparative analysis and classification to Native American and Asian specimens, believing them to be every bit as worthy of such inquiry as those of Mediterranean origin. As part of his commitment to effective museum exhibition and display, Culin also developed a working relationship with John Wanamaker, a wealthy Philadelphia department store tycoon and museum board member. Beginning in 1900, Wanamaker funded the curator’s collecting trips and even exhibited some of the acquired specimens at his palatial downtown store, which featured an international array of goods organized in sections that mimicked the geographic panorama of the museum.66 Taking Brinton’s nativist theory of racial origins a step farther, Culin argued that prehistoric Native Americans had actually migrated westward across the Bering Strait, giving birth to Asian civilization, not the other way around. In effect, unlike his mentor Brinton, Culin embraced the idea of diffusion, but he deployed it in a manner consistent with the professor’s ardent nativist nationalism. Writing in a 1903 article for Harper’s titled “America the Cradle of Asia,” Culin criticized “the theory of an Asiatic immigration” as well as “supposed identities of the language

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and physical types of the Indian with those of the inhabitants of Asia.” From Culin’s point of view, “these resemblances offer quite as good proof of American intercourse with Asia.” Invoking Brinton as his authority and citing evidence from the history of games, Culin referred to “the Asiatic forms, of which there are many, all existing along lines representing a development from, rather than toward, America. If the relation be that of parent and child, the parent, it would seem, is here.” Such archaeology had obvious affinities with the paternalistic discourse of contemporary American imperialism, which often rendered Filipinos and other Asians as semicivilized infants in need of proper evolutionary rearing by the United States.67 Evidently not content merely to assert the American origins of Asian culture, Culin proceeded to make an even grander claim by contending, these identical customs originated in America, and were disseminated thence over the world; that the American culture, no longer to be regarded as sterile and unproductive, must be given its due place among the influences which have contributed to the origin and development of our own civilization. . . . Man evidently wandered far and wide over the world before history began. Shall we, with our American explanations in mind,—and they hold good not alone for games, which are but the ‘stalking-horse’ of the student— shall we not assent to the claim that ancient America may have contributed, to an extent usually unimagined, her share of what is now the world’s civilization?68

In a manner peculiarly befitting the political and structural hierarchies within the University Museum, Culin’s metaphors of intercourse and sterility imply an anxious sense of masculine impotence regarding his chosen field of expertise. Understood more broadly and taken to its logical conclusion, though, his argument ultimately portrayed America as the fertile “cradle” not only of Asia and the “world” but ultimately of itself. For, according to Culin, “American culture” in some unspecified epoch “contributed to the origin and development of our own civilization.” If Brinton’s theory of Native American racial origins had suffered from internal contradictions, his curator colleague compounded logical fallacy with a kind of imperial circularity. Needless to say, such archaeological speculation hardly celebrated the contemporary achievements of living Native Americans, which Culin consistently referred to in social evolutionary terms as vanishing survivals of an earlier phase of human development, doomed to imminent extinction.69 In 1895, Culin met and befriended Eakins after approaching Samuel Murray, the painter’s pupil, for assistance in repairing specimens of pottery. Culin subsequently invited Eakins to university functions and faculty dinners on a regular basis; he even organized a solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the Faculty Club in 1901. As noted earlier, the curator also occasionally presented exotic objects, drawings, and magazines to Eakins and his wife as gifts after taking trips to Asia and to

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the American Southwest on behalf of the museum. The couple socialized and corresponded with Culin for many years, long after the curator left Philadelphia in 1903 to take a position at the Brooklyn Museum. Interviewed for a newspaper article in 1923, Culin described the late artist as one of his “most intimate friends.”70 Although Eakins’s 1899 portrait of Culin was rarely exhibited and has since been lost, we know that the painter called it The Archaeologist, an emblematic title that gave recognition to the curator’s expertise in objects of Native American and Asian antiquity. A 1930 letter to Lloyd Goodrich from the sitter’s widow, Alice Culin, provided this fragmentary recollection of the portrait: “Life-size seated figure full front at table head turned three-quarters. Many objects about. Games American Indian things, on table on floor. I think hand on things on table. Dark hair + moustach [sic] do not remember any glasses. The whole canvas very black not easily seen in detail.” To this description, Goodrich later added that the items depicted included “American Indian remains.”71 An extant perspective study (Fig. 72) by Eakins for The Archaeologist only schematically outlined Culin’s desk and two specimens in the foreground pertaining to his work. On the basis of Goodrich’s addendum, Kathleen Foster has suggested that the cubical form delineated near the floor at left represented a Northwest Coast mortuary box containing cremated Native American remains. In addition to underscoring Culin’s area of expertise, such an object also constituted an uncanny, “primitive” talisman of sorts for the artist himself, foreshadowing his own cremation in 1916. Yet some Northwest Coast tribes, including the Tlingit, used similar containers to house the decapitated heads of their deceased warriors, so the precise nature of this box remains unclear. In either case, though, the deathly specimen served as a visual metaphor for the antiquity and evolutionary morbidity of Native American people.72 Foster identifies the square-shaped checkered form in front of Culin’s desk as a Chinese or Korean chessboard, citing the distinctive “X” inscriptions at the center along opposite edges. By highlighting the latter detail, Eakins perhaps indicated his awareness of Culin’s comparative research into the divinatory origins, military associations, and physical properties of such games. As Foster says, “Eakins’s use of an Asian chess board shows that he was familiar with Culin’s work.” In an extensive anthropological study titled Chess and Playing-Cards, published in 1898, Culin noted the existence of such a chessboard in the University Museum collection (now untraceable) and provided his own schematic illustration. According to Culin, the game was known to the Chinese as “Tséung k’í,” or “the General’s Game,” and “regarded by them as having been invented by Wu Wang, B.C. 1169–1116, the founder of the Chow dynasty.” Furthermore, he observed that the “X” marked “an inclosure [sic], which is called the ‘Palace,’” an area guarded by

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Figure 72. Thomas Eakins,

Portrait of Stewart Culin: Perspective Study, ca. 1899. Pen and ink over graphite on paper, 88.4 × 57.9 cm (3413⁄16 × 223⁄16 in.). Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection. Purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust.

“The General,” “Councillors,” “Elephants,” “Cannons,” “Foot soldiers,” and other pieces. Culin’s research in this area would later culminate in a massive comparative study, Games of the North American Indians, published in 1907.73 Foster reminds us that as “a chess player himself, Eakins may have been curious about the international variations in chess.” Thus, while the chessboard referred to Culin’s anthropological work, it also reflexively recalled the artist’s own interest in the game, as manifested in The Chess Players (see Plate 4). In appropriately comparative fashion, that painting had domesticated an earlier orientalist picture by Gérôme depicting Turkish Arnaut soldiers playing chess. For Eakins, the allusiveness of chess probably went even further, though, because it tapped a rich local Philadelphia tradition going back to Benjamin Franklin, who had famously written “The Morals of Chess” in 1786. Additional evidence of that local tradition appears in an 1898 book by Gustavus C. Reichhelm titled Chess in Philadelphia: A Brief History of the Game in Philadelphia, full of detailed information about

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city chess clubs, biographical sketches of major masters, and play-by-play records of celebrated matches. Reichhelm’s book mentions neither Eakins nor Culin, but as fellow Philadelphians and chess enthusiasts they may have been familiar with its contents.74 The Archaeologist evidently allowed Eakins to explore a complex layering of public and private allusions, which telescoped back and forth between East and West, past and present, artist and sitter, using a comparative logic roughly consistent with Culin’s archaeological method. In light of such shared logic and mutual interests, Foster is probably correct in saying that Eakins was “intrigued by Culin’s theory that both chess and playing cards derived from rods, sticks, or arrows used for divination and early games of chance” and that “related sticks may have been on the table in Culin’s portrait, if not in his hand.” The latter suggestions, if correct, would indicate that Eakins not only knew Culin’s works but also embraced his general theory about the American origins of Asian and world civilization. By showing his anthropologist friend holding Native American arrows or divinatory sticks, Eakins drew attention to the supposed evolutionary source of the Chinese chessboard pictured below.75 The resulting concatenation of comparative references—Indian arrows, cremated remains (or warrior’s head?), Chinese “Generals,” Arnaut soldiers—also subtly imbued the portrait with a timely military dimension. In that respect, the work accorded with contemporary treatises on chess “tactics” as applied to military art and science, a genre of training manual popular among modern soldiers at the time. In a rather passive-aggressive way, The Archaeologist thus projected an expansive, bellicose posture consistent with Philadelphia anthropology, the Sigsbee portrait, and American empire.76

Indian Portraits Two other portraits by Eakins, Frank Hamilton Cushing (see Plate 9) and Elbridge Ayer Burbank (lost), spoke artistically to the ambitions of “Americanist” anthropology around 1900. Both depicted professional men with considerable experience conducting ethnographic fieldwork among Native Americans in the West. Cushing and Burbank, an anthropologist and a painter respectively, had official dealings with Stewart Culin at the University Museum during separate visits to Philadelphia around the turn of the century. On each occasion, probably through Culin, Eakins met the visitor and volunteered to paint his portrait, recognizing in him a kindred desire to combine “science and art” in a manner akin to the museum’s mission. Cushing and Burbank also offered Eakins pretexts for re-imagining the

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regenerative “touch” of the West in Native terms. Portraying such men thus helped Eakins to face his ongoing sense of professional obscurity after the Pennsylvania Academy debacle. Although his vicarious engagement with their ethnographic work led him to the brink of modern cultural perception, it did not fundamentally alter his inherited nineteenth-century outlook. As we will see, although Cushing used the term “cultures” in a few writings of the 1880s and 1890s, he did so only sporadically and not theoretically, while remaining firmly wedded to social evolutionary anthropology in other respects. He was not a Boasian; nor did he inspire or instruct Eakins to adopt a “cultural” perspective. For that reason, it is anachronistic to call the Cushing portrait “a meditation on the Western relation to the cultural other,” as one recent textbook does.77 Cushing had attracted national fame as a young Smithsonian anthropologist during the 1880s, when he lived for nearly five years as an initiated member of his tribal subject community at Zuni Pueblo, in northwestern New Mexico. There he adopted Native clothing, language, eating habits, ceremonies, clan affiliations, and other customary behavior, including the title of “First War Chief ” in the prestigious Bow Priesthood. Cushing’s unprecedented participatory methods helped him to examine Zuni folklore and social relations, but they also made him a media sensation when the national press covered his exploits, both at the pueblo and back East during an “aboriginal pilgrimage” with members of the tribe (Figs. 73, 74). The anthropologist was as skillful in crafting an image for himself as he was in ethnography, a fact confirmed by the elaborate portrait that he staged at the pueblo with the help of Smithsonian photographer John K. Hillers (Fig. 75). In addition to writing official scientific reports for the Smithsonian, Cushing published a series of popular articles titled “My Adventures in Zuñi” in The Century Magazine (standard orthography now omits the tilde from “Zuni”). After his groundbreaking Zuni expedition of 1879–84, Cushing led the ambitious Southwestern Archaeological Expedition of 1887, funded by Boston aristocrat Mary Hemenway, but its search for the origins of ancient pueblo peoples ended with only mixed results. Shortly before his premature death in 1900 (after choking on a fish bone), Cushing conducted fieldwork in the Florida Keys, examining ancient Native American settlements built on piles of seashells. In 1895, while in his late thirties, Cushing visited Philadelphia to assist Stewart Culin with exhibits at the University Museum and to obtain medical treatment at the university medical school for various fieldwork-related ailments. Through Culin, Cushing and Eakins met and quickly befriended one another.78 Though less of a celebrity than Cushing, Burbank began to garner attention in artistic, scientific, and commercial circles around the country by 1900 for painting nearly a thousand realistic portraits of Native Americans from life in Arizona,

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Figure 73. Unidentified artist,

“Frank H. Cushing.” Published in Sylvester Baxter, “An Aboriginal Pilgrimage,” The Century Magazine, vol. 24, no. 4 (August 1882), p. 528. Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY. Figure 74. J. W. Black, Zuni Delegation in Washington, D.C., including Laiiuahtsailunkia, Naiiuhtchi, Palowaihtiwa, Kiasi, Nanahe (Hopi), and Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1882. © 2007 Harvard University, Peabody Museum Photo 2004.29.5193. Figure 75. John K. Hillers, “Cushing in His Zuñi Garb,” ca. 1880–81. Published in Charles F. Lummis, “The White Indian,” The Land of Sunshine, vol. 13, no. 1 (June 1900), p. 9. Olin Library, Cornell University.

Oklahoma, New Mexico, and South Dakota (Fig. 76). A latter-day George Catlin, Burbank lived in the West for years and marketed his “Indian Portraits” widely in magazines, advertising them as both commodities and authentic documents of a supposedly vanishing race. Earlier in his career, Burbank had earned a local reputation in his native Chicago for painting genre pictures of African Americans. As the nephew of Edward Everett Ayer, eminent director of Chicago’s Field Museum and a major collector of Native Americana, Burbank had powerful connections. During the winter of 1901–2, in his early forties, he came to Philadelphia on a sales junket, attempting (with the help of Culin) to persuade University Museum authorities to acquire 120 of his “Indian Portraits” for the institution’s anthropological collections. While Burbank was in the city, Eakins met him and admired the portraits so much that he lobbied authorities at the Pennsylvania Academy to include examples of them in an upcoming show, saying that “a couple of his little Indian studies . . . are surely good enough to raise the average of an exhibition.” When these efforts in Philadelphia failed, Burbank sold his paintings to Joseph G. Butler, founder of the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio. Burbank suffered from a form of depression and spent much of his later life convalescing in a psychiatric hospital after 1917. He died in 1949.79 Eakins especially admired Cushing. The two men became close friends, albeit for a short time. In a letter of July 14, 1895, addressed to “My dear Mr. Cushing,” Eakins invited the anthropologist to “stay at our house while I paint you . . . or whether I paint you or not.” Referring to a statuette that his student Samuel Murray was preparing, Eakins told Cushing, “He [Murray] is modelling my naked figure before putting on the clothes and I wish you were modelling alongside of him.” That comment certainly seems redolent of homosocial desire on some level, but it also probably reflects the artist’s anatomical fascination with the anthropologist’s wiry, toughened physique, scarred from years of fieldwork in the Southwest, an exotically remote place that Eakins probably associated with his Dakota cowboy experience in a vague way. Cushing’s body, in other words, seemed to bear traces of his difficult adaptation to primitive frontier life in a challenging, alien environment that was still in the process of becoming “American.”80 In the longest passage of the same striking letter, Eakins described the belligerent and deceptive actions of his pet monkey, Bobby, toward other household animals. According to Eakins, Bobby “entices the cats by holding back of the full length of his chain ready to dart forward” so as to be able to beat them with “one of his numerous war clubs.” After such premeditated attacks, said the artist, Bobby “shows a fiendish delight if he hits. The first time we saw this done we felt there might be chance, but now we have seen it so frequently as to eliminate all the factors but those of pure intention.” Such observations not only prefigured bellicose elements

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Figure 76. Elbridge Ayer Burbank, It-Say-Yah; Zuni (Zuni NM) Half-Male, 1898. Oil on canvas, mounted on panel, 33.1 × 22.8 cm (13 × 9 in.). The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio. Museum purchase, 1912 (912-O-571).

of the Cushing portrait (“war clubs”) but they also hint at an ongoing Darwinian evolutionary discussion with the anthropologist regarding comparative intelligence of species. This may help explain why Cushing referred to Eakins as “my friend . . . the scientist-artist” in his American Anthropologist article of 1895. Cushing and Burbank were both portraits d’apparat that aesthetically mirrored the University Museum’s object-based epistemology by representing each sitter with various artifacts pertaining to Native American anthropology. Eakins depicted Cushing dressed as a Zuni war priest, retrospectively commemorating the anthropologist’s admission to the tribe’s most powerful military society. Shown standing in a kiva, or sacred ceremonial space, Cushing holds a wooden war club, a bundle of prayer feathers, and a quiver of arrows. Such attributes resemble those mentioned by Cushing in one passage of “My Adventures in Zuñi,” describing the annual Shalak’o, or “Coming of the Gods,” ceremony, held late in the fall each

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year at Zuni. As Cushing noted, “A loud prayer was uttered over them by an old priest, who held in his hands a bow, some arrows, and a war-club, and who wore over one shoulder a strange badge of buckskin ornamented with sea-shell and flint arrow-heads.” In a footnote to that passage, Cushing added, “This, as I afterward learned, was Nai-iu-tchi, the Chief Priest of the Bow, or the high-priest of a powerful sacred order of war, in many ways strangely like the Masonic Order, and of which I have since become a member.”81 The portrait also represents Cushing wearing clothing and jewelry of the sort given to him by his Zuni hosts as part of his initiation into the tribe. Reflecting centuries of Southwestern Native-Spanish hybridity, the outfit consists of a black silk headband, dark blue worsted wool shirt, buckskin leggings and moccasins with silver ornaments, and a waist belt with enormous silver concha decorations. Hanging from the belt is a large hunting knife and a silver-studded whip. Cushing also wears a large silver hoop earring ornamented with turquoise and black beads, as well as a similarly beaded necklace. He stands in the center of the composition with head turned to the left, away from the implied light source, leaving the right side of his scarred face and the front of his body mostly in shadows. Not unlike Mrs. Frishmuth (see Plate 5) and other subjects portrayed by Eakins around this time (see Fig. 23), but also recalling his earliest student work (see Plate 7), Cushing appears to gaze off into the distance introspectively, as if absorbed in his own thoughts. Dressed as an Indian, though, he strikes a swashbuckling pose rather different from those seen in other portraits by the artist and more reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelt (see Fig. 59). The Cushing portrait also departed dramatically from an earlier conventional portrait of the anthropologist by Eakins’s Philadelphia colleague Thomas Hovenden (Fig. 77).82 Surrounding the anthropologist in Eakins’s portrait are additional tribal artifacts: a war shield decorated with Zuni pictograms, a buckskin bandolier bag hanging from an antler embedded in the background stucco wall, a roughly hewn timber ladder, and a fireplace, atop which rests a turreted ceramic cornmeal prayer bowl with Native designs. Eakins represented all of these indigenous accoutrements with striking precision, as he had done with Mrs. Frishmuth’s instruments in Antiquated Music. The war shield closely resembles one owned by Cushing and reproduced in his 1881 Smithsonian report titled Zuñi Fetiches. In that report, the anthropologist identified the pictographic symbols on the shield as representing the Zuni war god, Á-tchi-a lä-to-pa, also known as the Knife-feathered Monster, a spirit “anciently inimical to man . . . until subdued by other gods and men of magic powers.”83 Unfortunately, Eakins’s lost Burbank portrait was never photographed, but we know something about its appearance from the following firsthand description by the sitter in a letter to his uncle: “Mr. Thomas Eakins has finished my portrait he

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Figure 77. Thomas Hovenden, Portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1890. Oil on canvas, 55.9 × 40.6 cm (22 × 16 in.). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., Gift of Mrs. F. H. Cushing.

painted me & my Indian portraits on the background in the picture every one likes the picture it hangs now in the University Club, he made me a present of the portrait but he said he wished at my death the portrait would go to some Museum that had a collection of my Indian portraits.” In portraying Burbank, Eakins thus basically followed the compositional formula of his other University Museum– related portraits d’apparat by again showing the subject with relevant ethnographic material, in this case the sitter’s “Indian Portraits,” which contained their own representations of Native artifacts and human specimens. Compounding layers of imagery in a metarepresentational way, Eakins envisioned that his portrait of Burbank would be permanently housed in an appropriate museum, surrounded by actual examples of the sitter’s work.84 Eakins explicitly articulated such a vision for the Cushing portrait in a 1900 letter to the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology, offering the work for the government collections either as a gift or for purchase. The letter also described elaborate preparations for the portrait project undertaken by him in collaboration with the anthropologist in his Philadelphia studio:

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I have in my possession a full length life size portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing which will cause me uneasiness until it finds a permanent resting place in some fire proof building. He is represented as in Zuñiland performing an incantation. An altar was built by Cushing in a corner of my studio, and all the proper details were assembled by him. Even the frame of the picture was designed by him, largely made and ornamented by him. Its lower piece contains his name (the picture of a plant), his office and his clan. I should be glad if the picture could be acquired by the Government Bureau or by the University of Pennsylvania.85

Reviewing this letter, art historian Marc Simpson has noted that “Eakins’s language— the concern with the fireproof building and the specificity of sites where he hoped to place the work, relevant to Cushing’s anthropological interests rather than in art settings—reveals his sense of the painting’s historical significance.” Eakins evidently saw his portrait of Cushing as serving the interests of anthropology and history but not necessarily those of art, at least not in any conventional or institutional way. The portrait embodied an attempt to merge “science and art” in a manner roughly consistent with the mission of the university’s Free Museum of Science and Art. Although the Smithsonian politely declined Eakins’s offer, he and Culin arranged to install the Cushing portrait temporarily at the University Museum in 1901 as a memorial to the recently deceased sitter. Marking that memorial occasion, the museum Bulletin published a photograph (Fig. 78) showing the Cushing portrait in its original frame, which no longer survives. Just visible in the center of the frame’s lower panel is a pictographic inscription of a plant, referring to Cushing’s Zuni name, Té-na-tsa-li (“Medicine Flower”), which he earned by successfully using herbal remedies to treat illnesses among tribal members. To the left appears another pictographic image of a macaw, the sacred Zuni bird symbolizing Cushing’s clan.86 As a portrait d’apparat, the Cushing portrait by default offered something approaching a “cultural” perspective on Native American life and customs. Unlike other portraits of that type by Eakins, this one involved unusual collaborative efforts by artist and sitter to reconstruct a specific tribal context using a number of pertinent symbols and depicted artifacts. As we have seen, conventional social evolutionary methods of display in anthropology at this time dictated a more narrow selection of specimens according to a single type, as in the Smithsonian’s spindle display (see Fig. 3), gathered from different communities to facilitate intergroup comparison and linear ranking. Such comparative arrays resulted in the systematic reification of racial hierarchy as well as the moral “naturalization of time,” as noted by the anthropologist Johannes Fabian. Several years before Eakins painted the Cushing portrait, Franz Boas already had begun to criticize those social evolutionary displays because they isolated artifacts from their original contexts, eliding formative sociohistorical relationships.87

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Figure 78. Unidentified

photographer, Thomas Eakins’s Frank Hamilton Cushing in original frame, 1901. Published in Bulletin of the Free Museum of Science and Art (Philadelphia), vol. 3, no. 3 (May 1901) facing p. 176. University of Pennsylvania Museum (image 140747).

By contrast, the Cushing portrait showed a variety of specimen types from a single community, Zuni, integrated into a somewhat more holistic representation. In a pictorial way, Eakins’s portrait d’apparat thus unwittingly mirrored the logic of a cultural “life group,” the three-dimensional alternative form of display that Boas helped develop around the same time for anthropological exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (Fig. 79). As portrayed by Eakins, the figure of Cushing oddly resembles a mannequin from such an installation, propped up stiffly and surrounded by other “authentic” objects. Depicted with war club and vacant look of introspection, the anthropologist’s appearance roughly approximated that of a blankly inanimate life-group figurine holding customary tools, producing an uncanny convergence of museum mannequin, portrait, and stilllife painting around 1900. Photographs of Cushing taken by Eakins in preparation for the portrait (Fig. 80) even bring to mind similarly staged contemporary photographs in which Boas posed as a life-group model (Fig. 81), complete with indigenous clothing, artifacts, and incongruous Anglo-Saxon moustache—the lat-

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Figure 79. Life Group Exhibition Case with Huichol Arrow Maker, Mexican Hall, American Museum of Natural History, New York, ca. 1901. Image #39687, American Museum of Natural History Library. Figure 80. Thomas Eakins, photograph of Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1895. Platinum print on paper, 8.9 × 6.6 cm (31⁄2 × 25⁄8 in.). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Collection, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966. Photograph by Lee Stalsworth.

ter feature serving to confirm the model’s identity as a white professional scientist, not an actual Native American. In light of these resonances, Eakins’s decision to lend the Cushing portrait to the University Museum’s Zuni ethnological exhibit seems quite timely and appropriate. Unintentionally, the artist’s realism and compositional approach, worked out in collaboration with Cushing, resembled evolving practices of museum display.88 Still other aspects of the Cushing portrait accidentally approximate a “cultural” perception on Eakins’s part. For example, as indicated by the artist in his 1900 letter to the Smithsonian, the work purported to show not only an anthropologist with collected artifacts but also Zuni customs in action. According to the artist, Cushing “is represented as in Zuñiland performing an incantation.” Eakins never identified the specific “incantation,” nor did he refer to it as evidence of another “culture,” but the portrait at least vaguely recognized the existence of a behavioral dimension in Zuni traditions apart from the people and artifacts associated with them. Furthermore, by depicting Cushing performing such immaterial phenomena, the artist even implied the possibility of their social transmission and diffusion. Whereas The Dancing Lesson (see Plate 1) had presented transmission of such information in terms that emphasized racial ownership and continuity, Frank Hamilton Cushing proffered evidence of interracial exchange by showing a white

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Figure 81. Unidentified photographer, Franz Boas in Eskimo clothing demonstrating correct posture for holding a harpoon. American Museum of Natural History, New York, late 1890s. Image #3220, American Museum of Natural History Library.

initiate performing a traditional Native American ceremony. The portrait thereby pointed to the severing of Zuni customs from biology in a manner that seems to anticipate Boasian anthropology. As noted earlier, Cushing himself occasionally referred to “culture” and “cultures” in a plural, relativistic sense that foreshadowed twentieth-century anthropological theory. He did so haphazardly, providing little explanation for what he meant by such usage, but some historians of anthropology nonetheless cite Cushing as an important precursor of the Boasian culture concept, if not a fledgling modernist in the field. In 1963, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the famous French structural anthropologist, even praised Cushing as deserving “a seat on [Lewis Henry] Morgan’s right, as one of the forerunners of social structure studies.” More recently, historian Jesse Green has said that Cushing used the term “culture” “in a way that anticipates its modern meaning, not as the single ‘complex whole’ comprised by the totality of man’s accumulated acquisitions as a social being at any given stage of evolution . . . but as the pattern of belief and behavior distinguishing any ethnic group” (emphasis in the original).89 To corroborate that point, Green cites various observations made by Cushing in his private Zuni journal, scholarly publications, and popular periodicals. For instance, in a journal entry of February–April 1880, the anthropologist noted aspects of Zuni “mythology and tradition” that bore “a strange resemblance to the

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Peruvian and other ante-Columbian cultures.” Two years later, in a newspaper interview, Cushing observed that the Zuni “have a culture of their own.” His articles in The Century Magazine also contained occasional comments of a relativistic sort, as when he referred to Zuni men as his “brothers” or the cooing utterances of a Zuni infant as “just like so many of my own people of the same age, only in a different language.” Accordingly, Cushing recognized his “own people” as having a “culture” as well. In the study “Zuñi Breadstuff ” (1884–85), he alerted Anglo-American readers that they were “controlled by a culture totally at variance with that of the Zuñis.” If the anthropologist ever uttered such things in the presence of Eakins, we have no record of it, but the Cushing portrait displays an artistic logic that paralleled aspects of the sitter’s nascent modern perspective.90 It must be noted, however, that Cushing paradoxically continued to espouse nineteenth-century social evolutionary dogma even as he manifested inklings of a new cultural understanding and relativism. As Green observes, Cushing was “a man of his own time” who “seems to have seen no contradiction between established evolutionary doctrine and his own pluralizing of the term ‘culture.’” A brief glance at Cushing’s writings confirms such an assessment. For example, in “My Adventures in Zuñi,” the anthropologist described tribal members and customs as “rude,” “monkey-like,” “wild,” “primitive,” “simple,” “lazy,” and not “civilized.” Other observations related them to “Oriental” people and customs. As such vocabulary suggests, Cushing continued to view human difference comparatively and hierarchically, in keeping with established nineteenth-century conventions. The same conventions clearly informed his long 1895 article, “The Arrow,” treating a single specimen type in an evolutionary manner consistent with the Smithsonian’s spindle display (see Fig. 3). This was the American Anthropologist article in which Cushing mentioned “my friend, Thomas Eakins, the scientist-artist, of Philadelphia,” who “is honoring me by painting my portrait.” In the same passage of the article, Cushing referred to “observing Bobby,” the artist’s pet monkey, as living evidence of “early” approaches to weapon production comparable to those of Native Americans, “Very little children,” “Tasmanians,” and other people “in the true paleolithic period of their development.”91 Whereas ethnographic fieldwork often prompted Franz Boas and his twentiethcentury students to reconsider and even critique assumptions of Western cultural superiority, Cushing ultimately believed that Native Americans needed to learn from white people how to evolve rapidly in order to survive in the modern world. He articulated this benevolent vision of assimilation in an 1897 government report titled “The Need of Studying the Indian in Order to Teach Him,” also delivered as a lecture to Smithsonian colleagues. According to Cushing,

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That the teacher of the Indian should understand him, even as the teacher of the child should understand the nature no less than the needs of the child, scarce requires to be stated. . . . [The] Bureau of American Ethnology is not devoted to the study of anthropology as a science merely, to the study of the American Indian in order that we may ascertain his place in history and in the scale of the mental development of our species only, but that we may understand his very nature, his mood of mind, his usages, his attitude, all in order that we may be the better able to treat with him as subject or ward, and to aid him to overcome in his sadly unequal struggle with an advancing and alien civilization, so that he may be fitted to survive among us and not be further degraded or utterly destroyed. It is a mistake to suppose that the Indian, because he belongs to an earlier status of mind and condition of human life than our own, is inapt at learning. Of all the savages of whom I have read—certainly of all the savages I have seen, though they be many—the American Indian is intellectually the most alert and superior.92

Although Cushing and his contemporaries tended to view the Zuni people as more civilized than most Native Americans by virtue of their agricultural habits, unique linguistic structures, and complex cosmology, the anthropologist nonetheless regarded all Indians as occupying “an earlier status of mind and condition of human life than our own.” In order to reeducate “the Indian,” Cushing told his fellow scientists, “we must go to him as brothers, be in thought and act his equals only, neither assume, for the time being, nor manifest, any superiority whatever.” Here the anthropologist alluded to a more strategic kind of performance (“act”) than the incantatory one depicted by Eakins. Furthermore, he specified that the best agents of such a program of assimilation would be “men of true and strong feeling for humanity . . . men who would go to those people sympathetically, much as parents to little children, and full of the tact born of such sympathy.”93 Such statements vividly illustrate the complexities of interracial “sympathy” as they pertained to social evolutionary anthropology in Eakins’s immediate scientific circle at the turn of the century—complexities that Cushing embodied at every turn. As an active participant in Zuni life during the early 1880s, he had ingratiated himself with tribal members by helping them in various ways. These included not only assisting with ceremonial activities, medical treatments, and even war campaigns against other tribes, but also taking courageous steps to prevent Zuni territory from being acquired illegally by unscrupulous Anglo developers. And yet, at the same time, in order to “understand” Zuni society and folklore fully from the inside, Cushing imposed himself intrusively upon the tribe, stealing sacred artifacts and treating some of their most secret ceremonial knowledge as public information in the process. By the 1890s, the anthropologist had opted for assimilation as the best policy for dealing with the manifold problems faced by Zuni people and other Native tribes: dire poverty, disease, and growing threats to sov-

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ereignty from land speculators. Cushing obviously wanted Native American people to survive, but he foresaw little or no future for their traditional culture, except as the object of ethnographic analysis, collection, and display.94 Angered by his successes as an ethnographer and by his “sympathy” for the Indians, some contemporaries called Cushing a fool and a fraud, alleging that he had forged evidence and betrayed his race by too closely identifying with his subjects. Boas acknowledged Cushing to be “an exceedingly able man” but felt his work lacked scientific discipline, saying it “will have to be done all over again.” Many others, however, including Eakins and the East Coast consumers of popular literature, found Cushing’s “Adventures” exciting and fascinating. According to Southwestern regionalist author Charles Lummis, writing in 1900, Cushing’s “personal magnetism, his witchcraft of speech, his ardor, his wisdom in the unknowabilities” facilitated “his life of research among ‘wild Indians of the frontier’” and enabled him “to acquire the innermost secrets of a primitive people.”95 Two decades ago, in the first extended study of the Cushing portrait, art historian William Truettner explored the friendship between artist and sitter in relation to their respective professional struggles, health problems, emotional anxieties, and capacities for image-making. Citing numerous commonalities, Truettner argued that the Cushing portrait embodied a mutual sense of tragic suffering, or what Eakins in 1894 had called his own “misunderstanding, persecution, and neglect.” As Truettner concluded, “Both showed a certain disregard for institutions, for codes of behavior, for the religion of expansion and progress that guided public opinion at the end of the century. . . . Both men were victims of an age in which values were rapidly changing, both turned inward for survival. There they found nothing but their own creative powers to sustain them. Cushing gave lasting significance to his study of Zuni culture; Eakins developed that rare and profound ability to shape other modern heroes in his own image.”96 Although that estimate remains accurate in certain respects, by now the language of heroism in connection with Eakins and this sitter rings somewhat hollow. Furthermore, concerning the “religion” mentioned by Truettner, both Cushing and Eakins clearly continued to hold particular institutions, codes, and expansive notions of progress in high regard. One of these was the anthropological museum, an institution that, in Philadelphia anyway, then remained very much committed to social evolutionary codes of classification, expansive collections, and comparative research into differential rates of human progress. Boasian innovations did not make headway at the University Museum for some time. The Cushing portrait spoke to the museum’s institutional framework quite directly and deliberately, even finding a niche there for a time, thanks to the assistance of Stewart Culin. With its martial theme and primitivist masquerade, including the rawhide tassels used

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to decorate and bind the wooden frame (see Fig. 78), the portrait partook of a theatrical, urban white masculinity akin to that of Roosevelt the ranchman (or Eakins the Dakota cowboy). Cushing and the Cushing portrait thus exemplify a historical pattern of fraught male whiteness in search of regenerative transformation through the primitive, the Native, and the West. Various historians have traced such a pattern from the eighteenth century to the present, but what concerns us here are the portrait’s “cultural” implications in Eakins’s historical moment.97 Beyond simply reconstructing the sitter’s glorious past or projecting a mutual sense of regenerative white masculinity, the Cushing portrait also performed its own intrusive act of pictorial violence upon Native American lifeways and tradition. It certainly did not engage in anything like the kind of respectful, intercultural “conversation” called for by Kwame Anthony Appiah in his recent book on cosmopolitanism (see Introduction). Despite the accidental “cultural” resonances noted above regarding the portrait d’apparat structure and depicted ceremonial action, Frank Hamilton Cushing ultimately flattened and distorted tribal customs by bending them aggressively to the prevailing imperatives of “science and art.” In doing so, the portrait spoke pertinently, if idiosyncratically, to broader AngloAmerican discourse of the period. That is, such a picture surely belonged to the “religion of expansion and progress” in its own quirky fashion precisely by paying tribute to a man whose work blazed new trails on the frontier of anthropology. To the extent that Cushing himself contributed to that scientific religion, however problematically, Eakins endorsed it aesthetically. Although the artist and his sitter both felt “sympathy” for Native Americans on some level, their collaborative project of image-making artistically modeled a version of Indian removal, assimilation, and appropriation then dominating official United States policy. In keeping with aims of the Dawes Severalty (General Allotment) Act of 1887, for example, the Cushing portrait addressed an agricultural tribe whose customs already conformed in some respects to “habits of civilized life,” as called for in the legislation. Militantly laying claim to Zuni ceremonial objects and customs (in lieu of actual land), Eakins and Cushing interposed the figure of a white scientist as their custodian, implicitly leaving people of the tribe no alternative but to adopt Anglo ways and accept pacification. As Eakins said himself in his letter from the West in 1887, “there is no longer danger of Indians here.”98 And yet, if the Cushing portrait visually encoded aspects of contemporary American scientific and political discourse, its construction of Zuni also embodied disruptive forces of diffusion and circulation to which exotic aesthetic objects of various kinds were then subject. Those forces exposed fissures in the social evolutionary categories of difference that separated Anglo from other, “civilized” from “savage,” painting from popular image, science from art, and the like, thereby mak-

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ing way for a Boasian theory of cultural diffusion. At first glance, portraying a white anthropologist dressed as an Indian might seem like Eakins’s deliberate attempt to blur the distinction between Native and non-Native, but he clearly advertised Cushing’s “civilized” European racial origins by displaying the sitter’s bushy Victorian moustache. The real blurring of categories occurred on a subtler, unintentional level, within the formal and compositional fabric of the picture. In painting the Cushing portrait, Eakins used various visual sources and technical strategies that suggest a fluid continuity between high and low, art and artifact, subject and object, foreground and background. By concealing his sources and strategies in a manner reminiscent of his secret photographic tracing techniques, Eakins maintained the necessary appearance of realism. Nonetheless, technical uncertainties in the Cushing portrait appear in the compositional staginess and spatial incoherence. In effect, Eakins performed his own pictorial “incantation”—one that was structurally unsound and redolent of the sort of theatricality informing Cushing’s ceremonial dance. We have already encountered evidence of Eakins’s interest in popular magazines as vehicles of circulating imagery (see Figs. 37, 38, 40–42). That interest certainly continued into the 1890s as he worked on the Cushing portrait. In a 1902 letter to Culin, Eakins wrote, “I never saw the red leather thing ornamented with silver buttons and trailing on the ground as shown in the Cushing portrait. It was painted from Mr. Cushing’s description. It shows if I remember in a magazine article also.” The magazine article in question was probably Sylvester Baxter’s “An Aboriginal Pilgrimage,” published in The Century Magazine with an illustration of Cushing as a Zuni war priest (see Fig. 73). As depicted by Eakins, either from that illustration or from Cushing’s description or both, “the red leather thing ornamented with silver buttons and trailing on the ground” accentuates a number of other pictorial elements aligned with the overall vertical orientation of the portrait: the spear, the ladder, the eagle feathers hanging from the war shield, and other silver decorations along the anthropologist’s buckskin leggings. Those verticals contrast with various horizontals—the ladder rungs, the background adobe bench, the floor— creating a formal dialectic appropriate to the implied thematic oppositions in the portrait between war and peace, spirituality and materiality, heaven and earth, “civilization” and “savagery.” The stair-step form of the altarpiece and prayer bowl, along with the shield’s zigzagging pictographic lightning bolt, further emphasizes this oppositional structure, to which the otherwise vertical “red leather thing” contributes by gently resting on the ground, in a manner reminiscent of the magazine illustration.99 The Cushing portrait’s original frame literalized the work’s status as an exotically aesthetic object that dabbled on the “border” between art and craft, Anglo

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and Native, United States and Mexico, and so on (see Fig. 78). With its unfinished chestnut boards, Zuni pictographs, and rawhide tassels, the frame served a metonymic function vaguely similar to that of an artifact-specimen displayed in the University Museum. It also constituted a specimen of Cushing’s own handicraft as an anthropologist, no doubt with some help from Eakins. As art historians have noted many times, Eakins inscribed and ornamented portrait frames on other special occasions when he particularly admired his sitter. Such a practice reprised that of his French teacher, Gérôme, who sometimes used frames with Egyptian hieroglyphs for orientalist pictures, as in A View of the Plain of Thebes in Upper Egypt (1857, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, France). The best-known example of this tendency by Eakins occurred in connection with his portrait of a physicist, Professor Henry A. Rowland (1897, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.), where the frame displays mathematical symbols and formulae pertinent to the sitter’s research on light diffraction and color spectra. Notably, the elusive, liminal phenomena of color spectra were only perceptible with the development of new tools and techniques of scientific analysis at the turn of the twentieth century, such as the diffraction grating held in Rowland’s hand. Rowland’s tool thus constituted a physical analogue to Cushing’s Native artifacts and innovative participatory methods for observing the invisible phenomena of Zuni social structure, folk tales, and ceremonial “incantations.”100 By helping Cushing to inscribe the frame with Zuni pictographs, Eakins reconfirmed his own deep fascination with language, writing, and graphic marks of all kinds. As the art historian Michael Fried has observed, such inscriptions were “tantamount to treating the frame as the typically blank but by no means inviolable margin of a page.” Fried’s page metaphor takes on new meaning when we consider how the Cushing portrait frame approximated the “ethnographic” covers often used for contemporary books of regional and exotic literature around the turn of the century. Herbert Myrick’s rawhide-clad Western novel Cache la Poudre provides a case in point (Fig. 82). As the literature historian Brad Evans has noted, “that with which book covers were costumed became something like anthropological content, such that when you purchased a book you got not just the words on the page but the fantasy of fragments from the physical record of the people under textual observation.” In effect, novels and paintings wore material signs of their status as Tainean “fossil shells” on their sleeves.101 In addition to such chic resonances with literary exotica of the period, the Cushing portrait’s original frame also brings to mind popular tourist curios and world’s fair midway souvenirs, further confusing fine art, science, consumerism, and public theatricality. Such confusion accorded with the sitter’s career as an anthropologist, prompting the art historian Kevin Muller to observe that Cushing’s image-

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Figure 82. Herbert Myrick, Cache la Poudre: The Romance of a Tenderfoot in the Days of Custer, leather cover (New York: Orange Judd, 1905). Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming; PZ3.M997C2.

making and media-savvy “exposed the uncomfortably close proximity of anthropology to commercial spectacle.” Muller suggests that this proximity may ultimately explain the frame’s disappearance. When the Brooklyn Museum deaccessioned the Cushing portrait from its scientific collections in 1947, the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa purchased the work not as an ethnographic curiosity but rather as a “Western” specimen of fine art by a great American master. For the modern Gilcrease curators (or their dealers) in the twentieth century, disposal of the frame therefore could have signified a purifying removal of anthropological “culture” in favor of a more elevated, Arnoldian, aesthetic “culture.” In Eakins’s time, however, a clear distinction between those particular categories did not yet exist.102 The Cushing portrait also confuses categories and boundaries on a formal level in various painterly details, notably including the depicted buckskin war shield. With its war god pictograph, rich red color, and frontal orientation, the shield attains an eerie visual presence. Looking closely at the shield, we see palpable signs of Eakins’s own brushwork, creating a metaphorical ambiguity between canvas and buckskin, “civilized” painter and “primitive.” The bright red paint used by

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Eakins makes the Zuni war shield stand out from the murky background of the portrait, despite the spear leaning against it. Hanging from an antler embedded in the wall, the shield competes for our attention with the figure of Cushing, who points toward it with his left hand, not unlike a painter before his easel. Through this reflexive gesture, Eakins effectively deployed his own participatory method of sorts, implicating his ethnographic impulse with that of his sitter, as if to merge science and art. In other passages of the Cushing portrait, Eakins undermined the conventions of realism somewhat by taking even more dramatic liberties as a painter. For example, he treated the background wall in a particularly loose and brushy manner, producing odd visual harmonies and unclear spatial relationships. Art historians have tended to regard such passages as intentional efforts to capture the smoky pueblo atmosphere or the mottled look of adobe, but several areas appear inexplicably vague and sketchy. Scratchy zigzags of paint beneath the shield oddly reprise and invert the war god’s symbolic lightning. Haphazard brushstrokes in the lower-right background form an inchoate, undecipherable writing, providing another reminder of Eakins’s irrepressible fascination with graphic marks. Splotches of pink, red, and salmon pigment throughout the background echo tones in the shield as well as in Cushing’s scarred, pockmarked face, creating an impression of the pueblo wall as one giant fleshy skin, stretched, dried, and inscribed like an animal hide. Such effects aptly, if unintentionally, suggest the literal meaning of “Zuni,” or A:shiwi, meaning both “the people” and “flesh.” A faintly articulated adobe bench modeled low along the kiva wall creates ambiguity about where the floor ends and the wall begins. The resulting sense of spatial confusion was noted by a contemporary art critic, Riter Fitzgerald, when Eakins exhibited the Cushing portrait at Earle’s Galleries in Philadelphia in 1896. According to Fitzgerald, “There is not sufficient depth to the background. It has the appearance of a one confused mass in which subject, details, and back ground are inextricably mixed.” The critic’s comments recall the more positive observations made by Earl Shinn in 1878 regarding the “sketchiness,” “riotous disorder,” and “perspectiveless look” of Eakins’s The Dancing Lesson (see Plate 1), suggesting a certain continuity in the artist’s formal technique when representing exotic performances. The artist occasionally displayed a similar disregard for formal-spatial coherence in other works, but the Cushing portrait willfully flaunts such characteristics, as if the exotic subject and setting temporarily demanded a more “primitive” approach.103 In his analysis of realist American literature in the moment “before cultures,” Evans refers to Cushing’s writing as exemplifying some of the categorical breakdowns at issue here. Appearing in issues of The Century Magazine alongside more

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rarefied poetry and literary essays by the likes of Henry James and William Dean Howells, Cushing’s “My Adventures in Zuñi” participated in a cosmopolitan phenomenon that Evans describes in terms of cultivated “eccentricity” and “circulating culture.” Commenting briefly but incisively on the Cushing portrait by Eakins, Evans notes that “an equivalence develops between the ethnological objects and the painted body, suggesting the creep of materials from Zuni collections to the body of civilization. . . . The picture of Cushing has finally merged him with the Zuni folk object; but at the same time, he becomes an object of high culture.” Evans concludes the passage by saying, “Still more than a decade before both the formal emergence of an anthropological culture concept and of the aesthetics that came to be known as modernism, Eakins’s portrait of Cushing suggests that the distinctions between objects of ethnography and objects of art had already become complexly interconnected.” As we have now seen, closer analysis of the portrait bears out such an assessment while also illuminating a broader set of relations among multiple works by Eakins that pertain to the West and to Philadelphia anthropology.104

Zuni Perspectives In recent years, postcolonial considerations of Native American sovereignty, repatriation, and representation have significantly reshaped museum collections and historical interpretation. Such considerations have yet to enter much academic discourse on the history of American art, including scholarship on Eakins and the Cushing portrait. When Truettner wrote his seminal article on the portrait in 1985, for example, he made no mention of major repatriation negotiations then under way between anthropology officials at his own institution (the Smithsonian) and Zuni tribal representatives, who visited Washington and even testified before Congress on such matters in 1984. Their negotiations and testimony concerned the disposition of certain Ahayu:da, or sacred war god figurines, in the Smithsonian’s possession that Cushing had stolen from a shrine at the pueblo during the very expedition commemorated in the portrait by Eakins.105 Given the importance of such recent negotiations in empowering the tribe to regain a measure of control, over not only stolen religious objects but also their sovereignty, it seems appropriate to include Zuni perspectives in the art historical narrative—especially in light of Cushing’s important overlapping roles as war priest, thief of the Ahayu:da, and portrait sitter to Eakins. In defense of Truettner, we should acknowledge that art historians generally did not make this kind of interpretive connection in 1985 and some may still regard such considerations as extraneous to the discipline. After all, the contested Zuni objects then subject to

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repatriation, the Ahayu:da, do not appear in the portrait by Eakins. Nevertheless, in the interests of historical reconciliation and greater understanding about the power of imagery, the present author believes that the time has come to remove whatever disciplinary barriers still prevent discussion of these connections. As important living stakeholders in the sacred traditions to which Cushing and Eakins laid claim in 1895, the Zuni deserve a place at the table of historical interpretation. To that end, I visited the Zuni in June 2004 to meet with Edward Wemytewa and other members of the pueblo’s tribal council for a face-to-face conversation about the Cushing portrait. Apparently, this was the first such conversation broached by a professional art historian. When I showed a reproduction of the portrait to members of the council, they rolled their eyes with exasperation and patiently informed me that they found the work offensive. In their view, the work inappropriately parades private ceremonial information in public, before the uninitiated, in violation of long-standing Zuni traditions of religious sanctity. Particularly objectionable to the council was the depiction of prayer feathers and the sacred war shield. As one council member explained, the portrait is “boastful” in its excessive accumulation of war-related objects, indicating either a misunderstanding of Zuni ceremony or (just as likely) an insensitive desire on the part of Cushing and Eakins to manifest as much private tribal knowledge as possible for their own aesthetic, anthropological, and narcissistic reasons. For the council members, learning of the portrait’s age and artistic pedigree did little to mitigate its transgression of their beliefs.106 During the 1880s, Cushing was perfectly aware that aspects of his behavior crossed the line of ethical propriety, as indicated by his acknowledged removal of the Zuni Ahayu:da from sacred shrines under cover of darkness. The twentiethcentury Zuni anthropologist Edmund Ladd and others have researched Cushing’s theft in great detail as part of a recent attempt to inventory sacred tribal objects for repatriation. Several of Cushing’s other activities, such as his excavation of bones from Zuni funerary sites as well as his dance performances wearing ceremonial Mudhead and Katsina masks for photographers in Washington, have only compounded the sense of betrayal felt by some tribal descendants. For those descendants with whom I spoke, the Cushing portrait amounted to similar theft and unauthorized display of sacred knowledge. As such, it offered an unwelcome reminder of the wholesale expropriation of Zuni materials and privileged information during a period when tribal sovereignty was particularly threatened. New versions of such threats persist today, of course, in the form of mining operations that diminish and taint tribal water supplies, among other problems. In light of this history, I asked the tribal council whether they would prefer not to have the Cushing portrait reproduced in this book. Instead of making such a demand, however, the council requested that I simply register their distaste for the work, while impressing

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Figure 83. Phil Hughte, The

Big Photo, ca. 1994. Graphite on paper. A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center and Pueblo of Zuni Arts and Crafts, Zuni, New Mexico.

upon readers the fact that intrusive representations of this sort have a long and enduring history.107 In recent years, the prevailing attitude about Cushing among historians of anthropology and members of the Zuni community has been one of ambivalence, to say the least. That attitude, mixed with humor, informs the work of Phil Hughte, a Zuni artist who produced a series of large satirical cartoons about Cushing during the early 1990s. In one cartoon, titled The Big Photo (Fig. 83), Hughte gently poked fun at the elaborately choreographed picture of Cushing by John K. Hillers (see Fig. 75). Hughte here gives us the bigger picture, as it were, by including playful Zuni children who look around from behind the contrived studio backdrop and smirk at the camera. By comparison, the self-aggrandizing Cushing, with his stoic pose and thick Anglo moustache, comes off as preposterous and pretentious. Hughte, who died in 1997, produced no such satire of the Cushing portrait by Eakins, but The Big Photo effectively spoke back to their nineteenthcentury discourse of science and art. Obviously, neither Hughte’s cartoons nor the current tribal council are likely to impede ongoing circulation of the Cushing portrait, but the discourse of art history could do more to register such oppositional perspectives.108

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coda

“Distinctly American Art” Thomas Eakins, National Genius

As I noted in the Introduction, one of Eakins’s last recorded statements concerned the future of American art. In 1914, at the age of sixty-nine, he told an interviewer from the Philadelphia Press newspaper that “if America is to produce great painters and if young art students wish to assume a place in the history of the art of their country, their first desire should be to remain in America to peer deeper into the heart of American life, rather than spend their time abroad obtaining a superficial view of the art of the Old World.” Using terms that domesticated Hippolyte Taine’s naturalistic theory, Eakins said: “It would be far better for American art students and painters to study their own country and portray its life and types. To do that they must remain free from any foreign superficialities. Of course, it is well to go abroad to see the works of the old masters, but Americans must branch out into their own fields as they are doing it. They must strike out of themselves and only by doing this will we create a great and distinctly American art.”1 During the last decade of his career as an active painter, from 1900 to about 1910, Eakins produced a number of extraordinary portraits that peered “deeper into the heart of American life.” Some of these portraits, now widely admired, prompted the following observation by Lloyd Goodrich in a seminal 1933 biography of the artist: “His vision had a mordancy like that of a powerful acid, eating away surface graces and leaving only the irreducible nucleus of character.” Whether portraying a man or a woman, said Goodrich, the artist depicted his subject “with a penetrating sympathy and a sense of inner life.”2 For Goodrich and many other Eakins scholars, The Thinker (Portrait of Louis N. Kenton) (Fig. 84) epitomized such an approach to inner life, that of the human subject and that of America generally. It shows the artist’s suited, bespectacled brother-in-law standing in a vacant golden interior, hands in pockets, absorbed in his own thoughts. Apart from what the portrait conveys, we know almost nothing

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Figure 84. Thomas Eakins, The Thinker (Portrait of

Louis N. Kenton), 1900. Oil on canvas, 208.3 × 106.7 cm (82 × 42 in.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1917 (17.172). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

about Kenton but that his marriage to Elizabeth Macdowell was a failure—a fact perhaps reflected in the sitter’s downcast look. The Thinker (Susan Eakins gave it that title in 1917) has transcended its individual subject to become an emblem of turn-of-the-century malaise and of Eakins’s late style, marked by psychological interiority and a reprise of the old masters. According to the art historian Marc Simpson, “The brooding, contemplative nature that the painting suggests has come to be taken as representing both the individual and the generic modern, introspective man. . . . The work’s austere use of few elements and colors to create a complex and powerful image recalls Spanish portraits of the seventeenth century— especially those of Velázquez.” For such reasons The Thinker serves as a signature achievement for Eakins. In Simpson’s words, it has “proved immensely important for his reputation, one of his strongest and purest paintings.”3 But what does purity mean exactly with regard to an American painting so richly infused with international aesthetic information? H. Barbara Weinberg, addressing the issue of Spanish influence, points to Diego Velázquez’s portrait The Jester Pablo de Valladolid (Fig. 85)—a work on view at the Prado Museum when Eakins visited Madrid—as a compositional prototype for The Thinker. Indeed, with its dark-

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Figure 85. Diego Rodríguez de Silva y

Velázquez, Portrait of Jester Pablo de Valladolid, ca. 1632–35. Oil on canvas, 213.5 × 125 cm (84 × 491⁄4 in.). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

suited human subject, empty golden background, and nearly identical dimensions, The Thinker appears to quote The Jester directly, suggesting that Eakins, around 1900, was thinking a good deal about Velázquez. Weinberg and other scholars have noted similar borrowings in relation to the turn-of-the-century portraits of Catholic clergy by Eakins, some them modeled on the Spanish master’s Pope Innocent X (see Fig. 12).4 The American painter seems never to have forgotten the lessons he had learned from Velázquez’s works in Spain or from his Hispanist teacher, Léon Bonnat, in Paris during his youth. Even so, the international celebration of the tercentenary of Velázquez’s birth in 1899 probably stirred his memory of those lessons; it attracted attention across Europe as well as in America. Spain’s government, recently humiliated in war with the United States, used the occasion to stage a spectacle of national pride in Madrid on June 6, 1899, Velázquez’s birthday. The event was attended by many foreign dignitaries, including another Hispanist French painter, Carolus-Duran (Charles-Émile-Auguste Durand), and widely covered in the press. A foreign correspondent for the New York Times recounted the festivities in a long article summarizing the Baroque master’s achievement and analyzing contem-

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porary politics. As the journalist observed, “Again the national chord is touched and the Spanish heart thrilled with the sense of Spanish glory. In the Museo del Prado Spain does not surrender to the United States.” Although Eakins did not travel to Spain for the celebration in 1899, he could have read a number of pertinent articles published at the time. For example, Bonnat published a commemorative essay in an 1898 issue of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, identifying himself as “a student in the cult of Velázquez . . . our god.”5 Art historians’ emphasis on The Thinker and other portraits of Anglo-American subjects by Eakins as evidence of his “strongest and purest” painting obscures a subtle diversity in his choice of sitters during the late phase of his career. Signora Gomez d’Arza (see Plate 6), a portrait of an Italian immigrant woman who lived in Philadelphia, provides one example of such diversity. As a way of concluding the present book, I want to look once again at that work and a handful of Eakins’s other contemporaneous portraits that together reveal his interest in a wider range of “life and types” in “our country.” The portraits in question demonstrate that his nationalistic project of forging a “distinctly American art” was fundamentally assimilative, both technically and iconographically, in a manner broadly consistent with “Americanist” anthropology in Philadelphia, as discussed in the last chapter. On the one hand, Eakins used stylistic devices imported from Europe to portray a variety of human subjects, some of whom were non-native or otherwise exotic people whose images he freighted with pertinent ethnographic cues. On the other hand, Eakins subjected all of his sitters, regardless of origin, to the same interiorizing logic as in The Thinker, effectively assimilating them to an overarching national personality or “heart of American life.” In doing so, he did his part to Americanize both Velázquez and ethnic diversity. Eakins’s assimilative approach in art also echoed the poetic/literary vision of his friend Walt Whitman, who left a succinct expression of that vision in his essay “The Spanish Element in Our Nationality,” published in the Philadelphia Press newspaper in 1883: We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress’d by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashion’d from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only—which is a very great mistake. Many leading traits for our future national personality, and some of the best ones, will certainly prove to have originated from other than British stock. As it is, the British and German, valuable as they are in the concrete, already threaten excess. Or rather, I should say, they have certainly reach’d that excess. To-day, something outside of them, and to counterbalance them, is seriously needed. Character, literature, a society worth the name,

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are yet to be establish’d, through a nationality of noblest spiritual, heroic and democratic attributes—not one of which at present definitely exists—entirely different from the past, though unerringly founded on it, and to justify it. To that composite American identity of the future, Spanish character will supply some of the most needed parts. No stock shows a grander historic retrospect—grander in religiousness and loyalty, or for patriotism, courage, decorum, gravity, and honor.6

Anticipating later writers such as Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks, Whitman asserted that Americans will benefit from the assimilation of characteristic “Spanish” traits as a tonic for surplus Anglo-Saxon input. Eakins probably heard the poet himself express such thoughts about “our future national personality” and “that composite American identity of the future” after the two men met in 1887. Eakins shared his friend’s premodern perspective, with its confusion of biological “stock,” social behavior, and psychic inner life. The significance of Velázquez as an artistic model for Eakins deserves reconsideration in light of Whitman’s comments, particularly his exhortation to seek “something outside” the “British” mainstream. As a Spanish old master noted for representing rather diverse human subjects in art, Velázquez offered Eakins a historical prototype for negotiating the cultures of modernity avant la lettre. In addition to portraying Spanish aristocrats, Velázquez depicted peasants, “mulattoes,” little people, and others on the margins of European society. Such variety may have helped inspire Eakins to admire the master’s work, which stood out like “nature itself,” as the American artist wrote in a letter to his father from Madrid in 1869. Although Eakins never understood human diversity in terms of “cultural” difference, the quest for a national aesthetic encompassing America’s manifold “life and types” brought him closer to the threshold of modern anthropological perception in the early years of the twentieth century.7

Exploring the Foreign Quarter The modern metropolis of Philadelphia afforded Eakins many opportunities to encounter and observe human difference after 1900, often in the company of friends and other artists. According to his early biographer Margaret McHenry, “When [ John Singer] Sargent was here on his visits, he and Eakins together would explore the foreign quarter in South Philadelphia. They used to admire the beauty of the young Jewesses and Italians.” Goodrich doubted McHenry’s story about Sargent’s participation in such excursions, but he underscored Eakins’s “deep affinity for the Latin temperament” and confirmed that Eakins and Samuel Murray, a student and close friend, “enjoyed the Italian sections of Philadelphia.”8

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Similarly, a passage from the 1936 biography of Eakins’s friend and portrait sitter Talcott Williams (see Fig. 69) indicates that the two men regularly walked the streets of Philadelphia together, observing immigrants like ethnographic flâneurs: [Williams’s] interest in people of the East never flagged, and they came to him for everything. One day he was walking with the artist, Thomas Eakins, when a Syrian woman came striding toward them, eyes front; in her land no woman might look at even her brother on the street. Eakins, admiring the grace of the creature, asked TW [Talcott Williams], “Now, could you make her understand you?” Without hesitation TW paused, placed his palm on brow, on lips, on breast, saying, in his well bred voice, ‘Salaam aleikum.’ At first startled, the girl almost wept for joy at finding someone who could greet her in the dear Arabic. On another occasion, again Mr. Eakins was with him, they came across a group of immigrants newly landed, bewildered by the jostle of the West. One of them, a mother with little ones clinging to her skirt, stood meekly waiting, one hand held, palm up, in the other. An officer, supposing she was begging, raised a row, whereupon Galahad Williams interposed; and he remained to assist the others. TW made a point of keeping in touch with Asia.9

We do not know precisely when these incidents occurred, but they recall the artist’s early fascination with the ethnographic orientalism of Gérôme, whose works Eakins praised for transporting him to “the East.” Late nineteenth-century immigration brought “the East” to Philadelphia in sufficient numbers to sustain his curiosity.10 The portrait of Signora Gomez d’Arza (see Plate 6) resulted from just such urban ramblings. In this case, the subject was an Italian immigrant actress who lived with her husband, Enrico, in South Philadelphia, where the couple operated a small theater. An Italian of Spanish ancestry, Enrico Gomez d’Arza acted at the theater as well, but we know nothing else about him. Subsequent remarks by Susan Eakins offer a glimpse into the brief friendship that she and her husband formed with these immigrants. In addition to making regular visits to the theater in South Philadelphia, the Eakinses dined at the d’Arza home on at least one occasion. Susan clearly understood that Signor and Signora Gomez d’Arza were poor, but their poverty seems to have been less important to her than the opportunity to learn about their interesting alien customs: The portrait was painted in 1901. The year previous a party of us went often to the Italian quarters (Little Italy of Phila.) to see the marionettes perform in classic Plays, and hear the beautiful Italian spoken . . . , also interesting performances at the Italian Theatre. There we saw Signor & Signora Gomez act and through this association Mr. Eakins painted the portrait. They were very poor, depending on their acting and Signora’s teach-

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ing young actors, for a living. They could not speak English. Mr. Eakins spoke Italian and learned from her that she had had tragic experiences in her early life. She was about thirty years old when the portrait was painted. . . . During the period of the posing for the portrait, Miss [Mary Adeline] Williams and I cooked and served a noon dinner for them and their two children, a boy ‘Mario,’ and a baby ‘Immaculata,’ marvel of happiness and comfort, always smiling. The baby was swathed in white wrappings, we were curious, so different from the American way. Signora unwrapped the cloths to show us the custom, and we also noted the exquisite care and cleanliness, altho. so poor. . . . Signora showed us how to cook spaghetti & kidney the finest way, she said ‘I know how, but cannot afford it myself.’ The dish became famous in our house. Soon after the portrait was finished they left Philadelphia. We heard only once from them.11

Another description of this friendship comes from Margaret McHenry, whose information was based on interviews with Samuel Murray: One hot night when the Eakinses were down at the D’Arzas’ for dinner, Eakins kept backing away from a roach that was on the table. In a dreadful moment D’Arza swept it into the lap of Susan Hannah. The night was made memorable, too, by a terrible cesspool nearby. Madam D’Arza used to come to the Eakins house for dinner; very often it would be an Italian spaghetti dinner. The D’Arzas were very poor and the Eakinses, kind to them.12

Such anecdotes reveal the Eakinses’ awareness of class distinctions, but they also indicate an honest sense of curiosity verging upon the “cultural” in an informal, unscientific way, enabling them to overcome those distinctions to some extent. The portrait of Signora Gomez d’Arza by Eakins shows the sitter wearing an elaborate European theatrical dress with lace trim and intricate borders reflecting a golden light that also illuminates the right half of the sitter’s face and her right forearm. The rest of the figure is in shadow. Her three-quarter posture, eye-catching clothing, and look of absorption relate the work to other portraits by Eakins around 1900, but these same details also recall earlier studies, including Carmelita Requeña (see Plate 8), which portrayed another “Latin” performer, as well as Female Model (see Plate 7), depicting a similarly pensive woman with a red earring. In painting Signora Gomez d’Arza, Eakins demonstrated his own aesthetic cosmopolitanism by adapting the famous compositional prototype of Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X (see Fig. 12), which also may have served as an allusion to the sitter’s Roman Catholicism. Catholic beliefs figured prominently in Whitman’s “Spanish element,” with its grand “historic retrospect.” Completing the aesthetic and ethnographic ensemble in a manner consistent with Taine’s “fossil shell” theory of national character, Eakins selected an elaborate Spanish Baroque gilded frame for the portrait. Though the subject’s background was in fact Italian, he framed her

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Figure 86. Thomas Eakins, Girl with a Fan (Portrait of Miss Gutierrez), ca. 1902–8. Oil on canvas, mounted on panel, 50.8 x. 40.6 cm (20 × 16 in.). Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection. Purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust and the Henry C. Gibson Fund.

broadly with artistic signifiers of Hispanic, Catholic, and “Latin” identity. For Eakins, the sitter’s marriage to a man of Spanish ancestry may have further justified such broad aesthetic framing.13 A more strictly pictorial approach to Hispanic signifiers informs Girl with a Fan (Portrait of Miss Gutierrez) (Fig. 86). Nothing is known of the sitter other than her Spanish surname, but the model’s earring and fan added touches of ethnographic exoticism, as if to evoke the bolero or other Spanish dance. In that respect, the portrait merged the picturesque motives of A Street Scene in Seville (see Plate 3) with the scientific impulses of Lucy Wharton Drexel (1900, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.), with its display of international fans donated by the sitter to the ethnological collection of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. The fan also served broadly as a pictorial attribute of aesthetic femininity, as in a number of other portraits by Eakins. Girl with a Fan, an unfinished and rather idiosyncratic portrait, awkwardly gropes for a way to capture Spanish national character. Eakins’s unconvincing use of such accoutrements suggests his recognition of their failure to represent the totality of a sitter’s customs and traditions, recalling his hesitant reference in 1869 to “that ugly hanging of the eye that is often supposed to represent the whole Spanish type.”14

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Picturing Expatriation A subtler ethnographic perception informed the Portrait of Henry O. Tanner (Plate 10), another one of Eakins’s underappreciated late paintings, depicting a highly successful former student. Tanner, the eldest son of a prominent African Methodist Episcopal minister in Philadelphia, had studied under Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy off and on during the late 1870s and early 1880s, after the institution took its first tentative steps toward desegregation. The circumstances and date of the portrait’s execution remain elusive, but scholars generally agree that Eakins painted it at the turn of the century when the sitter made one of his homecoming visits to the United States. Tanner had moved to France in the early 1890s to avoid American racial discrimination and lived there until his death in 1937. By 1900, in his early forties, he was earning considerable recognition abroad, winning medals for pictures at the Paris Salon and selling his works, as a result, to the French government and prominent private collectors. Tanner’s professional success and international acclaim far exceeded Eakins’s at the time the portrait was painted.15 Eakins’s trademark representation of introspection in the portrait of Tanner pointed to the personal frustrations of an educated, middle-class, professional man with African ancestry. Tanner exemplified W. E. B. Du Bois’s “talented tenth” of African Americans, whose thwarted ambitions and “double consciousness” marked the Jim Crow era in the United States. As the great-grandson of an enslaved black woman and a white Virginia planter, Tanner also embodied the complexity and historical drift of racial identity in the United States. Whitman had described an evolving “national personality” and “stock,” but Tanner experienced the challenges and anxieties of that evolution firsthand. Indeed, he addressed them obliquely in art through various biblical and genre scenes, including his celebrated work The Banjo Lesson (see Fig. 14), a painting that reprised and reconfigured the theme of racial continuity seen in Eakins’s The Dancing Lesson (see Plate 1). Tanner grappled more directly with the complexity of his own racial identity in a striking letter of 1914, written to the American art critic Eunice Tietjens. The critic had sent Tanner a draft of a forthcoming review, praising his work and offering sympathy for the many trials and obstacles he had faced as a “negro” artist. Responding to Tietjens, Tanner expressed his appreciation, but he also objected to the racial identification: Now am I a Negro? Does not the 3/4 of English blood in my veins, which when it flowed in ‘pure’ Anglo-Saxon men and which has done in the past effective and distinguished work in the U.S.—does this not count for anything? Does the 1/4 or 1/8 of ‘pure’ Negro blood in my veins count for all? I believe it, the Negro blood counts and counts to my advantage—though it has caused me at times a life of great humiliation and sor-

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row. That it is the source of all my talents (if I have any) I do not believe, any more than I believe it all comes from my English ancestors.16

Tanner’s private statement here is extraordinary for paying tribute to the coexistence of “English” and “Negro” “blood” in his veins, crediting both as sources of his talent despite “humiliation and sorrow.” Not surprisingly, Tanner’s African ancestry has tended to dominate art historical accounts of him and his work, as well as interpretations of the portrait by Eakins. Despite evidence of Tanner’s complex background, including his own verbal protestation, most scholars today represent him narrowly as a “black” or “African American” artist. Likewise, by portraying Tanner, Eakins is generally seen as having depicted such an artist without any awareness of, or attention to, the complexities of his sitter’s identity.17 Yet the Portrait of Henry O. Tanner contains visual clues that acknowledge subtle nuances. For example, in the red, green, and touches of yellow in Tanner’s cravat, Eakins evoked the exotic “African” headdresses seen in Female Model (see Plate 7) and other works (see Figs. 15, 18, 26, 27). The particular color combination here also suggests an emblematic reference to “Ethiopia,” or “Abyssinia,” an African nation widely recognized during the nineteenth century as an Eastern, or Oriental, haven of Christianity whose flag featured those same colors. Eakins may have known of such associations from any number of nineteenth-century accounts. For example, Whitman’s Civil War poem “Drum Taps,” originally titled “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors,” described an emancipated slave woman who patriotically acknowledged the American flag flown by General William T. Sherman’s Union troops. The woman, named “Ethiopia,” displayed a “head with turban bound, yellow, red, and green.” After the Civil War, Ethiopia became internationally recognized as a nation resisting European colonialism: in 1868, it rebuffed British imperial claims and in 1896 it repulsed an invasion by Italy. With competing inflections at once stereotypical and heroic, Tanner’s cravat appears to refer emblematically to his “African” racial ancestry, Christian spirituality, and desire for freedom.18 Another complex signifier in Eakins’s Tanner portrait occurs in the bright illumination of the sitter’s prominent forehead that, in keeping with a long artistic tradition, metaphorically alludes to intellect. By emphasizing the lightness of Tanner’s complexion, Eakins here drew attention to the “3/4 of English blood” in his veins, implying an unspoken racial qualification for formal portraiture. Whereas Eakins consigned dark-skinned anonymous “Negroes” to genre pictures (see Plate 1, Figs. 41–44, 51), he probably considered Tanner a legitimate portrait subject not only by virtue of intellect, professional class status, and personal familiarity, but also his admixture of Anglo-Saxon “blood.” Indeed, Tanner’s relatively

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Figure 87. Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Juan de Pareja, 1650. Oil on canvas, 81.3 × 69.9 cm (32 × 271⁄2 in.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Fletcher and Rogers Funds, and Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), by exchange, supplemented by gifts from friends of the Museum, 1971 (1971.86). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

light skin frequently prompted contemporaries to describe him as a “mulatto” and even to associate him with “Aryan” and “Latin” races.19 Eakins’s awareness of such “Latin” inflections and professional admiration for a former pupil could also have prompted him to view the Tanner portrait as reprising another historical prototype, Velázquez’s portrait of his “mulatto” pupil and enslaved assistant, Juan de Pareja (Fig. 87). Pareja is said in various nineteenthcentury sources to have entered the service of Velázquez during the 1620s, assisting in the studio and later accompanying the master to Rome to help with the important portrait of Pope Innocent X (see Fig. 12). According to a widely known Victorian biography by William Stirling, Velázquez practiced for that exalted commission by executing a study of Pareja’s head. Another passage in Stirling’s biography described how Pareja, having secretly painted a picture on his own, surreptitiously displayed it in his master’s studio shortly before a visit by King Philip IV. Upon seeing the picture, the king expressed admiration for it, at which point Pareja revealed himself as the painter, prompting Philip to declare that no man with such talent should remain a slave. Velázquez then set Pareja free.20 Although Stirling’s account has a legendary ring, the art historian Jennifer Montagu recently confirmed Pareja’s emancipation by discovering the official act of manumission in Rome’s state archives. That act and other surviving evidence, including works by Pareja himself and the master’s heroic portrait of his former

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slave, indicate that this seventeenth-century “mulatto” was both gifted and highly regarded by Velázquez. According to Stirling, “Pareja’s portrait, finely painted by Velazquez . . . represents him as an intelligent bright-eyed mulatto, with the thick nose and lips and curling black hair proper to his race, and dressed in a dark-green doublet, with a white falling collar. This is perhaps the picture which gained Velazquez his election into the academy of St. Luke.”21 Eakins left no written documentation affirming that he viewed his Tanner portrait as a modern version of Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja. Yet the two works have enough in common, visually and conceptually, to merit comparison, especially in light of Eakins’s other borrowings from Velázquez around 1900. Not unlike the Spanish painter, Eakins represented his former pupil in three-quarter pose against a blank gray-brown background, wearing a similarly monochromatic suit and contrasting white collar. Both sitters have short beards and curly dark hair, their foreheads radiating the bright light of intelligence. In each case, the single visible ear is almost entirely in shadow, except for a subtle highlight. Eakins followed the example of Velázquez on a technical level as well, modeling details of the face with small strokes of paint while brushing broadly in surrounding areas, all in a limited range of earth tones. Absorbed in a moment of historical retrospection about his own career and the roots of his realism, but also cognizant of Tanner’s extraordinary achievement as a painter “emancipated” professionally by expatriation, Eakins may well have deliberately emulated Velázquez in this portrait of a “mulatto” former pupil. Given Tanner’s avowed admiration for the Spanish painter, sitter and artist may even have conspired in constructing the historical conceit.22 The portraits are not identical, however. Whereas Velázquez showed Pareja with his head turned toward the beholder, Eakins presented Tanner looking down, averting his bespectacled eyes. Nor did Eakins reveal his sitter’s hands, as Velázquez did to underscore Pareja’s ability as an artist. Tanner’s multicolored cravat, moreover, stands out as the most vibrant area of color in either painting. Overall, the Tanner portrait is somber while Juan de Pareja exudes a robust, unmistakably Baroque hauteur. Pareja asserts a solid sense of place and pride; Tanner looks distracted and dislocated in a manner appropriate to a transatlantic expatriate of the modern era. Eakins, as his former teacher, perhaps envisioned himself as an emancipator—part Velázquez, part Lincoln—even as he appropriated his pupil’s status as exile for personal and aesthetic motives. Indeed, the portrait suggests Oriental “resignation” in a manner befitting Eakins’s reflexive sense of “misunderstanding, persecution, and neglect,” as if he saw himself as a white version of the “tragic mulatto,” then a common figure in popular discourse. Accordingly, the art historian David Lubin has insightfully suggested that Eakins, in late portraits such as this, anticipated the

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modern disaffected “white negro” described by Norman Mailer. In any case, through various formal and pictorial allusions Eakins once again framed human difference in aesthetic, national, and racial terms, though not “cultural” ones.23

“Much as I Would Work Myself ” In 1905, Eakins wrote to his friend Stewart Culin, formerly curator of archaeology and anthropology at the University Museum, thanking him for a recent gift of “Jap. drawings.” As the artist observed, “They are exceedingly beautiful . . . made by approximation much as I would work myself. Then the transparent paper is laid over the study and the artist being entirely sure of his drawing, he lays on his color with the greatest freedom.” We cannot identify the Japanese draftsman responsible for the works in question, but Eakins clearly shared some of the curator’s passion for Asian art. The book of Japanese pictures represented in his earlier Portrait of the Artist’s Wife and Setter Dog (see Fig. 71) indicates that Eakins shared such orientalist interests with his spouse as well. The letter to Culin reveals an unexpected degree of aesthetic relativism in Eakins’s observation that the Japanese technique of “approximation” resembled his own drawing practice. It is difficult to know precisely which techniques he had in mind in making such a comparison, but another of Eakins’s late portraits may shed light on the question.24 In 1906, Eakins’s orientalism evidently led him to portray Genjiro Yeto, an obscure Japanese artist then active in the United States as a watercolorist and illustrator of popular turn-of-the-century cosmopolitan literature by authors such as Lafcadio Hearn, William H. Boardman, and Yoné Noguchi. Unfortunately, Eakins’s Genjiro Yeto portrait disappeared without a trace after the sitter returned to Japan in 1907. The precise circumstances in which Eakins portrayed Yeto remain elusive as well, but the two artists may have met in New York at the Salmagundi Club, a gallery and meeting place that both men visited during the first decade of the new century. Writing in 1904 to Culin, who had recently relocated from Philadelphia to New York to take a curatorial position at the Brooklyn Museum, Eakins mentioned attending a “Salmagundi banquet” during one of his frequent trips to the city. Yeto is recorded as attending such an event in 1906. Apparently, the two men had other experiences in common and became friends, for Margaret McHenry reports that Yeto had studied in France and “showed Eakins how to cook rice.”25 Yeto’s art is often beautiful and provides an interesting case study in aesthetic transnationalism. Judging from a largely positive review of works he displayed at an exhibition of the Water Color Club in New York in 1901, we can understand Eakins’s curiosity about the artist:

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Perhaps the subtlest and most charming of all are by a Japanese, Mr. Genjiro Yeto of New York, who draws on Japanese paper with a fastidious taste and a skill that may well rouse the envy of his American comrades. “Poppy” and “Shirley Poppies,” “Peony,” and “Morning Glories” are not merely drawn with exquisite refinement, but have that skill in arrangement which the Japanese study in their arrangements of the flowers themselves as decorations of their homes. In his figure pieces on the other hand, such as “The Summer Eve” and “The Cherry Festival,” he is not so happy. He has little of that style which is a convention in Japan, and yet he is not a realist in one sense.26

The reviewer’s latter negative comments indicate confusion arising from the artist’s transnational blend of stylistic conventions, at once seemingly “Japanese” and “realist” yet also neither in any strict “one sense.” We do not know whether the gift of “Jap. drawings” Culin sent to Eakins included examples by Yeto, but let us briefly consider the Japanese artist’s illustration “Fireflies” (Fig. 88), created for a 1902 novel by Lafcadio Hearn titled KottO: Being Japanese Curios, as an example of his style. Hearn was a well-known cosmopolitan author of regional literature and ethnographic essays, so Eakins could have encountered illustrations by Yeto in contemporary books. In its cropping of forms, repoussoir effects, and blank space, Yeto’s “Fireflies” suggests the “approximation” and “freedom” that Eakins admired as “beautiful” in the drawings received from Culin. Perhaps Eakins also viewed Yeto’s artistic approach as an intriguing Asian version of his own in preparatory studies, with their areas of flat white space and schematic delineation of forms (Fig. 89).27 In any case, Eakins apparently maintained a lively interest in specimens of human difference throughout his life, regarding both exotic artifacts and the living people who produced them. Eakins’s comment to Culin that a Japanese artist drew “much as I would work myself ” also indicates an ongoing proclivity to make international comparisons like those of his anthropologist friend. Such comparisons never led Eakins to radical formal experimentation in a modernist mode, however. His curiosity about Yeto and Japanese art may suggest some relativism in his views, especially after 1900, but it did not modify his realism.

“Genius Americanus” On June 25, 1916, Eakins died peacefully in his sleep at the age of seventy-one. He left his wife, Susan, with a house full of unsold paintings, including many works now considered masterpieces. In accord with the artist’s wishes, no funeral service was held and his body was cremated. The ashes were later buried in Philadelphia’s Woodlands Cemetery. In November 1917, seven months after the United States

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Figure 88. Genjiro Yeto, “Fireflies.” In Lafcadio Hearn, KottO: Being Japanese Curios, with Sunday Cobwebs

(New York: Macmillan, 1902), p. 136. Figure 89. Thomas Eakins, The Dancing Lesson [originally The Negroes]: Perspective Study, ca. 1877–78. Pen

and black, red, and blue ink over graphite on two sheets of foolscap, 43.2 × 35.6 cm (17 × 14 in.), each sheet. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection. Purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust and the John S. Phillips Fund.

entered World War I, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened a memorial exhibition of sixty-nine paintings by Eakins. Six weeks later, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the institution that had forced the artist’s resignation in 1886, sponsored its own memorial exhibition with twice as many works. After facing “misunderstanding, persecution, and neglect” during the last thirty years of his career, Eakins began to receive acclaim in death. In 1923 the Joseph Brummer Gallery in New York organized yet another Eakins show. And in 1930 the new Museum of Modern Art, under the guidance of Director Alfred H. Barr, unveiled an exhibition of works by Winslow Homer, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Thomas Eakins. The Sixth Loan Exhibition, as it was called, effectively installed that triumvirate of nineteenth-century painters in the canon of American art history.28 In an insightful discussion of Eakins’s posthumous critical reputation, David Lubin identifies two important strains of thinking about the painter in the decades following his death. Left-leaning “progressives,” such as Robert Henri, leader of the Ash Can School realist painters, together with the critics Henry McBride, Lewis Mumford, and others, “admired Eakins as an artist who exposed the troubled, even anguished private lives of his bourgeois sitters.” For these progressives, Eakins, like the writer Herman Melville, was a tragic visionary outsider who chafed against lingering Puritan morality and mainstream Victorian propriety in America. As McBride wrote in a 1922 issue of The Dial, “The cases of Herman Melville, writer, and Thomas Eakins, painter, have enough in common to make one at least think about the vagaries of fame.” In McBride’s view and that of his peers, Melville and Eakins were renegades who needed to be reclaimed as paragons of a usable past. But by the 1930s, says Lubin, amid the political tensions and aesthetic debates of the Depression, another view of Eakins as “a staunchly objective reporter, a factbased positivist,” and “a scientifically rigorous fact-gatherer swiftly came to dominate . . . thereby repressing the alternative understanding of him as a dissenter from bourgeois society.” Lloyd Goodrich, whose monograph of 1933 set the terms of scholarship on the artist for the next fifty years, developed this more clinical, depoliticized construction of Eakins.29 Lubin did not mention a third line of discourse that permeated Eakins criticism during the same years. It concerned the artist’s relation to America, the world, and the origins of creativity. We might call this the premodern cultural discourse on Eakins, for it repeated many of the terms and themes I have discussed in this book. Writers often considered whether Eakins’s art arose as a natural outgrowth of his immediate American environment and moment or as a social expression of humanity. The same writers also sometimes attributed his creativity to individual ingenuity. Consciously or otherwise, this line of criticism wrestled with the theoretical legacy of Taine, whose ideas about national character, natural environment,

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history, and creativity seem to have haunted American criticism well into the twentieth century. Criticism of Eakins’s art thus partook of Kroeber’s “current confusion” regarding organic versus “superorganic” determinants of culture. The art critics claimed that Eakins’s work encoded multiple factors: his American environment, historical moment, national character, and individuality, as well as universal humanity. In effect, Eakins was an American genius whose vision was at once personal, local, national, and global. This rather elastic neo-Tainean conception of the artist has proved durable despite its inherent contradictions. For example, in a 1929 journal article in the Arts, laying the foundations for his later monograph on Eakins, Goodrich observed that “his art was a direct reflection of his environment,” and “he seems to fit naturally into the tradition of American realism.” Acknowledging “a touch of bitterness” in the painter’s work, Goodrich further claimed that “the sources of this tragic element in Eakins’s art undoubtedly lay deeply hidden in his relation to his environment. . . . His was the usual fate of those who paint their surroundings too truly.” According to Goodrich, “We need more of Eakins’ spirit—his full-blooded power of extracting art from the elements of his own experience, his courage to paint life in any of its aspects, his firm roots in reality.” And yet, even as Goodrich used the nineteenthcentury naturalistic language of natural “roots” and elemental experience, he also trumpeted Eakins’s “sympathy” and “common humanity,” terms suggesting a social and psychological basis rather than an environmental or biological one.30 An even more striking expression of neo-Tainean rhetoric appeared in Goodrich’s short essay on Eakins in the catalogue of the Sixth Loan Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1930. There Goodrich touted Eakins the “scientist,” as Lubin has observed, but also drew attention to the artist’s “profound humanity” and “innate qualities of mind and character,” which enabled him to produce works wherein the subjects’ “individual and racial character is unmistakable.” On no point was Goodrich more emphatic, though, than the artist’s “completeness of adjustment to his environment,” saying that “few painters have mirrored an environment with such fidelity.” Using words that Hamlin Garland might have cribbed from Taine four decades before, Goodrich said of Eakins, “His work could have been painted in no other time and place than in the United States from 1870 to 1910, and more particularly in Philadelphia, with its conservatism, its quiet, solid, rich respectability . . . its pleasant, healthy outdoor life on the Schuylkill and in the surrounding countryside, its distinctly older American character as opposed to the foreign ferment of Manhattan.” (Never mind the Schuylkill pollution or the fact that Eakins sought out such “ferment” in both cities, as Goodrich himself acknowledged elsewhere.) “An integral part of this environment, living its life, he painted the people

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and things that were closest to him. . . . Never one to borrow, he developed as independently as an oak in a clearing.” In Goodrich’s mind, Eakins was about as rooted as an artist could be.31 Similar neo-Tainean terminology, with all of its conceptual elasticity, runs through much of the art criticism on Eakins between the late 1910s and 1940s. Nationalistic and naturalistic environmental references abound in such criticism, as in Frederick Eddy’s remark that “[Eakins’s] interest was in the people of his surroundings,” so that “his work seems akin to that of a scientist, of a natural historian.” Alan Burroughs observed that in The Thinker (see Fig. 84) Eakins depicted “an American type, and the epoch made by many such men.” In the words of Helen Appleton Read, Eakins and Winslow Homer belonged not to “the Puritan strain” but “the Plymouth Rock strain,” characterized by “vigor, clarity of vision and above all sanity! This is the quality of the pure American strain.” Eakins not only exemplified “the genius Americanus,” in Read’s view, but was “one of its highest and purest types.” Virgil Barker referred to Eakins and his realist compatriots as exemplifying the American response to “peculiar conditions” and “environmental influences,” capturing “the accent peculiar to America,” “the dialect of a place, the stamp of an age, imbuing the work with a particular character.” According to Martha Candler Cheney, the “Americanism” of Eakins “appears in his uncompromising accuracy of observation of his time and place and his ability to reveal something of the mental and spiritual atmosphere of his era in his characters and scenes.” Van Wyck Brooks, in his book The Times of Melville and Whitman, compared the painter to the poet, noting, “Eakins had his own specifically Philadelphian stamp,” an interest in a “native art,” and a “feeling for elemental life.”32 If critics closely tied Eakins to his time and place as a specimen of the “genius Americanus,” they also paradoxically considered him an individual genius with a vision not limited to Philadelphia. For Henri, “Eakins was a deep student of life and with a great love he studied humanity frankly.” Although McBride considered Eakins “our American Ingres,” he also felt the artist’s portraiture offered “a profoundly human document.” Similarly, Cheney saw “Americanism” in Eakins’s empirical approach but also found him to have “a broader education” and “a more cosmopolitan taste” than Winslow Homer. Writing in 1944, Clement Greenberg believed that Eakins used “chiaroscuro” in a manner consistent with “a characteristic expression of the American sense of the poetical in the nineteenth century” yet also readily acknowledged the artist’s engagement with the work of French painters such as Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, and Édouard Manet. Alan Burroughs typified this strain of critical confusion about the nature and origins of Eakins’s creativity when he observed, “We may say that a certain age produces a certain man; nevertheless, the work done makes the age, and the man is what pro-

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duces the work. . . . The traditions of teaching, one sees, fitted him well. By nature and inheritance he not only accepted them as good traditions, but enlarged on them logically. . . . [The] ‘moderns’ have found something purer and more restricted, something personal; while Eakins found Eastern America at the end of the nineteenth century—and found it not simple or personal, but complex and objective.”33 It so happens that during these years of confusion in American art criticism about Eakins, Alfred Kroeber was engaged in a friendly critical debate with his fellow Boasian anthropologist Edward Sapir over related matters of cultural creativity. The historian Susan Hegeman has provided a helpful summary and analysis of this timely debate. As she notes, whereas Kroeber downplayed the importance of the individual by locating creativity in larger “superorganic” forces of group custom and social behavior, Sapir—who was also a poet and literary critic for The Dial and other journals—emphasized notions of individuality and genius. “Because Sapir was himself a creative artist—and clearly interested, personally and intellectually, in the idea of creative ‘genius’—he was especially invested in the question of how creative individuals might negotiate and transform these cultural conventions,” which Kroeber had privileged. Sapir responded to Kroeber by coining the conciliatory term “national genius” to describe a cultural framework at once forming, and formed by, individuals, an idea rather close to that of Burroughs regarding Eakins noted above. In a 1924 essay, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” parts of which had appeared in The Dial in 1919, Sapir explained that “a genuine culture refuses to consider the individual as a mere cog in a wheel, as an entity whose sole raison d’être lies in his subservience to a collective purpose.” Accordingly, “genuine culture” constituted any creative contribution, in any group, that maintained internal harmony, balance, and self-satisfaction among members while avoiding hypocrisy. As Sapir also observed, “We may perhaps come nearest the mark by saying that the cultural conception we are now trying to grasp aims to embrace in a single term those general attitudes, views of life, and specific manifestations of civilization that give a particular people its distinctive place in the world. . . . Culture, then, may be briefly defined in so far as it embodies the national genius.”34 There is no clear evidence that Eakins’s posthumous critics ever read Sapir or vice versa, but some of their texts appeared in the same issues of The Dial, so some intertextuality may be at issue here. In any case, the fact that the artist’s critical reputation clearly was forged in the context of wider intellectual debates about the nature and origins of culture helps explain the rather grandiose and problematic claims made then and now about Eakins and his work. Indeed, art critics and art historians have never fully shed the confused, nineteenth-century language of environment and national character, though overt references to “race” largely dis-

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appeared until the post– civil rights era, when Eakins also became an artist known for depicting the “culture of an oppressed minority.” Even today, he remains “a great and distinctively American artist,” whose works are identified with “Philadelphia roots,” according to the catalogue of the most recent retrospective exhibition. Such statements contain an important kernel of historical truth about the artist’s home, upbringing, and citizenship, even as they partake of post-9/11 patriotism. Eakins will always be an American artist, whatever that means, but he and his artistic world encompassed a good deal more.35

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Notes

introduction: “this current confusion” 1.

Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Madrid, 2 December 1869, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, quoted in Kathleen A. Foster and Cheryl Leibold, Writing About Eakins: The Manuscripts in Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 211–12.

2.

Thomas Eakins to Stewart Culin, Philadelphia, 15 June 1905, Culin Archival Collection, Brooklyn Museum.

3.

“Eakins Chats on Art of America,” Philadelphia Press, 22 February 1914, quoted in Lloyd Goodrich, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Work (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1933), 139; William Innes Homer, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art (New York: Abbeville Press, 1992), 249.

4.

Kathleen A. Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered: Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 90–91; Frances K. Pohl, “Black and White in America,” in Stephen F. Eisenman, ed., Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History, 2nd ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 202; Donelson F. Hoopes, Eakins Watercolors (New York: Watson Guptill, 1971), 44; Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art, 4: From the American Revolution to World War I, vol. 2: Black Models and White Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 190.

5.

On the culture concept, see Michael Elliott, The Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 1–34; Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Richard Handler, “Boasian Anthropology and the Critique of American Culture,” American Quarterly 42, no. 2 (June 1990): 252– 73; George W. Stocking, Jr., ed., Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); idem, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 161–233; idem, “The Basic Assumptions of Boasian Anthropology,” in A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American An-

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thropology, 1883–1911, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 1–20. 6. Franz Boas, “The Outlook for the American Negro” (Commencement Address at Atlanta University, 31 May 1906), in A Franz Boas Reader, 314. On Dewey, Bourne, and Locke, see Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 377–408. 7. A[rthur] L. Kroeber, “The Superorganic,” American Anthropologist 19, no. 2 (April–June 1917): 163–213; the quoted passage appears on page 163. 8. Thomas Eakins to Frances Eakins, Paris, 1 April 1869, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (hereafter AAA), microfilm reel 640, frames 1480–87; Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, 1 November 1866, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, quoted in Foster and Leibold, Writing About Eakins, 204; Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, 12 March 1867, cited by Lloyd Goodrich, Thomas Eakins, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1982), 1:23. 9. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), edited by J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 45, 47, 54, 105, 141. On Arnold, see Marc Manganaro, Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 2–7, 20, 27–29, 34, 54, 122–24. 10. E[dward] B[urnett] Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1871), 1:1. On Arnold and Tylor, see George W. Stocking, Jr., “Matthew Arnold, E. B. Tylor, and the Uses of Invention,” in Race, Culture, and Evolution, 6–90. 11. S[amuel] Augustus Mitchell, Mitchell’s Intermediate or Secondary Geography (Philadelphia: Thomas, Cowperthwait & Co., 1849), 10, 19–20, 59–60. According to Lloyd Goodrich, Eakins “was named Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins, after one of his mother’s brothers” (she was one of ten children). Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 1:4. On Eakins’s Cowperthwait relatives, see Amy Werbel, Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 154. For more on Eakins’s grammar school textbooks, including his copies of maps from Mitchell’s, see Alan C. Braddock, “Displacing Orientalism: Thomas Eakins and Ethnographic Modernity” (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 2002), 31–35, 39–42; Gordon Hendricks, The Life and Work of Thomas Eakins (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1974), 6–7. 12. Rembrandt Peale, Graphics, The Art of Accurate Delineation; A System of School Exercise for the Education of the Eye and the Training of the Hand, as Auxiliary to Writing, Geography, and Drawing (Philadelphia: Edward C. Biddle, 1845), 51. 13. On classicism at Girard College (specifically, Founder’s Hall, a Greek Revival design by Thomas Ustick Walter), see Philadelphia Architecture: A Guide to the City, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Foundation for Architecture, 1994), 39. 14. Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 25. On social evolutionism at American world’s fairs, see ibid., 31–41; Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 15. Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society; or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism and Civilization (1877; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964), 5–6.

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16. Curtis M. Hinsley, The Smithsonian and the American Indian: Making a Moral Anthropology in Victorian America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981). 17. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), especially 11–21. On the “Synoptic History of Inventions,” see Elliott, Culture Concept, 6–7; Ira Jacknis, “Franz Boas and Exhibits: On the Limitations of the Museum Method of Anthropology,” in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 78. 18. Gerald Ackerman, “Thomas Eakins and His Parisian Masters Gérôme and Bonnat,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, 73 (April 1969): 235–56. 19. On photographic reproductions owned by Eakins, see Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 237–38 n. 3. 20. H. Barbara Weinberg, Thomas Eakins and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), 23; Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 34, 91. 21. For a discussion of nineteenth-century American minstrelsy, white expropriation, and notions of “folk” culture based on the ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 15–17, 30, 39, 92–93, 101–3, 177, 180, 244 n. 27, 246 n. 3, 258 n. 26. On the rise of Gilded Age folklore studies, see Simon J. Bronner, Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1998). 22. [Earl Shinn], “Eleventh Exhibition of the Water-color Society,” The Nation 26, no. 661 (28 February 1878): 156–57; T. F. Crane, “Plantation Folk-Lore,” Popular Science Monthly 18 (1880–81): 824–25; William Owens, “Folk-Lore of the Southern Negroes,” Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science 20 (December 1877): 748–55; Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, ed. Robert Hemenway (New York: Penguin, 1892). Regarding Eakins and Frost, see Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 91 and 250 nn. 43 and 53. 23. For more discussion of the Lincoln portrait, see Alan C. Braddock, “Eakins, Race, and Ethnographic Ambivalence,” Winterthur Portfolio 33, nos. 2/3 (Autumn–Winter 1998): 135–61. In a recent lecture, Sarah Blackwood has noted that the Brady image represented Lincoln and Tad viewing a photograph album (College Art Association, Dallas, Texas, 23 February 2008). Such a distinction probably eluded the average viewer of Harper’s Weekly, as well as Eakins, given the lack of specificity in Brady’s image itself in this regard. 24. On the Compromise of 1877, see Paul S. Boyer, ed., The Oxford Companion to United States History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 150. Regarding Reconstruction, black literacy, and segregation in Philadelphia, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Perennial Library, 1989); Ira V. Brown, “Pennsylvania and the Rights of the Negro, 1865–1887,” Pennsylvania History 28, no. 1 (January 1961): 45–57; Harry C. Silcox, “Philadelphia Negro Educator: Jacob C. White, Jr., 1837–1902,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 97, no. 1 (January 1973): 75–98; idem, “Nineteenth Century Philadelphia Black Militant: Octavius V. Catto (1839–1871),” Pennsylvania History 44, no. 1 (January 1977): 53–76. 25. Homer’s Sunday Morning in Virginia is discussed in Peter H. Wood and Karen Dal-

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ton, Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 85–88. 26. On black professionals in Philadelphia, see Roger Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 26–27. Hoopes, Eakins Watercolors, 44. Elizabeth Johns, Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 129, has noted the three ages of man motif in other works. On the motif in general, see James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 9. 27. Goodrich, Thomas Eakins, 1:108; Nicolai Cikovsky, American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 1:170. 28. [Shinn], “Eleventh Exhibition of the Water-color Society,” 156–57. 29. On Eakins and Shinn, see Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 31–36, 44, 47, 56, 65– 67, 83–86, 90–94, 123–24, 130, 134, 144–45, 164, 172, 184–86; Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 1:9–10, 17, 21, 89, 121–22, 135–36, 167, 255; 2:204, 275–76. 30. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852; reprint New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), xiii, 385. 31. Martin A. Berger, “Sentimental Realism in Thomas Eakins’s Late Portraits,” in Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, ed. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 248. 32. Frances K. Pohl, Framing America: A Social History of American Art, 2nd ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008), 217. See also Teresa A. Carbone and Patricia Hills, Eastman Johnson: Painting America (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1999), 121–65. On postbellum white nationalism, see Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 33. Independent, 14 February 1878, 7, quoted by Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 95. On Eakins’s painting as depicting a private scene, see Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1990), 102. 34. Amy Schrager Lang, “Class and the Strategies of Sympathy,” in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 128–42; the quoted passage appears on page 137. 35. The references to “snobs” and earning “a respectable living” appear respectively in Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, 17 March 1868, and Thomas Eakins to Caroline Cowperthwait Eakins, Paris, 1 October 1866, both Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; see Foster and Leibold, Writing About Eakins, 58, and Henry Adams, Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 146. On Eakins’s studio as the setting for The Dancing Lesson, see Hoopes, Eakins Watercolors, 44. 36. For the most detailed account of the academy scandal and other troubles involving Eakins, see Foster and Leibold, Writing About Eakins, 69–121. On Eakins’s middleclass upbringing and aspirations, see Darrel Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001), 1, 6; Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 9–12; Homer, Thomas Eakins, 13–14. 37. [Earl Shinn], “Art-Study at the Imperial School in Paris,” The Nation 8, no. 198 (15 April

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1869), 294. William Crowell to Thomas Eakins, Avondale, Pa., 10 April 1890, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Van Rensselaer quoted in Sewell, Thomas Eakins, xi, xvi; Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 1:113, 2:8, 22, 59, 64, 224; Margaret McHenry, Thomas Eakins, Who Painted (Oreland, Pa., privately printed, 1946), 51, 108, 114, 116, 121. 38. Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:8. On the friendship between Eakins and Chase, see ibid., 2:220; idem, Thomas Eakins (1933), 190. For the portrait of Chase, see Phyllis D. Rosenzweig, The Thomas Eakins Collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977), 170–71. In The German Ideology (1846), Karl Marx wrote: “The expansion of trade and manufacture accelerated the accumulation of movable capital, while in the guilds, which were not stimulated to extend their production, natural capital remained stationary or even declined. Trade and manufacture created the big bourgeoisie; in the guilds was concentrated the petty bourgeoisie, which no longer was dominant in the towns as formerly, but had to bow to the might of the great merchants and manufacturers.” Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 182. Forced to “bow” economically before modern merchant capitalists, Eakins early in his career found human subject-specimens (see Plates 1, 3, 7, 8) whose working-class poverty or social marginalization provided him with both an object of fictive identification and a foil to buttress his middle-class aspirations. By representing such specimens bowing or otherwise resigned before the artist-beholder, Eakins aptly, if asymmetrically, figured his own petit bourgeois predicament. 39. Thomas Eakins to Mrs. Benson, 12 February 1897, Philadelphia Museum of Art, quoted in Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:6. 40. On Eakins and boxing, see Marjorie Walter, “Fine Art and the Sweet Science: On Thomas Eakins, His Boxing Paintings, and Turn-of-the-Century Philadelphia” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996). 41. Thomas Eakins to Harrison Morris, 23 April 1894, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. On Eakins’s attitudes toward women and modern art, see Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 14; Thomas Eakins to Mrs. Benson, 12 February 1897, transcription by Susan Macdowell Eakins, Philadelphia Museum of Art, quoted in Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:6. 42. Hippolyte Taine, The Philosophy of Art (1865), trans. John Durand (New York: Holt & Williams, 1873), 101–2. On Taine, see also Leo Weinstein, Hippolyte Taine (New York: Twayne, 1972); Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, eds., Art in Theory, 1815– 1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), 610–14. 43. Elizabeth Milroy, “Thomas Eakins’ Artistic Training, 1860–1870” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1986), 237, 239; Homer, Thomas Eakins, 38. Earl Shinn to Anna Shipley, 10 November 1866, Richard Tapper Cadbury Collection, Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, quoted in Daniel Timothy Lenehan, “Fashioning Taste: Earl Shinn, Art Criticism, and Gilded Age America” (B.A. thesis, Haverford College, 2005), 28. On Taine and Eakins, see also Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 16; John Wilmerding, ed., Thomas Eakins (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 36. 44. Hippolyte Taine, The Ideal in Art (1867), trans. John Durand (New York: Holt & Williams, 1872), 48–49.

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45. Quoted in Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:5. 46. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 146–62. For more on of Eakins in Europe, see Chapter 1. 47. A classic study of transformation in American modernity is Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). See also Mark Simpson, Trafficking Subjects: The Politics of Mobility in NineteenthCentury America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 48. Regarding the Philadelphia visit of Japanese ambassadors, see Philadelphia Inquirer, 12 May 1860, supplement; 17 May 1860, 4; Russell F. Weigley, ed., Philadelphia: A 300-Year History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1982), 381–82. On the Wanamaker store, see William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1994), passim. 49. On The Chess Players, see Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 34, 58; Martin A. Berger, Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 71–84. I thank Barry Harwood of the Brooklyn Museum for discussing the picture with me in relation to nineteenth-century wicker and decorative arts. See also Jeremy Adamson, American Wicker: Woven Furniture from 1850 to 1930 (New York: Rizzoli, 1993). For more on Antiquated Music, see Chapter 3. 50. Caroline Golab, “The Immigrant and the City: Poles, Italians, and Jews in Philadelphia, 1870–1920,” in The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and LowerClass Life, 1790–1940, ed. Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), 203–30. See also Frederick Miller, “Black Migration to Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 108, no. 3 (July 1984): 315–50; Weigley, ed., Philadelphia, 471–523; Roger Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 20. On Eakins’s artistic commission in Brooklyn and teaching positions at the Cooper Union and National Academy of Design in New York during the 1890s, see Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, xxxvi–xxxvii. New York immigration statistics for the years around 1900 can be found in Paul Boyer, ed., Oxford Companion to United States History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 553. 51. For photographs by Eakins of African Americans and immigrants, see, for example, Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 162; Susan Danly and Cheryl Leibold, Eakins and the Photograph: Works by Thomas Eakins and His Circle in the Collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Washington, D.C.: Published for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 39, 147–48, 176, 185; Homer, Thomas Eakins, 209. See also the print inscribed “Bess with Ornery Jake, May 26, 1881” (1988.10.55) in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. 52. Joseph Pennell, “A Ramble in Old Philadelphia,” The Century Magazine 23, no. 5 (March 1882): 655–67; the quoted passage appears on page 662; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 44. 53. Weinberg, Thomas Eakins, 33; Natalie Spassky, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Princeton University Press, 1980), 2:627–29; McHenry, Thomas Eakins, 106–7. Carrie Tirado

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Notes to Pages 26–30

Bramen, The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 54. Franz Boas, “The History of Anthropology” (1904), reprinted in A Franz Boas Reader, 34. On cultural migration and diffusion, see Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, 77–80, 106, 139–41, 146, 151–52, 205–9. For an important study of the cultural effects of diffusion, see James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). 55. Karen Linn, That Half-Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in American Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 5–39; Philip F. Gura and James F. Bollman, America’s Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). For more on the banjo, see Leo G. Mazow, Picturing the Banjo (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2005). 56. Pohl, Framing America, 2nd ed., 316–17. For more on Tanner, see Alan C. Braddock, “Painting the World’s Christ: Tanner, Hybridity, and the Blood of the Holy Land,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 3, no. 2 (Autumn 2004): http:// 19thc-artworldwide .org/autumn_04/articles/brad.shtml (online article); and Albert Boime, “Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Subversion of Genre,” Art Bulletin 75 (September 1993): 416–42. 57. Pohl, Framing America, 2nd ed., 317. The same plucking gesture seems to appear in the Eakins painting, suggesting that both artists were aware of modern banjo-playing methods. 58. On other pictures by Eakins showing banjos, see Mazow, Picturing the Banjo, 86–88, 167–69. 59. On Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson, his later biblical pictures, and the complexities of identity, see Braddock, “Painting the World’s Christ.” On Tanner’s ancestry, see Marcia M. Mathews, Henry Ossawa Tanner: American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 6. For a discussion of “strategic essentialism” in postcolonial theory, see The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed. Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean (New York: Routledge, 1995), 159, 204. 60. Commentary and quotation from Alain Locke, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations (unpublished manuscript, 1915), in Menand, Metaphysical Club, 398. 61. On the problem of cultural ownership, see Michael F. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); Scott Michaelsen, The Limits of Multiculturalism: Interrogating the Origins of American Anthropology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Werner Sollors, “A Critique of Pure Pluralism,” in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., Reconstructing American Literary History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 250–79. On Locke’s criticism of Tanner, see Braddock, “Painting the World’s Christ.” 62. Brad Evans, Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865– 1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2. 63. On urban typing in the early twentieth century, see, for example, Rebecca Zurier, Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 109–10, 130–34, 168, 181–82, 188, 191–92, 205–9, 220–21, 231– 37, 258; Rebecca Zurier, Robert W. Snyder, and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York (New York: National Museum of American Art in association with W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), 115–30. See also Bramen, The Uses of Variety.

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64. Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 59–92. 65. Ibid; Alexander Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale, 1812–1824 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); JoAnne Marie Mancini, Pre-Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Evans, Before Cultures. 66. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). 67.

For a critique of “cultural diversity” as a “shibboleth” of ongoing American exceptionalism, see Bramen, The Uses of Variety, 5.

chapter 1: “amongst strangers” 1.

On Eakins in Europe, see H. Barbara Weinberg, “Studies in Paris and Spain,” in Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 13–26; Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 32–48; Milroy, “Thomas Eakins’ Artistic Training,” 75–336. For general discussion of Americans abroad, including Eakins, see Kathleen Adler, Americans in Paris, 1860–1900 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2006); H. Barbara Weinberg, The Lure of Paris: American Artists at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (New York: Abbeville, 1991); idem, The American Pupils of Jean-Léon Gérôme (Fort Worth, Texas: Amon Carter Museum, 1984).

2. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, 29 October 1868 and 24 June 1869, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; see Foster and Leibold, Writing About Eakins, 208–10. 3. Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflections, 146–62. On Eakins, Spain, and Bonnat, see M. Elizabeth Boone, Vistas de España: American Views of Art and Life in Spain, 1860–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 61–89; H. Barbara Weinberg, “American Artists’ Taste for Spanish Painting,” in Gary Tinterow and Geneviève Lacambre, Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), 271–79; Weinberg, “Studies in Paris and Spain,” in Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 19–26; Suzanne L. Stratton, Spain, Espagne, Spanien: Foreign Artists Discover Spain, 1800–1900 (New York: The Equitable Gallery in association with the Spanish Institute, 1993), 59–62, 67–70, 75, 112. 4. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Madrid, 2 December 1869, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; see Foster and Leibold, Writing About Eakins, 210–13; Thomas Eakins to unknown recipient, Seville, 16 January 1870, cited by Homer, Thomas Eakins, 44; Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Seville, 26 January 1870, Philadelphia Museum of Art, quoted by Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 1:55–56. 5. Weinberg, “Studies in Paris and Spain,” in Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 13; Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 48. For a critique of Goodrich, see Henry Adams, Thomas Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 17–25. 6. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, 26 October 1866, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, cited in Foster and Leibold, Writing About Eakins, 201. 7. Thomas Eakins to Frances Eakins, Paris, 3 April 1868, AAA; Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, 31 May 1867, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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Notes to Pages 38–46

8. Hippolyte Taine, Histoire de la littérature anglaise, 4 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1863–64). On Taine, see Evans, Before Cultures, 12–13, 22, 83–95, 100; Weinstein, Taine. For discussion of Taine, Eakins, and the École, see Milroy, “Thomas Eakins’ Artistic Training,” 232–45; Weinberg, “Studies in Paris and Spain,” in Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 16; William Innes Homer, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art (New York: Abbeville, 1992), 36–38. 9. Taine, Ideal in Art, 29, 52–54. 10. Taine, Philosophy of Art, 21–24, 32–33, 67–70, 171, 180–90; idem, Ideal in Art, 29, 33, 42, 48, 52–54, 67, 74–75; Homer, Thomas Eakins, 38. 11. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Madrid, 2 December 1869, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; see Foster and Leibold, Writing About Eakins, 210– 12; Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), originally published in Le Figaro, quoted in David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003), 15; Franz Boas, “The Occurrence of Similar Inventions in Areas Widely Apart,” Science 9, no. 226 (June 1887): 485–86. 12. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Madrid, 2 December 1869, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; see Foster and Leibold, Writing About Eakins, 212; Thomas Eakins to [Benjamin Eakins], Paris, 3 June 1869, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, 31 May 1867, Philadelphia Museum of Art, cited by Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 1:30. 13. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Madrid, 2 December 1869, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; see Foster and Leibold, Writing About Eakins, 212. On American tourism in France, see Harvey A. Levenstein, Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 14. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), xiv–xviii, 19, 31. 15. Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1933), 113: “His chief interest was in character, for which he had a powerful instinct.” 16. Thomas Eakins to Frances Eakins, 26 March 1869, AAA, quoted in Adler, Americans in Paris, 12. 17. Harvey, Paris, 3; on Haussmann’s urban renewal project, see ibid., 3–4, 7–14, 110–14; Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflections, 159–60. 18. Marilyn R. Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians: The Myth of the Artist in NineteenthCentury France (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985), 28–30, 40–47, 52–53, 56, 66–70, 73, 79, 82–85. On restrictions and surveillance in Paris during the Second Empire, see Harvey, Paris, 146–49. Regarding pifferari, see Ackerman, “Thomas Eakins and His Parisian Masters,” 239; idem, “Gérôme’s Pifferari,” Stanford Museum 8–9 (1978–79): 9–13; John Zucchi, “Les Petits Italiens: Italian Child Street Musicians in Paris, 1815–1875,” Studi Emigrazione 27, no. 97 (1990): 27–53. Napoleon III’s cautious gestures to labor are discussed in Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (New York: Manchester University Press, 1988), 37; Harvey, Paris, 298–99. 19. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, 23 December 1866, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. On observing Paris street protests and his intention to avoid political engagement, see Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, 14 May 1869, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. For discussion of

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Eakins’s growing disaffection about imperial administration of the École, see Milroy, “Thomas Eakins’ Artistic Training,” 253–54. 20. W. Pembroke Fetridge, Harper’s Handbook for Travellers in Europe (New York: Harper’s, 1867), 97; Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, in The Complete Travel Books of Mark Twain: The Early Works, ed. Charles Nieder (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1966), 88, both quoted in Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 88. 21. Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 88; Thomas Eakins to Frances Eakins, Paris, 30 October 1866, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. 22. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, 11 November 1866, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Thomas Eakins to Frances Eakins, Paris, 1 April 1869, AAA, microfilm reel 640, frames 1480–87. 23. Laure de Margerie and Édouard Papet, Facing the Other: Charles Cordier (1827–1905) Ethnographic Sculptor, trans. Lenora Ammon, Laurel Hirsch, and Claire Palmieri (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004), 93–125. 24. On Potteau, see ibid., 92–93, 96–103, 106–11, 113, 116–17, 119–23, 225–26. Manet’s Afro-Caribbean model Laure is discussed in Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism (New York: Walker & Co., 2006), 107; Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (New York: Routledge, 1999), 277–81. 25. Zeynep Çelik , “Speaking Back to Orientalist Discourse,” in Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography, ed. Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 19–41; the quoted passage appears on page 23. For Osman Hamdi, see Holly Edwards, Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 13–14, 82–84. 26. Thomas Eakins to Frances Eakins, Paris, 1 April 1869, AAA, microfilm reel 640, frames 1480–87. 27. Report of 1867 to the emperor by the facteurs d’instruments de musique, quoted in T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 103; Haussmann quoted in Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992), 14; “Going Abroad,” Putnam’s Magazine, n.s. 1 (1868): 530–31, quoted in Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 95; Gérôme quoted in Fanny Field Hering, “Gérôme,” The Century Magazine 37, no. 4 (February 1889): 489. 28. Taine, Philosophy of Art, 140; Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, 1 November 1866, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Maurice Barrés, Les Déracinés (Paris, 1897), quoted in Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century, 11, 15. 29. For references to Eakins’s revolver, see Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Seville, 7 December 1869, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; McHenry, Thomas Eakins, 119; Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 1:32–33, 280, 2:6, 220; Adam Emory Albright, “Memories of Thomas Eakins,” Harper’s Bazaar 81 (August 1947): 184. 30. Victor Hugo, quoted and translated in Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 116. 31. Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 116; Report of the United States Commissioners to the Paris Exposition 1867 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1870), 1:13. 32. Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 85; Eugene Rimmel, Recollections of the Paris Exhibition of 1867 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1868), 1.

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Notes to Pages 52–59

33. Harvey, Paris, 259 34. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, 31 May 1867, Philadelphia Museum of Art, cited by Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 1:30. On the Okel, see François Ducuing, L’Exposition Universelle de 1867 illustrée (Paris: Administration, 1868), 1:59–60, 339– 42, 459–62. For a summary of Eakins’s letters about the exposition, see Milroy, “Thomas Eakins’ Artistic Training,” 150–54. 35. Thomas Eakins to Frances Eakins, Paris, 1 April 1869, AAA, microfilm reel 640, frames 1480–87. 36. Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 12–13. On the denial of coevalness and the ethnographic present, see Fabian, Time and the Other, 25, 31, 80–81. 37. Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics, 15. Gérôme’s trip to Egypt is discussed in Gerald Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme (New York: Sotheby’s, 1986), 84. 38. Théophile Gautier, “Salon de 1857 (IV): MM. Gérome, Mottez,” L’Artiste, 5 July 1857, 247, quoted and translated in Mary Anne Stevens, ed., The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse, European Painters in North Africa and the Near East (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1984), 139. 39. Ibid., 246, quoted and translated in Stevens, ed., The Orientalists, 145; Théophile Gautier, “Gérôme, tableaux, études, et croquis de voyage,” L’Artiste 3 (1856): 23, quoted and translated in Ackerman, Jean-Léon Gérôme, 45. 40. Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn, pseud.], Gérôme, A Collection of the Works of J. L. Gérôme in One Hundred Photogravures (New York: Hall, 1881–87); Charles Bargue, Cours de dessin (Paris: Goupil, 1868). On Gérôme and his dealer, see Hélène Lafont-Couturier, Gérôme & Goupil: Art and Enterprise (New York: Dahesh Museum, 2000). 41. Émile Galichon, “M. Gérôme, Peintre Ethnographe,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 24, no. 2 (Feb. 1868): 147–51. On the overlapping social circles of Taine and Gérôme, see Ackerman, Jean-Léon Gérôme, 84, and Weinstein, Taine, 21. 42. Frédéric Masson, “J.-L. Gérome, Peintre de l’Orient,” Le Figaro illustré 19, no. 136 (July 1901): 8–21. Masson had accompanied Gérome on his 1868 expedition to Egypt and Asia Minor. George de Forest Brush, “Open Letters: American Artists on Gérôme,” The Century Magazine 37, no. 4 (February 1889): 635. 43. Eugene Benson, “Jean-Léon Gérôme,” The Galaxy 1 (1 August 1866): 681–87; the quoted passages appear on pages 684–87. 44. Jules-Antoine Castagnary, “Année 1857,” in Salons I, 1857–1870 (Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1892), 1:31, quoted in Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics, 24–25. For the Algiers reference, see Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, 14 September 1869, quoted by Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 1:52. 45. Robert Flynn Johnson and Joseph R. Goldyne, Master Drawings from the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts/The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Richard Burton, S.A., 1985), 200, no. 92; Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 236 n. 8. 46. For information about the early title and exhibition history of Eakins’s Female Model, see object file 1966.41, American Paintings Department, De Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. See also Braddock, “Eakins, Race, and Ethnographic

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Ambivalence,” 141–42. For a useful discussion of the ébauche in Eakins’s academic training at the École, see Milroy, “Thomas Eakins’ Artistic Training,” 199–203. 47. Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1933), [161], no. 30; Sidney Kaplan, “The Negro in the Art of Homer and Eakins,” Massachusetts Review 7, no. 1 (Winter 1966): unpaginated; Honour, Image of the Black, 188; McElroy, Facing History, 87–89. McElroy erroneously dates Eakins’s Female Model (here titled A Negress) “circa 1900” based on a mistaken perception of its level of technical achievement and on a vague racial association with the artist’s late Portrait of Henry O. Tanner (see Plate 10). 48. David M. Lubin, “Modern Psychological Selfhood in the Art of Thomas Eakins,” in Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America, ed. Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 133–66. 49. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), quoted by Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 85. 50. A reproduction and discussion of Nattier’s Mademoiselle Clermont can be found in Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 287–89. 51. On Benoist’s Portrait of a Black Woman and ideas about “Liberty,” see ibid., 297–301. Pollock notes that the painting entered the Louvre collection in 1826. See also Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 42–46, 57–63; James Smalls, “Esclave, Nègre, Noir: The Representation of Blacks in Late 18th and 19th-Century French Art” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1991), 69–89; idem, “Slavery Is a Woman: Race, Gender and Visuality in Marie Benoist’s Portrait d’une négresse,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 3, no. 1 (Spring 2004): http://19thc-artworldwide .org/spring_04/ articles/smal.html (online article). 52. Smalls, “Esclave,” 71; Grigsby, Extremities, 59–60. 53. Charles Cordier, “Types ethniques représentés par la sculpture,” Bulletin de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris (6 February 1862): 66, quoted and translated in de Margerie and Papet, Facing the Other, 28. 54. Charles Cordier to Count de Nieuwerkerke, director of the Imperial Museums and superintendent of the Beaux-Arts, 18 November 1865, National Archives, Paris, quoted in ibid. As noted in the foreword to de Margerie and Papet, Facing the Other, 11, “The newly reopened Algerian onyx-marble quarries, abandoned since antiquity, solidified Cordier’s preference for vividly colored marble.” 55. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, 28 September 1869, Philadelphia Museum of Art, quoted by Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 1:28; Honour, Image of the Black, 166. 56. For reproductions of the paintings by Delacroix and Ingres, see Robert Rosenblum and H. W. Janson, 19th-Century Art (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1984), plates 21, 22. 57. Dianne W. Pitman, Bazille: Purity, Pose, and Painting in the 1860s (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998), 63–64, 66, 168–69; Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 295. 58. Pitman, Bazille, 180. 59. For a discussion of Giovanni Morelli, connoisseurship, and the psychology of detection, see Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Workshop Journal 9, no. 1 (1980): 5–36.

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Notes to Pages 67–76

60. On Eakins’s Paris models and account books, see Milroy, “Thomas Eakins’ Artistic Training,” 250, 270 n. 48. Frédéric Bazille to Camille Bazille (née Vialars), his mother, 1870, published and translated in J. Patrice Marandel, Frédéric Bazille and Early Impressionism (Chicago: Art Institute, 1978), 182 (English translation) and 209 (original French). For the possible identification of the model Laure (surname unknown) as an orphan born in Paris on 19 April 1839 and baptized the following day, see Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 255. On Bazille, Eakins, and the Salon of 1870, see Pitman, Bazille, 153; on Bazille’s studio and friendships with Renoir and Manet in 1869–70, see ibid., 147–51. Eakins’s Paris accommodations are listed in Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, xxv–xxvii. 61. Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics; Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 294. 62. Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 292. For examples of colonial souvenir postcards, see Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 63. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, “Autumn” 1869, Philadelphia Museum of Art, cited by Milroy, “Thomas Eakins’ Artistic Training,” 251. 64. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, 14 September 1869, Philadelphia Museum of Art, quoted by Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 1:52. On Eakins and Hispanism, see note 3 above. 65. Thomas Eakins to unidentified recipient, Paris, 1869, quoted in Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 47; Milroy, “Thomas Eakins’ Artistic Training,” 296–97. 66. Carol M. Osborne, “Yankee Painters at the Prado,” in Stratton, Spain, Espagne, Spanien, 112; Milroy, “Thomas Eakins’ Artistic Training,” 298; Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 47. For further discussion of Carmelita Requeña, see Braddock, “Displacing Orientalism,” 127–46. Weinberg, Thomas Eakins, 10–11; Spassky, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2:586–88. On the “premier coup” technique, see Milroy, “Thomas Eakins’s Artistic Training,” 288. 67.

Thomas Eakins to Frances Eakins, Seville, 25 December 1869, Philadelphia Museum of Art, quoted by Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1933), 162.

68. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, 26 January 1870, Philadelphia Museum of Art, quoted by Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 1:55–56. 69. Victor Hugo, Oeuvres poétiques, ed. Pierre Albouy (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 1:580. 70. Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians, 51–53, 73–84. For references to Carmelita Requeña as a “gypsy,” see Homer, Thomas Eakins, 44–45; Milroy, “Thomas Eakins’ Artistic Training,” 297–98. 71. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Seville, 7 December 1869, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. 72. Thomas Eakins to unknown recipient, Seville, 16 January 1870, Philadelphia Museum of Art, quoted by Homer, Thomas Eakins, 44. 73. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Seville, 26 January 1870, Philadelphia Museum of Art, quoted by Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 1:55–56. 74. Prosper Mérimée, “Carmen” (1845), in Carmen and Other Stories, translated with an introduction by Nicholas Jotcham (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1–53.

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75. Henry Blackburn, Travelling in Spain in the Present Day (London: Sampson Low & Son, 1866), 150–51; George Borrow, The Zincali; or, An Account of the Gypsies of Spain (New York: Carter, 1841), 62; Richard Ford, A Handbook for Travellers in Spain (London: John Murray, 1869), 282, 302. 76. For Eakins’s Spanish notebook, see Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 359. For the identification of Triana’s street names, see the map in Ford, A Handbook for Travellers in Spain, facing page 279. 77. For general history on the Gypsies, see Isabel Fonseca, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey (New York: Vintage, 1996). 78. Katie Trumpener, “The Time of the Gypsies: A ‘People without History,’ in the Narratives of the West,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 843–84; Borrow, Zincali, 7, 19. 79. Borrow, Zincali, 54, 68, 75. On Gypsy hybridity, see also Gwynne Edwards, Flamenco! (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 21. 80. On A Street Scene in Seville and related sketches, see Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 47, 58, and 353–59. A reproduction of the drawing in question appears on page 359. 81. M. Elizabeth Boone has suggested that A Street Scene in Seville indirectly critiques American “Bourbons,” conservative post–Civil War Democrats, whom Eakins derides in his European correspondence as “Copperheads.” Boone also echoes other recent scholarship in arguing that the painting “promotes a metaphorical parallel between recently freed blacks in the United States and the Sevillian street musicians in his paintings.” Boone, Vistas de España, 72. On Spain’s September Revolution and First Republic, see Charles J. Esdaile, Spain in the Liberal Age: From Constitution to Civil War, 1808– 1939 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), 126; Joseph A. Brandt, Toward the New Spain: The Spanish Revolution of 1868 and the First Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933); Glenn T. Harper, “The Birth of the First Spanish Republic,” Iberian Studies 16, nos. 1–2 (1987): 71–83. 82. For more discussion of A Street Scene in Seville, see Braddock, “Displacing Orientalism,” 146–55, 164. 83. Ford, Handbook, 303–4. The picturesque figure of the baratero, or Gypsy knife-fighter, was well known in Europe thanks in part to Gustave Doré, Manual del baratero ó arte de manejar la navaja [el cuchillo y la tijera de los jitanos] (Madrid: Heliodoro, 1849). 84. The quoted passages from Gautier appear in Marina Grut, The Bolero School: An Illustrated History of the Bolero, the Sequidillas and the Escuela Bolero: Syllabus and Dances (Toronto: Dance Books, 2002), 90. On Bolero arm positions, see 226–27. 85. Nancy G. Heller, “What’s There, What’s Not: A Performer’s View of Sargent’s El Jaleo,” American Art 14, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 8–23. 86. On Manet’s Spanish Ballet, see Tinterow and Lacambre, Manet/Velázquez, 488–89. Grut, Bolero School, reproduces various popular illustrations of the fourth arm position, including one by Gustave Doré, 87. 87. A reproduction of the Spanish Acrobat (ca. 1869, albumen carte de visite, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia), owned by Eakins, can be found in Braddock, “Displacing Orientalism,” 551. For Eakins’s “compañia gymnastica” reference, see Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 47. References to the circus appear in Thomas Eakins to Caroline Cowperthwait Eakins, Paris, 1 April 1869, AAA, microfilm reel

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Notes to Pages 84–90

640, frames 1480–87; Thomas Eakins to [Benjamin Eakins], Paris, 3 June 1869, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. On the circus as spectacle of difference, see Ellen Strain, “Exotic Bodies, Distant Landscapes: Touristic Viewing and Popularized Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century,” Wide Angle 18, no. 2 (1996): 70–100.

chapter 2: “what kind of people are there” 1. For surveys of Eakins’s work during this period, see Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 27– 256; Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 123–88. A list of works by Eakins between 1871 and 1885 can be found in Elizabeth Milroy, Guide to the Thomas Eakins Research Collection with a Lifetime Exhibition Record and Bibliography. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1996), 19–25. 2. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, 6 March 1868, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; see Foster and Leibold, Writing About Eakins, 207. On the specific season, time of day, and Schuylkill River setting reconstructed by Eakins, see Johns, Thomas Eakins, 20. 3. For discussion of the Quakers in The Champion Single Sculls, see Berger, Man Made, 12–21; Johns, Thomas Eakins, 20, 39. 4. Regarding the ubiquity of West’s Penn’s Treaty, see Anne Cannon Palumbo, “Averting ‘Present Commotions’: History as Politics in Penn’s Treaty,” American Art 9, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 28. 5. Eakins’s activities with the “Schuylkill Navy” are discussed in Helen A. Cooper, Thomas Eakins: The Rowing Pictures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 25–36; Johns, Thomas Eakins, 24, 36–39, 41, 43. On Eakins’s Quaker ancestry, see Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, xxiii; Werbel, Thomas Eakins, 3–4, 150–56. 6. On Eakins’s William Rush, see Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 35–38, 59–68; Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 144–50; Johns, Thomas Eakins, 82–114. 7. Written statement by Eakins, Sartain Family Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, quoted in Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 35–36. On the Schuylkill as “hidden river,” see www.schuylkillriver.org, the official website of the Schuylkill River National and State Heritage Area. 8. On Centennial-era historicism in William Rush and the model’s class status, see Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 144; Johns, Thomas Eakins, 85, 95, 98. 9. Ellwood C. Parry, III, and Maria Chamberlin-Hellman, “Thomas Eakins as an Illustrator, 1878–1881,” American Art Journal 5 (May 1973): 20–45. 10. Ibid., 45. 11. Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer, “The Philadelphia Exhibition—II,” The American Architect and Building News 8 (25 December 1880): 303, quoted in Cooper, Rowing Pictures, 52. 12.

On the American local color literary movement in general, see Tom Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003); Stephanie Foote, Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in NineteenthCentury American Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000); Elizabeth Ammons and Valerie Rohy, eds., American Local Color Writing, 1880–1920 (New

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York: Penguin, 1998). See also Evans, Before Cultures, 4, 10–12, 22, 82–151; Joseph Pennell, “A Ramble in Old Philadelphia,” The Century Magazine 23, no. 5 (March 1882): 655–67; Elizabeth Robins Pennell, “To Gipsyland,” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 45, no. 1 (November 1892): 109–21; 45, no. 2 (December 1892): 258–71; 45, no. 3 (January 1893): 414–24; idem, Our Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1916). 13. For discussion of the etymology of “local color,” see Bodo L. Richer, “Genesis and Fortunes of the Term ‘Couleur Locale’: A Review Article,” Comparative Literature Studies 3 (1966): 299–308; Emile Malakis, “The First Use of Couleur Locale in French Literary Criticism,” Modern Language Notes 60, no. 2 (February 1945): 98–99. 14. Henry Theophilus Finck, Spain and Morocco: Studies in Local Color (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1891). On the history of “couleur locale” in French literature and European music, see Chantal Vieuille, Histoire régionale de la littérature en France (Paris: Plon, 1986); Robert L. A. Clark, “Local Color: The Representation of Race in Carmen and Carmen Jones,” in Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries, ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Downing A. Thomas (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006), 217–40; J. W. Hovenkamp, Mérimée et la couleur locale: Contribution à l’étude de la couleur locale (Paris: Société d’édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1928). 15. Regarding local color as “circulating culture” with an “object-life” akin to that of a commodity, see Evans, Before Cultures, 51–151. 16. For discussion of “local color” and/or regional themes in nineteenth-century American paintings, see, for example, Teresa A. Carbone and Patricia Hills, Eastman Johnson: Painting America (New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art in association with Rizzoli International Publishers, 1999), 66, 68, 80–84, 103–4, 158, 180; William Truettner and Roger Stein, eds., Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, 1999); William H. Gerdts, Art Across America: Two Centuries of Regional Painting in America, 1710–1920 (New York: Abbeville, 1990). References to Winslow Homer pictures as capturing “local color” can be found in “American Artists Series. Winslow Homer,” The Century Magazine 46, no. 4 (August 1893): 638; “Paintings at Carnegie Galleries No. 7,” [Pittsburgh] Gazette (6 December 1904). 17. Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer, “Picture Exhibitions in Philadelphia,” American Architect and Building News 10 (13 December 1881): 311–12; Susan Macdowell Eakins, quoted in Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 131, 172. 18. Parry and Chamberlin-Hellman, “Thomas Eakins as an Illustrator,” 24. On historicism, see Marc Simpson, “Eakins’s Vision of the Past and the Building of a Reputation,” in Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 211–23. Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 91, 163, 250 n. 55. Regarding Harris, local color fiction, and realism, see Michele Birnbaum, “Dark Dialects: Scientific and Literary Realism in Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus Series,” New Orleans Review 18 (Spring 1991): 36–45; Gavin Jones, Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 46–51, 98–99, 110–13. For discussion of “Brer” references in programs of the Art Students’ League Annual Riots, see Alan C. Braddock, “‘Jeff College Boys’: Thomas Eakins, Dr. Forbes, and Anatomical Fraternity in Postbellum Philadelphia,” American Quarterly 57, no. 2 (June 2005): 372. 19. Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas, 65–69. 20. For critics’ references to Eakins’s French training, see, for example, Philadelphia Evening

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Notes to Pages 103–106

Bulletin (27 April 1871), quoted in Cooper, Rowing Pictures, 55; William C. Brownell, “The Art Schools of Philadelphia,” Scribner’s Monthly 18, no. 5 (September 1879): 740. On Eakins’s correspondence with Gérôme, see Foster and Leibold, Writing About Eakins, 62–64. For a psychoanalytic discussion of the artist’s various self-representations, see Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 12–13, 15, 27, 40, 44, 46, 50, 67, 77, 88– 89, 166 n. 23. 21. “New Books,” Harper’s Weekly (18 December 1875): 1019. On Shinn and Taine, see Lenehan, “Fashioning Taste,” 8, 27–31, 35, 37, 43, 50, 52. 22. Hamlin Garland, Crumbling Idols (Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1894), 57, 64–65. 23. Evans, Before Cultures, 13, 83–93; Garland, Crumbling Idols, 63. 24. William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and T. R. Lounsbury, quoted in Harry H. Clark, “The Influence of Science on American Literary Criticism, 1860–1910, Including the Vogue of Taine,” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 44 (1956): 114, 147, 150–51. 25. Lounsbury, Howells, and Henry James, quoted in Clark, “The Influence of Science,” 149, 151, 155. For Christian critiques of Taine, see ibid., 140–42. 26. For a reproduction of the Eakins portrait of Walt Whitman (1887, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia), see Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 202. Whitman in The Critic, quoted in Clark, “The Influence of Science,” 155; David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Vintage, 1995), 518. Whitman to Traubel, quoted in Roger Asselineau, “A Footnote to Whitman’s Essay on Taine,” Walt Whitman Newsletter 4, no. 3 (September 1958): 93. On Whitman and Taine, see also idem, “Un inédit de Walt Whitman: Taine’s History of English Literature,” Études anglaises 10 (April–June 1957): 131–41. 27. Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 963. 28. Garland, Crumbling Idols, 5, 12, 15. Pennell, “Ramble in Old Philadelphia,” 662. 29. “Eakins Chats on Art of America,” Philadelphia Press, 22 February 1914, quoted in Homer, Thomas Eakins, 249. 30. Garland, Crumbling Idols, 6, 59–62. 31. For references to Philadelphia “roots” and Americanness, see, for example, Johns, Thomas Eakins, 17–18; Sewell, Thomas Eakins, [v]; Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas, 26, 30. 32. Paul Leroi, [Salon review], L’Art 2 (1875): 276, quoted in Spassky, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2:598. 33. F. de Lagenevais, [Salon review], Revue des Deux Mondes 9 (15 June 1875): 927, quoted in Spassky, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2:598. 34. Evans, Before Cultures, 2, 7, 11–12. 35. Ibid, 14. 36. Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas, 20, 23, 30. 37. Maurice F. Egan, “A Day in the Ma’sh,” Scribner’s Monthly 22 (July 1881): 343–53; the quoted passage appears on page 352. 38. Sam Alewitz, “Filthy Dirty”: A Social History of Unsanitary Philadelphia in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Garland, 1989), 1, 108, 183 n. 16, 187 n. 48. See also

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Michael P. McCarthy, Typhoid and the Politics of Public Health in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1989), esp. 84–97; Michael McMahon, “Makeshift Technology: Water and Politics in 19th-Century Philadelphia,” Environmental Review 12, no. 4 (1988): 21–37; Weigley, ed., Philadelphia, 373, 496, 526; H. D. Jones, “The New Philadelphia Filtration System,” Scientific American 88 (March 14, 1903): 188; Clinton R. Woodruff, “Philadelphia’s Water: A Study of Municipal Procrastination,” The Forum 28 (November 1899): 307. 39. For reproductions of the paintings by Blythe, Whistler, and Wyllie, see Sarah Burns, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 73; John House, “Visions of the Thames,” in Monet’s London: Artists’ Reflections on the Thames 1859–1914 (St. Petersburg, Florida: Museum of Fine Arts, 2005), 22, 24. 40. For information about Eakins’s family retreats, see Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 111– 14. 41. On Eakins’s malaria and his sister’s typhoid, see Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, xxviii, xxxi, 30. For references to Eakins’s realism as “uncompromising” and “rooted” in Philadelphia, see, for example, Johns, Thomas Eakins, 17–18; Weinberg, Thomas Eakins and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 5; Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, [v]. 42. Elizabeth Milroy, “Images of Fairmount Park in Philadelphia,” in Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 77. On the Hayes portrait (now lost), see Gordon Hendricks, “The Eakins Portrait of Rutherford B. Hayes,” American Art Journal 1 (Spring 1969): 104–14. Eakins’s Republican sympathies are discussed in Foster and Leibold, Writing About Eakins, 52, 129, 187, 196–97. 43. For discussion of the Pennsylvania Academy scandal, see Sewell, Thomas Eakins, 104– 5; Foster and Leibold, Writing About Eakins, 69–79. 44. Jonathan P. Ribner, “The Poetics of Pollution,” in Turner Whistler Monet (London: Tate Publications in association with the Art Gallery of Ontario, 2004); idem, “The Thames and Sin in the Age of the Great Stink: Some Artistic and Literary Responses to a Victorian Environmental Crisis,” British Art Journal 1, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 38– 46; Burns, Painting the Dark Side, 44–74. 45. For a discussion of pictorial incongruities in The Champion Single Sculls, for example, see Leja, Looking Askance, 61–64, 68, 73. 46. Weigley, ed., Philadelphia, 496; Alewitz, “Filthy Dirty,” 3, 6. 47. Rev. John W. Mears, “Water Supply of Our Great Cities,” American Presbyterian (1866), 16–17; Annual Report of the Philadelphia Water Department (1869), quoted in Alewitz, “Filthy Dirty,” 106, 150–51 n. 12, 181 n. 2. 48. James Haworth, Comments on the Water Supply of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: E. C. Markley & Son, 1871), 6; Charles G. Darrach, “Water Supply of Philadelphia,” Proceedings of the Engineers Club of Philadelphia 3 (1879): 162, quoted in Alewitz, “Filthy Dirty,” 106, 150 183–84. 49. Charles M. Cresson, M.D., Results of Examinations of Water from the Schuylkill River (Philadelphia: Wm. Mann, 1875), 9–10, 15. H. T. Cresson, one of Eakins’s students at the Pennsylvania Academy and later president of the Art Students’ League of Philadelphia, presumably was related to the doctor. See Braddock, “‘Jeff College Boys,’” 373. 50. McCarthy, Typhoid, 7.

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Notes to Pages 115–119

51. Ludlow, Bureau of Water, Annual Report, 1884, quoted in ibid., 13; Ludlow, lecture to Master Plumbers Association, 1885, quoted in Alewitz, “Filthy Dirty,” 82; city resolution of 31 March 1885 ordering Ludlow to “refrain,” quoted in ibid., 163; “Brooklyn and Philadelphia,” The Nation, 18 February 1886, 143. On Ludlow’s termination and politics, see Alewitz, “Filthy Dirty,” 53–54; McCarthy, Typhoid, 11. 52. Cresson, Results of Examinations, 4. On Eakins and photography, see Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 39–40, 100, 225–55; Danly and Leibold, Eakins and the Photograph. For a discussion of germ theory, see John Waller, The Discovery of the Germ: Twenty Years That Transformed the Way We Think about Disease (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 53. William Ludlow, Water Supply in Relation to Sanitation: An Address to the County Medical Society of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Dunlap & Clarke, 1885), 15. 54. Alewitz, “Filthy Dirty,” 27, 30. 55. On The Agnew Clinic and sepsis, see Wilmerding, ed., Thomas Eakins, 143. For references to bacteriological “cultures,” see, for example, Prof. [Louis] Pasteur, “On the Germ Theory,” Science 2, no. 62 (September 1881): 420–22; H[oratio] C. Wood, “On the Nature of the Diptheritic Contagion,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 33 (1881): 435–39. For discussion of Wood as a friend and psychological advisor to Eakins, see Chapter 3. 56. Thomas Eakins to several family members, Paris, November 1867, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, quoted in McHenry, Thomas Eakins, 6–7. 57. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Zermatt, Switzerland, [August 1867], Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, quoted in McHenry, Thomas Eakins, 13. 58. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Madrid, 2 December 1869, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, quoted in Foster and Leibold, Writing About Eakins, 211–12. 59. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Madrid, 2 December 1869, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, quoted in Foster and Leibold, Writing About Eakins, 211. William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, eds., Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), vii. 60. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, 6 March 1868, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, quoted in Foster and Leibold, Writing About Eakins, 206–7. 61. Hippolyte Taine, “On the Ideal in Art,” quoted in Milroy, “Thomas Eakins’ Artistic Training,” 239; Thomas Eakins to Frances Eakins, Paris, 1 April 1869, AAA, microfilm reel 640, frames 1480–87. 62. Cohen and Johnson, eds., Filth, ix–x. 63. On Eakins’s cremation, see Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, xli. For the quotation from Cobb, see Alewitz, “Filthy Dirty,” 167. 64. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), quoted in Cohen and Johnson, eds., Filth, xi. Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 60. 65. Milroy, “Images of Fairmount Park,” in Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 77–79, 83. 66. Ibid., 82–83.

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67.

Cooper, Rowing Pictures, 30, 50. Leja, Looking Askance, 61–64, 68, 73.

68. Johns, Thomas Eakins, 24; Cooper, Rowing Pictures, 25, 78; Milroy, “Images of Fairmount Park,” 83; Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn, pseud.], ed., A Century After: Picturesque Glimpses of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, including Fairmount, the Wissahickon, and other Romantic Localities, with the Cities and Landscapes of the State. A Pictorial Representation of Scenery, Architecture, Life, Manners and Character (Philadelphia: Allen, Lane and Scott and J. W. Lauderbach, 1875), quoted in ibid., 84. 69. Winslow Mason, Jr., “Row at Boathouse Continues,” Philadelphia Tribune, 26 April 1994, 1A; Solomon E. Jones, “River Blues: A New House Backed by John Street along Boathouse Row Still Has People Divided,” Philadelphia Weekly 26 (1 July 1998): 13, 15. On recent desegregation of rowing elsewhere, see, for example, a report on the first African American and Hispanic team to participate in the Boston regatta: Sara Rimer, “For Rowers, It’s Getting There, First or Not,” New York Times, 20 October, 1997, A8. For early references to Frenchy Johnson, see, for example, “The Newburg Rowing Regatta,” New York Times, 31 August 1877, 5; “The Silver Lake Regatta,” New York Times, 16 August 1878, 5; “Racing on the Allegheny,” New York Times, 9 August 1879, 5. 70. On Rand and the Undine Barge Club, see Johns, Thomas Eakins, 24. The Franklin Institute incident with Rand and Catto is discussed by Silcox, “Nineteenth Century Philadelphia Black Militant,” 72. 71. Pohl, Framing America, 279. For discussion of Eakins’s Rand portrait and complex masculinity, see Berger, Man Made, 59–64. 72. On the racial significance of Manet’s black cat, see Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 303–5. 73. Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 1:81. On racial discrimination in Philadelphia after the Civil War, see Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 83–96; Brown, “Pennsylvania and the Rights of the Negro,” 45–57; Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia. 74. Jeffrey M. Dorwart with Jean K. Wolf, The Philadelphia Navy Yard (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 75. Egan, “A Day in the Ma’sh,” 343, 346, 352. On late nineteenth-century nativism and ethnographic literature, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925, 2nd ed. (New York: Atheneum, 1963). 76. Egan, “A Day in the Ma’sh,” 343–46, 348–51; Alewitz, “Filthy Dirty,” 63, 78. Dorwart, The Philadelphia Navy Yard, 89–94. 77. Egan, “A Day in the Ma’sh,” 346. 78. Ibid., 348. 79. For a detailed account of the shad fishing pictures by Eakins, see Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 163–77. 80. “Shad Fishing on the Delaware,” Harper’s Weekly, 30 April 1881, 283–84. 81. Charles Hardy, “Fish or Foul: A History of the Delaware River Basin Through the Perspective of the American Shad, 1682 to the Present,” Pennsylvania History 66, no. 4 (1999): 506–34; the quoted passage appears on page 520. Philadelphia Board of Health reports, quoted in Alewitz, “Filthy Dirty,” 100, 151 n. 12; [Philadelphia] Public Ledger, 24 July 1884, 2. Donald J. Pisani, “Fish Culture and the Dawn of Concern over Water Pollution in the United States,” Environmental Review 8, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 117–31.

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Notes to Pages 126–137

82. Goodrich, Thomas Eakins, 1:206–7. 83. On the artist’s use of photographic techniques in painting, see Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 225–38. Review of Shad Fishing in New York Times, April 30, 1882, quoted in ibid., 111; Homer, Thomas Eakins, 104. I thank Jobyl Boone for noticing the absence of footprints. 84. For discussion of blacks and their exclusion from industrial work in late nineteenthcentury Philadelphia, see Weigley, ed., Philadelphia, 491–44; Harry C. Silcox, “The Search by Blacks for Employment and Opportunity: Industrial Education in Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Heritage 4 (December 1977): 38–43. 85. On Munby, see Griselda Pollock, “‘With my own eyes’: Fetishism, the Labouring Body and the Colour of Its Sex,” Art History 17, no. 3 (September 1994): 142–82. 86. On lifetime exhibition venues of Shad Fishing, see Milroy, Guide to the Thomas Eakins Collection, 22–28; Marc Simpson, “The 1880s,” in Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 111. 87. For detailed background on Swimming, see Doreen Bolger and Sarah Cash, eds., Thomas Eakins and the Swimming Picture (Fort Worth, Texas: Amon Carter Museum, 1996). 88. Bolger and Cash, Swimming Picture, 49–51. 89. “At a Private View,” The Times (Philadelphia), 29 October 1885, 2; L[eslie] W. M[iller], “Art. The Awards of Prizes at the Academy,” The American 11, no. 274 (7 November 1885): 45, both quoted in Simpson, “The 1880s,” in Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 114. For interpretations of Swimming, see Werbel, Thomas Eakins, 39–44; Berger, Man Made, 89–106; Randall C. Griffin, “Thomas Eakins’s Construction of the Male Body, or ‘Men Get to Know Each Other across the Space of Time,’” Oxford Art Journal 18, no. 2 (1995): 70–80; Whitney Davis, “Erotic Revision in Thomas Eakins’s Narratives of Male Nudity,” Art History 17 (September 1994): 301–41; Michael Hatt, “The Male Body in Another Frame: Thomas Eakins’s The Swimming Hole as Homoerotic Image,” Journal of the Philosophy of the Visual Arts: The Body (London: The Academy Group, 1993), 8–21; Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, 13, 172 n. 59. 90. Bolger and Cash, Swimming Picture, 36–38, 49–51. 91. On Eakins’s naturalistic classicism, see Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 178–87 (the quoted passage appears on page 178); Bolger and Cash, Swimming Picture, 16– 18, 41–42, 73–74, 82–83, 87; Simpson, “The 1880s,” in Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 113–15 (the quoted passage appears on page 114); idem, “Thomas Eakins and His Arcadian Works,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1, no. 2 (Fall 1987): 71–95. 92. Eakins quoted in Brownell, “The Art Schools of Philadelphia,” 742 93. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 70, 171, 193–94. 94. Florence Earle Coates, “Matthew Arnold,” The Century Magazine 47 (April 1894): 933, quoted in Bolger and Cash, Swimming Picture, 43. 95. Whitman quoted in Bolger and Cash, Swimming Picture, 43. 96. Taine, Philosophy of Art, 127, 133. 97.

Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 184.

98. Margaret Sammartino Marsh, “Suburbanization and the Search for Community: Residential Decentralization in Philadelphia, 1880–1900,” Pennsylvania History 44, no. 2 (1977): 99–116; the quoted passages appear on pages 114–15.

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chapter 3: “to learn their ways that i might paint some” 1. Thomas Eakins to Edward Horner Coates, 9 February 1886, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. On Eakins’s resignation and surrounding events, see Foster and Leibold, Writing About Eakins, 69–90; Werbel, Thomas Eakins, 126–32. 2. Philadelphia Evening Item, 15 February 1886, 1; ibid., 18 February 1886, 1. 3. On Eakins in the Badlands, see Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 189–87; Cheryl Leibold, “Thomas Eakins in the Badlands,” Archives of American Art Journal 28, no. 2 (1988): 2–15. H[oratio] C. Wood, Brain-Work and Overwork (Philadelphia: P. Blakiston, Son & Co., 1885), 16, 22. 4. Thomas Eakins to Susan Macdowell Eakins, undated letter fragment, Dickinson, Dakota Territory, August 1887, and 7, 24, and 26 September 1887, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Thomas Eakins to John Laurie Wallace, Dickinson, Dakota Territory, late September and 8 December 1887, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, quoted in Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:19–20. 5. Walt Whitman quoted in Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, January 21– April 7, 1889 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), 4:135; Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 189. 6. Thomas Eakins to John Laurie Wallace, Philadelphia, 22 October 1888, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, quoted in Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:23. Thomas Eakins to Susan Macdowell Eakins, Dickinson, Dakota Territory, 28 August 1887, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. 7. On primitivism, see Bederman, Manliness & Civilization; Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellect, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). For illustrations of Walter’s and Remington’s works, see “Principal Accessions,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 2, no. 5 (May 1907): 87; Alexander Nemerov, Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 11. 8. Wood, Brain-Work, 85. 9. Eakins’s friendship with Silas Weir Mitchell, an even more prominent Philadelphia physician noted for prescribing related cures for mental illness, is also pertinent here. On Eakins and Mitchell, see Berger, Man Made, 26–27, 44, 46, 108; Lubin, “Modern Psychological Selfhood,” 134, 147; Kathleen Spies, “Figuring the Neurasthenic: Thomas Eakins, Nervous Illness, and Gender in Victorian America,” NineteenthCentury Studies 12 (1998): 85–109. 10. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893; reprint, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1966), 200. 1 1. Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885; reprint, New York: Modern Library, 1996); idem, “Still-Hunting the Grizzly,” The Century Magazine 30, no. 2 (June 1885): 220–30. 12. Idem, “Who Should Go West?” Harper’s Weekly, 2 January 1886, 7. Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:17. 13. Bederman, Manliness, 171. Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, 10–11. 14. Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, 39; Bederman, Manliness, 176; Harold F. Williamson, Winchester: The Gun That Won the West (Washington, D.C.: Combat Forces Press, 1952). 254

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Notes to Pages 149–158

15. Turner, Significance of the Frontier, 201. 16. Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). On Roosevelt’s mayoral bid, see Bederman, Manliness, 176–77. 17. Will Crowell, Jr., quoted in Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:21. On Winchester at the Centennial and in dime novels, see R. L. Wilson, Winchester, An American Legend: The Official History of Winchester Firearms and Ammunition from 1849 to the Present (New York: Random House, 1991), 58; Williamson, Winchester, 185–86. 18. Thomas Eakins to Susan Macdowell Eakins, Dickinson, Dakota Territory, 28 August and 24 September 1887, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. In letters from Europe during the 1860s, Eakins mentioned owning a Smith & Wesson revolver. 19. For the reference to a “six shooter,” see Thomas Eakins to Susan Macdowell Eakins, Dickinson, Dakota Territory, 26 September 1887, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. On the cowboy outfit, see Leibold, “Thomas Eakins in the Badlands,” 14. Regarding the Model 1886 Winchester and Roosevelt’s collection, see Wilson, Winchester, 79–90. 20. Leibold, “Thomas Eakins in the Badlands,” 14. Thomas Eakins to Susan Macdowell Eakins, Dickinson, Dakota Territory, August 1887, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. On Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, including Annie Oakley and other featured attractions, see Robert W. Rydell, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York: Knopf, 2005); Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); R. L. Wilson with Greg Martin, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: An American Legend (New York: Random House, 1998). On Cody’s endorsement of Winchester, see Williamson, Winchester, 67. 21. Thomas Eakins to Susan Macdowell Eakins, Dickinson, Dakota Territory, 7 September 1887, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. For information about the Wild West in Philadelphia, I thank Dr. Juti Winchester of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming. On Annie Oakley, see Wilson and Martin, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 121–53. 22. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 256–81. 23. Quoted in Wilson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 48. See also James W. Buel, Heroes of the Plains; or, Lives and Wonderful Adventures of Wild Bill, Buffalo Bill . . . and other Celebrated Indian Fighters (Philadelphia: West Philadelphia Publishing Co., 1881). 24. Thomas Eakins to Susan Macdowell Eakins, summer 1887, Dakota Territory, quoted by Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:16; Thomas Eakins to Susan Macdowell Eakins, Dickinson, Dakota Territory, 30 August 1887, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. 25. Thomas Eakins to Susan Macdowell Eakins, Dakota Territory, 7 September 1887, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. 26. Robert C. V. Meyers, Life and Adventures of Lewis Wetzel: The Renowned Virginia Rancher and Scout (Philadelphia: J. E. Potter, 1883); idem, Wetzel the Scout and Indian Fighter (New York: Hurst & Co., n.d. [ca. 1900]). On Meyers, Eakins, and The Gross Clinic, see Hendricks, Thomas Eakins, 88–89; Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1933), 168.

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27. Meyers, Life and Adventures of Lewis Wetzel, 404–5. 28. For discussion of this painting, see Cynthia D. Nickerson, “Artistic Interpretations of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, 1855–1900,” American Art Journal 16, no. 3 (Summer 1984): 49–77, especially 64–67; Rosenzweig, Thomas Eakins Collection, 53–54. On the Indian Rights Association, see William Thomas Hagan, The Indian Rights Association: The Herbert Welsh Years, 1882–1904 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985). 29. Thomas Eakins to Susan Macdowell Eakins, Dakota Territory, 26 September 1887, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. 30. Nancy K. Anderson, Frederic Remington: The Color of Night (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2003), 45 n. 20, 55. 31. Ackerman, “Thomas Eakins and His Parisian Masters,” 244. I thank Alexander Nemerov for suggesting the visual similarities between Eakins’s Dakota rock formation and Gérôme’s Sphinx. 32. As my comments suggest, I regard Gérôme’s Napoleonic narrative of colonial conquest to be quite pertinent for Eakins’s picture, albeit in displaced form. For that reason, I disagree with Kathleen Foster, who believes that “Eakins’ cowboys invoke no such story.” Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 195. 33. A prominent Philadelphia journalist as well, Williams had covered the motion photography experiments undertaken by Eakins with Eadweard Muybridge at the university during the 1880s. On Williams and the portrait of him by Eakins, see Carolyn K. Carr, Then and Now: American Portraits of the Past Century from the National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), 26; idem, “A Friendship and a Photograph: Sophia Williams, Talcott Williams, and Walt Whitman,” American Art Journal 21, no. 4 (1989): 2–12. The history of the University Museum is discussed in Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life: 1876– 1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 82–95; Regna Darnell, “The Emergence of Academic Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1970, 80–92; Percy C. Madeira, Jr., Men in Search of Man: The First Seventy-Five Years of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964). I thank Alex Pezzati, University of Pennsylvania archivist, for clarifying the museum’s founding and opening dates. 34. On the Brinton and Frishmuth portraits, see Charles Coleman Sellers, ed., A Catalogue of Portraits and Other Works of Art in the Possession of the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1961), 11–12; Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 311; Synnove Haughom, “Thomas Eakins’ Portrait of Mrs. William D. Frishmuth, Collector,” Antiques 104, no. 5 (November 1973): 836–39. 35. For a reproduction and discussion of the Drexel portrait, see Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:177–79; Rosenzweig, Thomas Eakins Collection, 172–73. 36. On Eakins and notions of community, see Berger, Man Made, 85–121; Danly and Leibold, eds., Thomas Eakins and the Photograph, 65–93. For discussion of physicians and physical anthropology, see David Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). On Eakins and anatomy, see Alan C. Braddock, “‘Jeff College Boys’: Thomas Eakins,

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Dr. Forbes, and Anatomical Fraternity in Postbellum Philadelphia,” American Quarterly 57, no. 2 (June 2005): 355–83. 37. Sarah M. Brinton to Stewart Culin, 12 December 1899, Culin Archival Collection, Brinton Memorial [9.1.006]: Brinton correspondence, 1899–1901, Brooklyn Museum Archives. Regarding Eakins and the Brinton family, see Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 34–35; Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 55, 203–8, 376–77; Rosenzweig, Thomas Eakins Collection, 122; Jane E. Myers, “Eakins and the 1704 Brinton House,” in Homer, ed., Eakins at Avondale, 30–32; Thomas Eakins: A Retrospective Exhibition (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1961), 83; Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1933), 172; Horace L. Traubel, “At the Graveside of Walt Whitman,” in In Re Walt Whitman, ed. Horace L. Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Thomas B. Harned (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1893), unpaginated. 38. Frank Hamilton Cushing, “The Arrow,” American Anthropologist 8, no. 4 (October 1895): 307–49; the quoted passage appears on page 328. 39. Eakins’s deposit of the Frishmuth portrait in the University Museum is recorded in Bulletin of the Free Museum of Science and Art 3, no. 4 (May 1902): 256. See also Thomas Eakins to Stewart Culin, 15 May 1901, University Museum Archives, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. The deposit of the Cushing portrait at the University Museum is cited in “Collections and Publications,” Bulletin of the Free Museum of Science and Art 3, no. 3 (May 1901): 175–77. On the Oriental Club of Philadelphia, see Thomas Eakins to Stewart Culin, 13 May 1896, Culin Archival Collection, General Correspondence [1.2.013], Brooklyn Museum Archives; Oriental Studies: A Selection of the Papers Read Before [the] Oriental Club of Philadelphia, 1888–1894 (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1894), 7–16. 40. On The Artist’s Wife and His Setter Dog, see Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 116–17, 197; Spies, “Figuring the Neurasthenic,” 89–90; Ellwood C. Parry, III, “The Thomas Eakins Portrait of Sue and Harry; or, When Did the Artist Change his Mind?” Arts Magazine 53, no. 9 (May 1979): 146–53. The magazines about Asia are mentioned in McHenry, Thomas Eakins, 126, 129. Regarding a “beautiful little basket” of Native American origin received as a gift, see Susan M. Eakins to Stewart Culin, Philadelphia, 9 January 1908, Culin Archival Collection, Brooklyn Museum. I thank Susannah Koerber at the Art Museum of Western Virginia for assistance with the Garrett Collection. On Eakins’s gift of Japanese kites to another portrait sitter, see Henry A. Rowland to Thomas Eakins, [from Craig Stone, Maine], 15 September 1897, Bregler Collection, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. 41. Darnell, “Emergence,” 80. 42. Ibid., 81. 43. Conn, Museums, 4. 44. For information about the new museum’s design, see Conn, Museums, 83, 87–89; Philadelphia: Three Centuries of American Art (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1976), 451–52; Madeira, Men in Search of Man, 23–24; “The New Museum Buildings,” Bulletin of the Free Museum of Science and Art of the University of Pennsylvania 2, no. 2 (June 1899): 69–72. 45. Conn, Museums, 5, 89. 46. Ibid., 83, 90–91. 47.

The Talcott Williams lecture is cited in “Talcott Williams Bibliography,” Elizabeth Dun-

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bar Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Daniel Garrison Brinton, “Native American Stringed Musical Instruments,” American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal 19, no. 1 (January 1897): 19–20. On the evolution of musical instruments, see also Henry Balfour, The Natural History of the Musical Bow: A Chapter in the Developmental History of Stringed Instruments of Music. Primitive Types (Oxford: Clarendon, 1899); Otis T. Mason, “Geographic Distribution of the Musical Bow,” American Anthropologist 10, no. 11 (November 1897): 377–80. 48. Article in Philadelphia Times quoted by Linda Moot, “Sarah Frishmuth, Portrait of a Collector,” Newsletter—American Musical Instrument Society 21 (June 1992): 5. For identification of the depicted instruments, see Haughom, “Frishmuth,” 836. 49. On Antiquated Music at the University Museum, see Thomas Eakins to Stewart Culin, 15 May 1901, University of Pennsylvania Museum Archives, Philadelphia; “Special Collections,” Bulletin of the Free Museum of Science and Art 3, no. 4 (May 1902): 256. 50. Regarding Mrs. Frishmuth’s negative response to Antiquated Music, see Haughom, “Frishmuth,” 836. On the piano and viola d’amore, see ibid.; Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:175; Hendricks, Eakins, 246–47; McHenry, Thomas Eakins, 120–21. 51. For general information on Brinton, see Regna Darnell, Daniel Garrison Brinton: The “Fearless Critic” of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); idem, “Daniel Garrison Brinton,” in John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3: 559–60. 52. Evans, Before Cultures, 66–67. Daniel Garrison Brinton, “The Aims of Anthropology,” Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 44 (1895): 1–17; the quoted passage appears on page 4. On Brinton and folklore, see also Bronner, Following Tradition, 77, 79, 132, 415. 53. Daniel Garrison Brinton, Anthropology: As a Science and as a Branch of University Education in the United States (Philadelphia: n.p., 1892), 3, 7. 54. Ibid., 4, 6. “Special Collections,” Bulletin of the Free Museum of Science and Art 1, no. 1 (May 1897): 42, 44. 55. Daniel Garrison Brinton, “The Peoples of the Philippines,” American Anthropologist 11, no. 10 (October 1898): 293–307; the quoted passage appears on page 293; idem, “Professor Blumentritt’s Studies of the Philippines,” American Anthropologist, n.s. 1, no. 1 (January 1899): 122–25; the quoted passage appears on page 122. 56. Talcott Williams, “The Ethical and Political Principles of ‘Expansion,’” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 16 (September 1900): 51–66; the quoted passages appear on pages 235, 237–40. 57. On the Sigsbee portrait, see Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:208. Regarding the construction of the Maine, see Weigley, ed., Philadelphia, 480. 58. Daniel Garrison Brinton, “The Aims of Anthropology,” Popular Science Monthly 48, no. 1 (1896): 59–72; the quoted passage appears on page 69. 59. On Brinton’s scientific racism and posthumous reputation, see Lee D. Baker, “Daniel G. Brinton’s Success on the Road to Obscurity, 1890–99,” Current Anthropology 15, no. 3 (August 2000): 394–423; John S. Haller, Jr., Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), 114–19; Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 145; Jay F. Custer, “Daniel Garrison Brin-

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Notes to Pages 179–185

ton, America’s First Professor of Anthropology,” Pennsylvania Archaeologist 68, nos. 1–2 (Spring and Fall 1998): 47–53, 70–75; the quoted passage appears on page 74. 60. Daniel G. Brinton, Essays of an Americanist (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1890; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970), 17. 61. Ibid., 17–18. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 359. 62. Brinton, Essays of an Americanist, 60. 63. Franz Boas, “The Limits of the Comparative Method of Anthropology,” Science 4 (1896): 901–8; quoted in Stephen D. Ousley, “Boas, Brinton, and the Jesup North Pacific Expedition: The Return of the Americanoids,” Native American Studies 14, no. 2 (2000): 12. 64. Franz Boas, “The History of Anthropology,” Science 20 (1904): 513–24; the quoted passage appears on page 519. 65. Brinton, Essays of an Americanist, 56; idem, “The Aims of Anthropology,” 12. 66. For background on Culin, see Diana Fane, “New Questions for ‘Old Things’: The Brooklyn Museum’s Zuni Collection,” in Janet Catherine Berlo, ed., The Early Years of Native American Art History: The Politics of Scholarship and Collecting (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992), 62–87; Diana Fane, Objects of Myth and Memory: American Indian Art at the Brooklyn Museum (New York: The Brooklyn Museum in association with University of Washington Press, 1991), 13–44; Bronner, Following Tradition, 77– 86, 133–39, 415–18; idem, “Object Lessons: The Work of Ethnological Museums and Collections,” in Bronner, ed., Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America 1880–1920 (New York: published for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum by W. W. Norton & Co., 1989), 217–54. On Culin and Brinton, see Brinton Memorial Meeting (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1900). 67.

Stewart Culin, “America the Cradle of Asia,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 106 (March 1903): 534–40; the quoted passages appear on page 534.

68. Ibid., 536, 540. 69. On Culin’s evolutionism, see Fane, “The Language of Things,” 18–21. 70. Helen Appleton Read, “Eakins Comes Into His Own,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 11 March 1923, 2B. Regarding Culin’s gifts, see Thomas Eakins to Stewart Culin, Philadelphia, 15 June 1905; Susan Macdowell Eakins to Stewart Culin, Philadelphia, 9 January 1908, Culin Archival Collection, Brooklyn Museum. On the faculty club exhibition, see Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 282 n. 37; “Faculty Club to Receive Noted Artists,” Philadelphia Press, 16 February 1901, 4. For a reference to Eakins, Culin, and Murray, see McHenry, Thomas Eakins, 112. 71. On The Archaeologist and early exhibitions, see Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1933), 207; Milroy, Guide, 29; Alice Culin to Lloyd Goodrich, New York, 1 July 1930, Goodrich Papers, Philadelphia Museum of Art; copy in Culin Archival Collection, Brooklyn Museum. 72. On The Archaeologist and the perspective study, see Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 210–12. Regarding Native American cremation, see William Christie MacLeod, “Certain Mortuary Aspects of Northwest Coast Culture,” American Anthropologist, n.s. 27, no. 1 (January–March 1925): 122–48; Edwin Oliver James, “Cremation and Preservation of the Dead in North America,” American Anthropologist, n.s. 32, no. 2 (April 1928): 214–42.

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73. Stewart Culin, Chess and Playing-Cards (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1898), 863–65. Idem, Games of the North American Indians, 2 vols. (1907; reprint, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1992). 74. Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 210. On the comparison with Gérôme’s The Chess Players (1859, Wallace Collection, London), see Berger, Man Made, 72–74. Gustavus C. Reichhelm, Chess in Philadelphia: A Brief History of the Game in Philadelphia, Illustrated by Numerous Charts, Tables, Games and Problems ([Philadelphia]: Billstein & Son, 1898). Ralph Hagedorn, Benjamin Franklin and Chess in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958). 75. Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 210. 76. “The Mimic Battle Field,” Daily Graphic, 29 December 1875, 460; Franklin Knowles Young, The Major Tactics of Chess: A Treatise of Evolutions (Boston: Little, 1898); idem, Chess Strategetics Illustrated: Military Art and Science Adapted to the Chessboard (Boston: Little, Brown, 1900); Raymund Allen, “Irregular Forces: A Story of Chess and War,” The Strand Magazine 50 (1915): 698–705. See also David Shenk, The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science, and the Human Brain (New York: Doubleday, 2006); Berger, Man Made, 72–76. 77. Angela L. Miller and others, American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2008), 376. On the Cushing portrait, see also Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 261–63, 291, 311; Kevin Richard Muller, “Cultural Costuming: Native Americans, Inversion, and the Power of an Exceptional White Masculinity” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2003), 195–254; William H. Truettner, “Dressing the Part: Thomas Eakins’s Portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing,” American Art Journal 17 (1985): 48–72. Regarding the Burbank portrait, see Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1933), 193. 78. For recent considerations of Cushing, see Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox, eds., Frank Hamilton Cushing and the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition, 1886–1889, 2 vols. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996–2002); Jesse Green, ed., Cushing at Zuni: The Correspondence and Journals of Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1879–1884 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990). 79. For biographical information on Burbank, see M. Melissa Wolfe, American Indian Portraits: Elbridge Ayer Burbank in the West (1897–1910) (Youngstown, Ohio: The Butler Institute of American Art, 2000). On his Philadelphia visit, see McHenry, Thomas Eakins, 112; Elbridge Burbank to Edward Everett Ayer, Philadelphia, 10 December 1901–4, February 1904, Papers of Edward Everett Ayer, Newberry Library, Chicago; Thomas Eakins to Harrison Morris, Philadelphia, 5 January 1902, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. 80. Thomas Eakins to Frank Hamilton Cushing, Philadelphia, 14 July 1895, Cushing Papers, Southwest Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles. 81. Frank Hamilton Cushing, “My Adventures in Zuñi,” The Century: A Popular Quarterly 25, no. 4 (February 1883): 507. I thank anthropologist Ted Frisbie for suggesting a connection to the Shalak’o ceremony. On Cushing’s observation of that ceremony, see Green, ed., Cushing at Zuni, 10, 63–64, 133–34, 183, 190. 82. On the Hovenden portrait, see Truettner, “Dressing the Part,” 54.

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Notes to Pages 191–196

83. Frank Hamilton Cushing, “Zuñi Fetiches,” Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1880–81), 40, pl. 10. 84. Elbridge Burbank to Edward Everett Ayer, 12 January 1902, Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago. 85. Thomas Eakins to W. J. McGee, 17 April 1900, Bureau of American Ethnology, National Anthropological Archive, Washington, D.C.; McHenry, Thomas Eakins, 112. 86. Simpson in Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 262–63. The Cushing portrait with its original frame appears in Bulletin of the Free Museum of Science and Art 3, no. 3 (May 1901): facing page 176. For a later photograph of the portrait in its original frame, see Helen Herbert Foster, “Frank Cushing, Zuñi chief,” The Mentor 16, no. 8 (September 1928): 50–51; the photograph appears on page 51. I thank Ken Sherry for showing me this magazine. On the identification of the pictographs, see Truettner, “Dressing the Part,” 59. A preparatory study for the Cushing portrait, now in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery, Washington, D.C., has a similar frame, complete with rawhide lashes and macaw pictograph; see Rosenzweig, Thomas Eakins Collection, 153, cat. no. 83. 87. Regarding Boas and exhibits, see Boas, “Occurrence of Similar Inventions”; idem, “Museums of Ethnology and Their Classification,” Science 9, no. 228 (17 June 1887): 587– 89; Jacknis, “Franz Boas and Exhibits,” A Franz Boas Reader, 1–20, 61–67. 88. On Boas and mannequin life groups, see Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, & Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 3–45; Elliott, Culture Concept, 30. 89. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 290, quoted by Green, ed., Cushing at Zuni, 2. For Green’s own comment, see ibid., 22. 90. Green, ed., Cushing at Zuni, 98, 356 n. 83; Frank Hamilton Cushing, “My Adventures in Zuni,” The Century 25, no. 2 (December 1882): 203; idem, “Zuñi Breadstuff ” (1884– 85), quoted in Joan Mark, Four Anthropologists: An American Science in its Early Years (New York: Science History Publications, 1980), 110. 91. Green, ed., Cushing at Zuni, 23; Cushing, “My Adventures in Zuñi,” The Century Magazine 25, no. 2 (December 1882): 193–98, 206; The Century Magazine 25, no. 4 (February 1883): 503, 508; The Century Magazine 26, no. 1 (May 1883): 28, 33, 39, 45; idem, “The Arrow,” 328. 92. Frank Hamilton Cushing, “The Need of Studying the Indian in Order to Teach Him,” Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1897), 3–4. 93. Ibid., 4. 94. On Cushing’s efforts to mobilize the media in order to prevent the so-called Logan Land Grab of 1883 (named after the son-in-law of Illinois senator John A. Logan), see Green, ed., Cushing at Zuni, 14, 18, 240, 261, 263, 275, 296, 282–87, 298, 321, 325, and 334. For his theft of artifacts, see Nancy J. Parezo, “Cushing as Part of the Team: The Collecting Activities of the Smithsonian Institution,” American Ethnologist 12, no. 4 (November 1985): 763–74. 95. Regarding Cushing’s media celebrity, see Curtis M. Hinsley, “Zunis and Brahmins: Cultural Ambivalence in the Gilded Age,” in George M. Stocking, Jr., ed., Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

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1989), 169–207. Boas’s judgment of Cushing is recorded by Robert Lowie, “Reminiscences of Anthropological Currents in America Half a Century Ago,” American Anthropologist, n.s. 58, no. 6 (December 1956): 996. For a recent defense of Cushing, see David R. Wilcox, “Restoring Authenticity: Judging Frank Hamilton Cushing’s Veracity,” in Don D. Fowler and David R. Wilcox, eds., Philadelphia and the Development of Americanist Archaeology (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003). Charles F. Lummis, “The White Indian,” Land of Sunshine 13 (June 1900): 11, 13. 96. Truettner, “Dressing the Part,” 66, 70. 97. Deloria, Playing Indian, 119, 141, 223 n. 54; Muller, “Cultural Costuming.” 98. On the Dawes Severalty (General Allotment) Act of 1887, see Emily Greenwald, Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, Jicarilla Apaches, and the Dawes Act (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002); Paul S. Boyer, ed., The Oxford Companion to United States History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 173–74. 99. Thomas Eakins to Stewart Culin, 28 May 1902, University Museum Archives, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 100. On the Rowland portrait, see Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 264, 298, 309. 101. Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, 35; Evans, Before Cultures, 101. 102. Muller, “Cultural Costuming,” 238, 243. For evidence that the Cushing portrait still carried its original frame as late as 1928, see Foster, “Frank Cushing,” 51. 103. “Thomas Eakins: Exhibition at Earle’s Opens To-Day: The Portrait of Cushing: What Critics Say about the Artist’s Frankness,” Philadelphia Evening Item, 12 May 1896, 1. 104. Evans, Before Cultures, 50. 105. Truettner, “Dressing the Part.” William L. Merrill, Edmund J. Ladd, and T. J. Ferguson, “The Return of the Ahayu:da: Lessons for Repatriation from Zuni Pueblo and the Smithsonian Institution,” Current Anthropology 34, no. 5 (December 1993): 523– 67. For an excellent discussion of indigenous cultural property in the global marketplace of commodities and ideas today, see Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 106. I am grateful to Edward Wemytewa of the Zuni Tribal Council for arranging my meeting with the council on 17 June 2004 and for entertaining my various inquiries on these issues. Other council members present were Carleton Albert, Arden Kucate, and Carmelita Sanchez ( lt. governor ). 107. A photograph taken at Zuni in 1888 by Isaiah West Taber titled Unidentified Non-Native Man and Frank Hamilton Cushing Wearing Tam-Style Cap Digging Out Human Skulls in Pit can be found at the National Anthropological Archives (NAA), Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (local control number NAA INV 02407600). The NAA also possesses at least four photographs of Cushing wearing Zuni Katsina and Mudhead masks. More recent examples of intrusive behavior by outsiders include the fabrication of sacred Zuni masks by Colorado Boy Scouts in the 1950s and a similar project for children in an education program in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2003. On the Colorado Boy Scouts, see Merrill, Ladd, and Ferguson, “The Return of the Ahayu:da,” 528. According to Edward Wemytewa of the Zuni Tribal Council, the 2003 example occurred at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, but officials at that museum informed me that no such program occurred at the institution. 108. Phil Hughte, A Zuni Artist Looks at Frank Hamilton Cushing (Zuni: A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center, 1994). I thank Professor Triloki Nath Pandey of the

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University of California, Santa Cruz, for sharing his insights regarding Hughte, Cushing, and Zuni.

coda: “distinctly american art” 1. “Eakins Chats on Art of America,” Philadelphia Press, 22 February 1914, quoted in Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1933), 139. 2. Ibid., 114. 3. Simpson in Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 318. 4. H. Barbara Weinberg, “American Artists’ Taste for Spanish Painting,” in Tinterow and Lacambre, eds., Manet/Velázquez, 276. On Catholic clergy portraits by Eakins and Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X, see Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 321–23; William H. Gerdts, “Thomas Eakins and the Episcopal Portrait: Archbishop William Henry Elder,” Arts Magazine 53, no. 9 (May 1979): 154–57. 5. Katherine Lee Bates, “Velasquez; Tercentenary Celebration at Madrid,” New York Times, 16 July 1899, 12. Léon Bonnat, “Velazquez,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 19, no. 489 (March 1898): 177. For more on the Velázquez tercentenary, see “The Celebration of the Tercentenary of Velasquez in Madrid—a Spectacle,” Blackwood’s Magazine 166 (July 1899): 118; Charles Whibley, “The Tercentenary of Velasquez,” North American Review 169 (July 1899): 116–24; Havelock Ellis, “The Tercentenary of Velasquez,” Fortnightly Review 65 (June 1899): 907–16; Christian Brinton, “Velasquez Works Exhibition at Madrid,” New York Times, 27 January 1900, 49. 6. Walt Whitman, “The Spanish Element in Our Nationality,” Philadelphia Press, 5 August 1883, republished in idem, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 1146–48. McHenry, Thomas Eakins, 89, notes that this text was included in an edition of November Boughs in 1888, the year in which Eakins finished his portrait of the poet. 7. Simpson in Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 318. Regarding Velázquez’s portraits of the poor, mulattoes, dwarfs, and other marginal figures, see Tinterow and Lacambre, eds., Manet/Velázquez, 213, 314, 339, 392, 453–54, 458–59. 8. McHenry, Thomas Eakins, 106, 129–30; Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:10, 101, 222; idem, Thomas Eakins (1933), 32. 9. Elizabeth Dunbar, Talcott Williams: Gentleman of the Fourth Estate (Brooklyn: Robert E. Simpson & Son, 1936), 184. 10. Thomas Eakins to Frances Eakins, Paris, 1 April 1869, AAA, microfilm reel 640, frames 1480–87. 11. Quoted in Spassky, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2:627. 12. McHenry, Thomas Eakins, 107. 13. For discussion of Signora Gomez d’Arza, see Weinberg, Thomas Eakins, 35; Spassky, American Paintings, 627–29; Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:10–11; McHenry, Thomas Eakins, 107. 14. On Eakins’s Girl with a Fan and other portraits by Eakins with this attribute, see Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 198–200, 443–44. 15. For discussion of the Tanner portrait, see Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, 264, 299;

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Wilmerding, Thomas Eakins, 150–53. On Tanner, see Braddock, “Painting the World’s Christ.” 16. Henry Ossawa Tanner to Eunice Tietjens, 25 May 1914, Henry Ossawa Tanner Papers, AAA, microfilm reel D306, frames 116–17. 17. See, for example, Mosby, Tanner; Wilmerding, Thomas Eakins, 150–53; and Sharon F. Patton, African-American Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 101. The point here is not to deny Tanner’s African ancestry but rather to acknowledge other aspects of his background, which the artist himself recognized. 18. Ed Folsom, “Lucifer and Ethiopia: Whitman, Race, and Poetics before the Civil War and After,” in David S. Reynolds, ed., A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 54, 59–64. On Ethiopia’s repulsion of the 1896 Italian invasion at the Battle of Adwa and its subsequent international image, especially among African Americans like Marcus Garvey, see Leslie Rollins, “Ethiopia, African Americans, and African-Consciousness: The Effect of Ethiopia and AfricanConsciousness in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of Religious Thought 54, no. 2 (1998): 1–25. 19. On Tanner as “Aryan” and “Latin,” see William R. Lester, “Henry O. Tanner, Exile for Art’s Sake,” Alexander’s Magazine 7, no. 2 (15 December 1908): 70; Braddock, “Painting the World’s Christ.” 20. For Pareja’s story and his “Moorish” “mulatto” identity, see William Stirling, Velazquez and His Works (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1855), 229–33. On Velázquez’s portrait of Juan de Pareja, see José López-Rey, Velázquez: Painter of Painters (Cologne: Taschen, 1996), 1:174, 180, 187, 2:278–80, no. 112. See also Jennifer Montagu, “Velázquez Marginalia: His Slave Juan de Pareja and His Illegitimate Son Antonio,” Burlington Magazine 125, no. 968 (November 1983): 683–85. I thank Tracy Cooper at Temple University for informing me that Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja was exhibited in the Pantheon in Rome in 1650. 21. Montagu, “Velázquez,” 684; Stirling, Velazquez, 229–33. 22. On Tanner and Velázquez, see Mosby, Tanner, 152–54, 190. 23. On the “tragic mulatto” as an American literary and artistic trope around 1900, see Lubin, “Modern Psychological Selfhood,” 149–51; Ray Stannard Baker, “The Tragedy of the Mulatto,” American Magazine 65, no. 6 (April 1908): 582–98. 24. Thomas Eakins to Stewart Culin, Philadelphia, 15 June 1905, Culin Archival Collection, Brooklyn Museum. 25. On the lost Genjiro Yeto portrait, see Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1933), 202. Regarding the Salmagundi Club, see Thomas Eakins to Stewart Culin, undated letter, “Wednesday” [postmark Brooklyn, 3 February 1904], Culin Archival Collection, Brooklyn Museum. Yeto is mentioned as a club member in “Salmagundians Merry at Get-Away Dinner,” New York Times, 9 May 1906, 9. For illustrations by Yeto, see Henry Reuterdahl, Japan, Her Beauty and Her Strength (New York: Collier, 1904); Lafcadio Hearn, KottO: Being Japanese Curios, with Sunday Cobwebs (New York: Macmillan, 1902); Yoné Noguchi, The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (Tokyo: Fuzanbo Pub. Co., 1902); William H. Boardman, The Lovers of the Woods (New York: McClure, 1901); Onoto Watanna, A Japanese Nightingale (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1901); Florence Peltier Perry, A Japanese Garland (Boston: Lothrop, 1901); idem, Tora’s Happy Day (New York: Alliance, 1899). On Yeto and Eakins, see McHenry, Thomas Eakins, 109.

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26. “The Water Color Club,” New York Times, 8 November 1901, 7. For shorter references to Yeto in the New York Times, see “Books and Authors,” 25 May 1901, BR6; “Books and Men,” 26 July 1902, BR12; “Water Color Club Has Annual Exhibit,” 11 November 1906, 11. 27. On Hearn, see Evans, Before Cultures, 12, 63–64, 111, 141, 147, 150; Simon J. Bronner, ed., Lafcadio Hearn’s America: Ethnographic Sketches and Editorials (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002). 28. On Eakins’s death and estate, see Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins, xli. Bryson Burroughs, Catalogue of a Loan Exhibition of the Works of Thomas Eakins (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1917); Gilbert Sunderland Parker, Catalogue of a Memorial Exhibition of the Works of the Late Thomas Eakins (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1917); Henry McBride, “Modern Art,” The Dial 74, no. 5 (May 1923): 529– 31; Alfred H. Barr, Catalogue of the Sixth Loan Exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, May, 1930: Winslow Homer, Albert P. Ryder, Thomas Eakins (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1930); Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1933). 29. Lubin, “Modern Psychological Selfhood,” 155–60. Henry McBride, “Modern Art,” The Dial 72 (February 1922): 221. Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1933). 30. Lloyd Goodrich, “Thomas Eakins, Realist,” The Arts 16, no. 2 (October 1929): 72–83; the quoted passages appear on pages 72, 76, 81, and 83. 31. Lloyd Goodrich, “Thomas Eakins,” in Barr, Sixth Loan Exhibition, 16–20. 32. Frederick W. Eddy, “News of the Art World,” The Sun (New York), 28 October 1917; Alan Burroughs, “Thomas Eakins,” The Arts 3 (March 1923): 185–89 (the quoted passage appears on page 188); Helen Appleton Read, “Eakins Comes Into His Own,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Sunday, 11 March 1923, 2B; Virgil Barker, “The Search for Americanism,” The American Magazine of Art 27, no. 3 (February 1934): 51–52; Martha Candler Cheney, Modern Art in America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), 47; Van Wyck Brooks, The Times of Melville and Whitman (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1947), 444–45. 33. Robert Henri, The Art Spirit (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1923), 86; Henry McBride, “Modern Art,” The Dial 72 (February 1922): 221–24 (the quoted passage appears on page 222); idem, “Modern Art,” The Dial 74 (May 1923): 529–31 (the quoted passage appears on page 530); Cheney, Modern Art, 47; Clement Greenberg, “Art,” The Nation 159 (1 July 1944): 24–25; Burroughs, “Thomas Eakins, The Man,” The Arts 4 (December 1923): 303–23 (the quoted passages appear on pages 303, 313, and 323). 34. Edward Sapir, “Civilization and Culture,” The Dial 67, no. 799 (September 1919): 234; idem, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” (1924), quoted in Hegeman, Patterns for America, 88. 35. Sewell, ed., Thomas Eakins [v], xxii.

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Manganaro, Marc. Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Marandel, J. Patrice. Frédéric Bazille and Early Impressionism. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1978. de Margerie, Laure, and Édouard Papet. Facing the Other: Charles Cordier (1827–1905) Ethnographic Sculptor. Translated by Lenora Ammon, Laurel Hirsch, and Claire Palmieri. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004. Mark, Joan. Four Anthropologists: An American Science in Its Early Years. New York: Science History Publications, 1980. Marsh, Margaret Sammartino. “Suburbanization and the Search for Community: Residential Decentralization in Philadelphia, 1880–1900.” Pennsylvania History 44, no. 2 (1977): 99–116. Mason, Winslow, Jr. “Row at Boathouse Continues.” Philadelphia Tribune, 26 April 1994, 1A. Mathews, Marcia M. Henry Ossawa Tanner: American Artist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. McBride, Henry. “Modern Art.” The Dial 74, no. 5 (May 1923): 529–31. Mazow, Leo G., ed. Picturing the Banjo. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2005. McCarthy, Michael. Typhoid and the Politics of Public Health in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1989. McElroy, Guy. Facing History: The Black Image in American Art. San Francisco: Bedford Arts Publishers in association with the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1990. McHenry, Margaret. Thomas Eakins, Who Painted. Oreland, Pa., privately printed, 1946. McMahon, Michael. “Makeshift Technology: Water and Politics in 19th-Century Philadelphia.” Environmental Review 12, no. 4 (1988): 21–37. Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Merrill, William L., Edmund J. Ladd, and T. J. Ferguson. “The Return of the Ahayu:da: Lessons for Repatriation from Zuni Pueblo and the Smithsonian Institution.” Current Anthropology 34, no. 5 (December 1993): 523–67. Meyers, Robert C. V. Life and Adventures of Lewis Wetzel: The Renowned Virginia Rancher and Scout. Philadelphia: J. E. Potter, 1883. Michaels, Scott. The Limits of Multiculturalism: Interrogating the Origins of American Anthropology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Miller, Frederick. “Black Migration to Philadelphia.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 108, no. 3 (July 1984): 315–50. Milroy, Elizabeth. “Thomas Eakins’ Artistic Training, 1860–1870.” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1986. ———. Guide to the Thomas Eakins Research Collection with a Lifetime Exhibition Record and Bibliography. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1996. ———. “Images of Fairmount Park in Philadelphia.” In Thomas Eakins, edited by Darrel Sewell, 77–94. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001. Mitchell, S[amuel] Augustus. Mitchell’s Intermediate or Secondary Geography. Philadelphia: Thomas, Cowperthwait & Co., 1849. Montagu, Jennifer. “Velázquez Marginalia: His Slave Juan de Pareja and His Illegitimate Son Antonio.” Burlington Magazine 125, no. 968 (November 1983): 683–85. Moot, Linda. “Sarah Frishmuth, Portrait of a Collector.” Newsletter—American Musical Instrument Society 21, June 1992, 4–5. Morgan, Lewis Henry. Ancient Society; or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from

274

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Savagery through Barbarism and Civilization (1877). Reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964. Mosby, Dewey F. Henry Ossawa Tanner. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1991. Muller, Kevin Richard. “Cultural Costuming: Native Americans, Inversion, and the Power of an Exceptional White Masculinity.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2003. Nemerov, Alexander. The Body of Raphaelle Peale, 1812–1824. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Nickerson, Cynthia D. “Artistic Interpretations of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, 1855–1900.” American Art Journal 16, no. 3 (Summer 1984): 49–77. Ousley, Stephen D. “Boas, Brinton, and the Jesup North Pacific Expedition: The Return of the Americanoids.” Native American Studies 14, no. 2 (2000): 11–17. Parezo, Nancy J. “Cushing as Part of the Team: The Collecting Activities of the Smithsonian Institution.” American Ethnologist 12, no. 4 (November 1985): 763–74. Parry, Ellwood C. “The Thomas Eakins Portrait of Sue and Harry; or, When Did the Artist Change his Mind?” Arts Magazine 53, no. 9 (May 1979): 146–53. ——— and Maria Chamberlin-Hellman. “Thomas Eakins as an Illustrator, 1878–1881.” American Art Journal 5 (May 1973) 20–45. Peale, Rembrandt. Graphics, The Art of Accurate Delineation; A System of School Exercise for the Education of the Eye and the Training of the Hand, as Auxiliary to Writing, Geography, and Drawing. Philadelphia: Edward C. Biddle, 1845. Pennell, Elizabeth Robins. “To Gipsyland.” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 45, no. 1 (November 1892): 109–21; 45, no. 2 (December 1892): 258–71; 45, no. 3 (January 1893): 414–24. ———. Our Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1916. Pennell, Joseph. “A Ramble in Old Philadelphia.” The Century Magazine 23, no. 5 (March 1882): 655–67. Pisani, Donald J. “Fish Culture and the Dawn of Concern over Water Pollution in the United States.” Environmental Review 8, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 117–31. Pitman, Dianne W. Bazille: Purity, Pose, and Painting in the 1860s. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998. Pohl, Frances K. “Black and White in America.” In Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History, 2nd ed., edited by Stephen F. Eisenmann. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002. ———. Framing America: A Social History of American Art. Rev. ed. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008. Pollock, Griselda. “‘With my own eyes’: Fetishism, the Labouring Body and the Colour of Its Sex.” Art History 17, no. 3 (September 1994): 142–82. ———. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. New York: Routledge, 1999. Prendergast, Christopher. Paris and the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992. Read, Helen Appleton. “Eakins Comes Into His Own.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Sunday, 11 March 1923, 2B. Reichhelm, Gustavus C. Chess in Philadelphia: A Brief History of the Game in Philadelphia, Illustrated by Numerous Charts, Tables, Games and Problems. [Philadelphia]: Billstein & Son, 1898. Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Vintage, 1995. ———, ed. A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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275

Ribner, Jonathan P. “The Thames and Sin in the Age of the Great Stink: Some Artistic and Literary Responses to a Victorian Environmental Crisis.” British Art Journal 1, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 38–46. ———. “The Poetics of Pollution.” In Turner Whistler Monet. London: Tate Publications in association with the Art Gallery of Ontario, 2004. Roosevelt, Theodore. Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons (1885). Reprint, New York: Modern Library, 1996. Rosenzweig, Phyllis D. The Thomas Eakins Collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977. Rydell, Robert W. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. ———. Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Sapir, Edward. “Civilization and Culture.” The Dial 67, no. 799 (September 1919): 233–36. Sewell, Darrel, ed. Thomas Eakins. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001. Shenk, David. The Immortal Game: A History of Chess; or, How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science, and the Human Brain. New York: Doubleday, 2006. [Shinn, Earl]. “Eleventh Exhibition of the Water-color Society.” The Nation 26, no. 661 (28 February 1878): 156–57. ——— [pseud. Edward Strahan]. Gérôme, A Collection of the Works of J. L. Gérôme in One Hundred Photogravures. New York: Hall, 1881–87. Silcox, Harry C. “Philadelphia Negro Educator: Jacob C. White, Jr., 1837–1902.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 97, no. 1 (January 1973): 75–98. ———. “Nineteenth Century Philadelphia Black Militant: Octavius V. Catto (1839–1871).” Pennsylvania History 44, no. 1 (January 1977): 53–76. ———. “The Search by Blacks for Employment and Opportunity: Industrial Education in Philadelphia.” Pennsylvania Heritage 4 (December 1977): 38–43. Simpson, Marc. “Thomas Eakins and His Arcadian Works.” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1, no. 2 (Fall 1987): 71–95. ———. “Eakins’s Vision of the Past and the Building of a Reputation.” In Thomas Eakins, edited by Darrel Sewell, 211–24. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001. Simpson, Mark. Trafficking Subjects: The Politics of Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Smalls, James. “Esclave, Nègre, Noir: The Representation of Blacks in Late 18th- and 19thCentury French Art.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1991. ———. “Slavery Is a Woman: Race, Gender and Visuality in Marie Benoist’s Portrait d’une négresse.” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 3, no. 1 (Spring 2004): http://19thc-artworldwide.org/spring_04/ articles/smal.html. Sollors, Werner. “A Critique of Pure Pluralism.” In Reconstructing American Literary History, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, 250–79. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. Spassky, Natalie. American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Princeton University Press, 1980. Spies, Kathleen. “Figuring the Neurasthenic: Thomas Eakins, Nervous Illness, and Gender in Victorian America.” Nineteenth-Century Studies 12 (1998): 85–109. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Edited by Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean. New York: Routledge, 1995.

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Stevens, Mary Anne, ed. The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse, European Painters in North Africa and the Near East. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1984. Stirling, William. Velazquez and His Works. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1855. Stocking, George W., Jr. Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (1968). Reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. ———, ed. A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. ———, ed. Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852). Reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Strain, Ellen. “Exotic Bodies, Distant Landscapes: Touristic Viewing and Popularized Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century.” Wide Angle 18, no. 2 (1996): 70–100. Stratton, Suzanne L. Spain, Espagne, Spanien: Foreign Artists Discover Spain 1800–1900. New York: The Equitable Gallery in association with the Spanish Institute, 1993. Taine, Hippolyte. The Philosophy of Art (1865). Translated by John Durand. New York: Holt & Williams, 1873. ———. The Ideal in Art (1867). Translated by John Durand. New York: Holt & Williams, 1872. Tinterow, Gary, and Geneviève Lacambre, Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003. Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden, January 21–April 7, 1889. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953. Truettner, William H. “Dressing the Part: Thomas Eakins’s Portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing.” American Art Journal 17 (1985): 48–72. Trumpener, Katie. “The Time of the Gypsies: A ‘People without History,’ in the Narratives of the West.” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 843–84. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893). Reprint, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1966. Warren, Louis S. Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show. New York: Knopf, 2005. Weigley, Russell F., ed. Philadelphia: A 300-Year History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982. Weinberg, H. Barbara. The American Pupils of Jean-Léon Gérôme. Fort Worth, Texas: Amon Carter Museum, 1984. ———. The Lure of Paris: American Artists at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. New York: Abbeville, 1991. ———. Thomas Eakins and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994. ———. “Studies in Paris and Spain.” In Thomas Eakins, edited by Darrel Sewell, 13–26. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001. ———. “American Artists’ Taste for Spanish Painting.” In Gary Tinterow and Geneviève Lacambre, eds. Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting, 259–305. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003. Weinstein, Leo. Hippolyte Taine. New York: Twayne, 1972. Werbel, Amy. Thomas Eakins: Art, Science, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Edited by Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1982.

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Wilcox, David R. “Restoring Authenticity: Judging Frank Hamilton Cushing’s Veracity.” In Philadelphia and the Development of Americanist Archaeology, edited by Don D. Fowler and David R. Wilcox. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003. Williams, Talcott. “The Ethical and Political Principles of ‘Expansion.’” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 16 (September 1900): 51–66. Williamson, Harold F. Winchester: The Gun That Won the West. Washington, D.C.: Combat Forces Press, 1952. Wilmerding, John, ed. Thomas Eakins. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993. Wilson, R. L. Winchester, An American Legend: The Official History of Winchester Firearms and Ammunition from 1849 to the Present. New York: Random House, 1991. ——— with Greg Martin. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: An American Legend. New York: Random House, 1998. Wolfe, M. Melissa. American Indian Portraits: Elbridge Ayer Burbank in the West (1897–1910). Youngstown, Ohio: The Butler Institute of American Art, 2000. Wood, H[oratio] C. Brain-Work and Overwork. Philadelphia: P. Blakiston, Son & Co., 1885. Wood, Peter H., and Karen Dalton. Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988. Young, Franklin Knowles. The Major Tactics of Chess: A Treatise of Evolutions. Boston: Little, 1898. ———. Chess Strategetics Illustrated: Military Art and Science Adapted to the Chessboard. Boston: Little, Brown, 1900. Zurier, Rebecca. Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. ———, Robert W. Snyder, and Virginia M. Mecklenburg. Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York. New York: National Museum of American Art in association with W. W. Norton, 1995.

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Illustrations

plates ( following page 148) 1.

Thomas Eakins, The Dancing Lesson (originally The Negroes), 1878

2.

Thomas Eakins, The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), 1871

3.

Thomas Eakins, A Street Scene in Seville, 1870

4.

Thomas Eakins, The Chess Players, 1876

5.

Thomas Eakins, Antiquated Music (Portrait of Sarah Sagehorn Frishmuth), 1900

6.

Thomas Eakins, Signora Gomez d’Arza, 1901–2

7.

Thomas Eakins, Female Model (A Negress), ca. 1867–69

8.

Thomas Eakins, Carmelita Requeña, 1869–70

9.

Thomas Eakins, Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1895

10.

Thomas Eakins, Portrait of Henry O. Tanner, ca. 1897

figures 1.

S. Augustus Mitchell, Mitchell’s Intermediate Geography, 1849, cover

2.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Historical Register of the Centennial Exposition, 1876, cover 9

3.

Unidentified photographer, Synoptic History of Inventions: Spindles, Shuttles, and Looms, ca. 1890 10

4.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Prisoner, 1861

5.

Detail of Thomas Eakins, The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), 1871 12

6.

Arthur Burdett Frost, “Plantation Play-Song,” published in Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, 1901 14

7.

Detail of Thomas Eakins, The Dancing Lesson (originally The Negroes), 1878

8.

Unidentified artist, “President Lincoln at Home—[Photographed by Brady],” published in Harper’s Weekly, 1865 15

279

7

12

15

9.

Winslow Homer, Sunday Morning in Virginia, 1877

16

10.

Eastman Johnson, Old Kentucky Home—Life in the South (Negro Life at the South), 1859 21

1 1.

Walter F. Brown, “Our Artist’s Dream of the Centennial Restaurants,” published in Harper’s Weekly, 1876 27

12.

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1650

13.

Unidentified photographer, Woman Playing a Banjo (possibly Lotta Crabtree), 1860s 32

14.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Banjo Lesson, 1893

15.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouk, 1868–69

44

16.

Thomas Eakins, Man in a Turban, 1866–67

44

17.

Charles Cordier, Capresse des Colonies, 1861

31

33

54

18.

Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863

19.

Osman Hamdi, Discussion in Front of the Mosque, ca. 1906

54

20.

Cham, “Les étrangers à Paris: Les orientaux à Paris,” published in Paris-Guide, 1867 58

21.

Cham, “Les étrangers à Paris: La colonie américaine,” published in ParisGuide, 1867 58

22.

Charles Bargue (after Jean-Léon Gérôme), Head of a Fellah, Three-Quarter View, 1868 63

23.

Thomas Eakins, Maud Cook (Mrs. Robert C. Reid), 1895

24.

Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of a Black Woman (Portrait d’une négresse), 1800 71

25.

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Negress (Pourquoi naître esclave?), 1868

55

68

73

26.

Frédéric Bazille, La Toilette, 1869–70

27.

Frédéric Bazille, Young Woman with Peonies (Négresse aux pivoines), 1870

28.

Detail of Thomas Eakins, Female Model (A Negress), ca. 1867–69

29.

Detail of Frédéric Bazille, Young Woman with Peonies (Négresse aux pivoines), 1870 77

30.

Albert Goupil, Two Models on a Terrace, 1868

31.

Gustave Courbet, Rêverie tsigane (Gypsy in Reflection), 1869

32.

Thomas Eakins, “San Bernardo” Sign with Bullfight, 1869–70

33.

Édouard Manet, Spanish Ballet, 1862

34.

Thomas Eakins, sketch of Japanese acrobats in letter to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, June 3, 1869 91

35.

Thomas Eakins, Swimming, 1885

36.

Thomas Eakins, William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River, 1876–77 97

37.

After Thomas Eakins, “The Only Gent that Lived to Tell About thet Spellin’ Bee,” published in Scribner’s Monthly, 1878 98

280

74 75

77

79 83 87

89

94

/

Illustrations

38.

Alice Barber (after Thomas Eakins), “Thar’s such a thing as Calls in this world,” published in Scribner’s Monthly, 1879 99

39.

Thomas Eakins, The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake-Boat, 1873

40.

Alice Barber (after Thomas Eakins), “On the Harlem,” published in Scribner’s Monthly, 1880 99

99

41.

After Thomas Eakins, “Rail-Shooting,” published in Scribner’s Monthly, 1881

42.

After Thomas Eakins, “A Pusher,” published in Scribner’s Monthly, 1881

43.

Thomas Eakins, Rail Shooting, 1876

44.

Thomas Eakins, Pushing for Rail, 1874

45.

Thomas Anshutz, The Ironworkers’ Noontime, 1880

46.

James Tissot, On the Thames, 1876

100 100

101 101 115

115

47.

Thomas Eakins, Professor Benjamin Howard Rand, 1874

48.

Cecilia Beaux, Sita and Sarita (Young Woman with Cat), 1893–94

128

49.

Joseph Pennell, “Oil Refinery,” published in Scribner’s Monthly, 1881

50.

Henry Poore, “Outdoor Tenants,” published in Scribner’s Monthly, 1881

51.

Thomas Eakins, Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River, 1881

52.

Thomas Eakins, Shad Fishing: Setting the Net, 1881

53.

Thomas Eakins, Three Women, Man, and Dog near the Delaware River, 1881–82 139

54.

Arthur Munby, Eliza Hayes, Rose Bridge, and Arthur Munby, ca. 1873

130 134 135 137

139

141

55.

Thomas Eakins, Arcadia, ca. 1883

56.

Thomas Eakins, Two Cowboys with Horses in B-T Ranch Yard, Dog in Foreground, 1887 151

145

57.

Thomas Eakins, Cowboys in the Badlands, 1888

58.

Unknown manufacturer, Eakins’s cowboy suit, ca. 1887

59.

Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman: Sketches of Sport on the Northern Cattle Plains, 1885, frontispiece 158

60.

Thomas Eakins, Cowboy Aiming Rifle, 1887

61.

Thomas Eakins, Cowboy Aiming Revolver, 1887

62.

Winchester Repeating Arms Company, “A New Repeater,” advertisement for the Model 1886 Winchester rifle, published in Forest & Stream, 1887 162

151 152

161 161

63.

J. Wood, Phoebe Ann Moses (Annie Oakley) with Shotgun, ca. 1887

64.

Nate Salsbury, American Horse, Warrior Chief of the Sioux Nation, Member of the Cast of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, ca. 1886 163

65.

Circle of Thomas Eakins, Parody of ‘The Gross Clinic,’ ca. 1875–76

66.

Thomas Eakins, Hiawatha, ca. 1874

166

168

67.

Frederic Remington, A Dash for the Timber, 1889

68.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Oedipus: Bonaparte before the Sphinx, 1867–68

69.

Thomas Eakins, Talcott Williams, ca. 1889

Illustrations

163

/

172

281

169 170

70.

Thomas Eakins, Daniel Garrison Brinton, 1899

173

71.

Thomas Eakins, The Artist’s Wife and His Setter Dog, ca. 1884–89

72.

Thomas Eakins, Portrait of Stewart Culin: Perspective Study, ca. 1899

176

73.

Unidentified artist, “Frank H. Cushing,” published in The Century Magazine, 1882 193

74.

J. W. Black, Zuni Delegation in Washington, D.C., including Laiiuahtsailunkia, Naiiuhtchi, Palowaihtiwa, Kiasi, Nanahe (Hopi), and Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1882 193

75.

John K. Hillers, “Cushing in His Zuñi Garb,” ca. 1880–81, published in The Land of Sunshine, 1900 193

76.

Elbridge Ayer Burbank, It-Say-Yah; Zuni (Zuni NM) Half-Male, 1898

77.

Thomas Hovenden, Portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1890

78.

Unidentified photographer, Thomas Eakins’s Frank Hamilton Cushing in original frame, 1901, published in Bulletin of the Free Museum of Science and Art, 1901 199

79.

Life Group Exhibition Case with Huichol Arrow Maker, Mexican Hall, American Museum of Natural History, New York, ca. 1901 200

80.

Thomas Eakins, photograph of Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1895

81.

Unidentified photographer, Franz Boas in Eskimo clothing demonstrating correct posture for holding a harpoon, late 1890s 201

82.

Herbert Myrick, Cache la Poudre: The Romance of a Tenderfoot in the Days of Custer, 1905, leather cover 208

190

195

197

200

83.

Phil Hughte, The Big Photo, ca. 1994

84.

Thomas Eakins, The Thinker (Portrait of Louis N. Kenton), 1900

212

85.

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Portrait of Jester Pablo de Valladolid, ca. 1632–35 215

86.

Thomas Eakins, Girl with a Fan (Portrait of Miss Gutierrez), ca. 1902–8

214

220

87.

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Juan de Pareja, 1650

88.

Genjiro Yeto, “Fireflies,” published in Lefadio Hearn, KOtto: Being Japanese Curios, with Sunday Cobwebs, 19 02 227

89.

Thomas Eakins, The Dancing Lesson [ originally The Negroes ]: Perspective Study, ca. 1877–78 227

282

/

Illustrations

223

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Asia, 1, 3–4, 6, 8, 52, 69, 82, 175, 178, 180, 185–91, 218, 225–26

Academy of Natural Sciences (Philadelphia), 174 Ackerman, Gerald, 10 acrobats, 89–91, 246n87 Africa/Africans, 5–6, 8–11, 19, 26–27, 34, 42, 46, 49, 52–53, 59–62, 65–82, 84–85, 165, 167, 169–71, 103, 128, 165, 167, 169–71, 178, 180, 182, 184–86, 207, 222, 244n54 African Americans, 2–4, 12–27, 29–35, 67–68, 90, 100, 127–31, 135–36, 140, 146, 184, 194, 221–27 Alewitz, Sam, 118, 120–21, 133 Algeria, 53, 61, 71–72, 74, 78, 244n54 American Philosophical Society, 174 Andalusia, 26, 45, 82, 84–85, 88, 171 Anshutz, Thomas, 38, 114–15, 133, 140; The Ironworkers’ Noontime, 114, 115 anthropology, 1, 3–6, 8–10, 12, 17, 19, 24, 28–31, 35–39, 46, 48–49, 53, 61– 62, 64, 71–72, 93, 108, 111–12, 125, 140, 148, 152–54, 159, 171–212, 216– 17, 225–26, 231 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 40–41, 205 Arabs, 6–7, 52–53, 62–64, 68, 82, 84– 85, 218 Arnold, Matthew, 5–6, 20, 22, 37, 66, 117, 121, 144–46, 148, 154–55, 208; Culture and Anarchy, 144

bacteriology, 120–22, 251n55 banjo, 2, 18, 31–35, 32–33. 38, 90,112, 221, 239n57–58; as circulating commodity, 31–33 Bargue, Charles, Head of a Fellah, ThreeQuarter View (after Gérôme), 63, 63, 65 Barker, Virgil, 230 Barrés, Maurice, 56 Baudelaire, Charles, 48, 68–69 Bazille, Frédéric, 38, 74–77; La Toilette, 74, 75; Young Woman with Peonies (Négresse aux pivoines), 75, 75–77, 77 (detail) Beaux, Cecilia, Sita and Sarita, 129–30, 130 Bederman, Gail, 8, 157–58, 163 Benedict, Ruth, 3 Benjamin, Roger, 61–62, 65, 77 Benjamin, Walter, 26, 43, 50–51 Benoist, Marie-Guillemine, Portrait of a Black Woman (Portrait d’une négresse), 70–72, 71 Benson, Eugene, 64, 68 Berger, Martin, 19 Bingham, George Caleb, 104 Black, J. W., Zuni Delegation in Washington D.C., 192, 193

283

Centennial Exposition (Philadelphia, 1876), 8–10, 12, 19, 27–28, 38–39, 97, 136, 159 Cham (Charles Amédée de Noé): “Les étrangers à Paris: La colonie Américaine,” 57, 58; “Les étrangers à Paris: Les orientaux à Paris,” 57, 58 Chamberlin-Hellman, Maria, 100, 105 character, 12–13, 24–26, 38–39, 43, 46– 50, 53, 57, 62–64, 66, 71, 82, 87–90, 94–95, 102–113, 116, 122, 130, 140, 150, 152–53, 155, 166, 168, 177, 180, 213, 217, 219–20, 228–31 Chase, William Merritt, 23, 38, 80 Chateaubriand, François-René, 103 Cheney, Martha Candler, 230 Chesnutt, Charles, 102 chess, 10, 28, 183, 189–91 Chopin, Kate, 102–3 Cikovsky, Nicolai, 17 circulation, 2–3, 13, 16, 20, 26–32, 37, 46, 48–51, 66, 68, 72, 77, 80, 84, 90, 93, 104, 110–12, 132, 136, 140–41, 148– 49, 162, 177, 181, 205–6, 210, 212 civilization, 5–9, 11, 14, 22–23, 25, 35, 47, 52, 56, 59–60, 64, 66, 112, 134–35, 148, 150, 153–59, 163–65, 167, 170, 177–80, 182–83, 185, 188, 202–3, 205–6, 208, 210, 231 class, 2, 5–6, 11–13, 17, 20–24, 28, 30, 38, 51–52, 59, 67, 78, 81, 86, 97, 100– 101, 110, 112–14, 116–17, 126, 131–33, 135–36, 140, 143, 146–47, 163, 219, 221–22, 228 classicism, 7, 23, 70–71, 74, 106, 136, 143–48, 178, 185–86 Coates, Edward Hornor, 116, 142–43, 145–47, 149 Coates, Florence Nicholson, 145–46 Cohen, William, A., 123–24 comparative method, 5–13, 23, 46, 48– 49, 59–60, 90, 165, 169–70, 177–79, 184–87, 189–91, 195, 198, 202, 204, 258n63 Conn, Steven, 177–79 Cook, Clarence, 98 Cook, Maud, 68 Cooper, Helen, 126–27

Blackburn, Henry, 84 “blood,” 24–26, 34, 47, 62, 85, 102, 176, 221–22, 229, 239n56 Blythe, David Gilmour, Prospecting, 114, 117 Boas, Franz, 3–5, 30–31, 34, 36–39, 48, 112, 140, 153–54, 176–78, 181, 186, 192, 198–99, 201, 201–2, 204, 206, 231; and life group exhibits, 199–201 “bohemianism,” 22–23, 51, 56, 82, 84– 86, 90 bolero, 88–89, 220 Bolger, Doreen, 145–46 Bollman, James, ix, 32–33 Bonnat, Léon, 45, 62, 80–81, 215–16 Boone, M. Elizabeth, 246n81 Borrow, George, 84–85 Bourne, Randolph, 3, 217 Brinton, Daniel Garrison, 171–76, 179– 88, 173 Brooks, Van Wyck, 39, 217, 230 Brown, Marilyn, 51 Brown, Walter F.: “Our Artist’s Dream of the Centennial Restaurants,” 27–28, 27 Brush, George de Forest, 64 Buel, James W., Heroes of the Plains, 164 Buffalo Bill’s (William F. Cody’s) Wild West, 53, 160, 162–65 Burbank, Elbridge Ayer, 191–92, 194–97; It-Say-Yah; Zuni Half-Male, 195 Burns, Sarah, 117 Burroughs, Alan, 39, 230–31 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 154–55 Burt, Nathaniel, 118 Cable, George Washington, 102 camp-cure, 150, 156 Carmen (Mérimée), 83, 103 Carolus-Duran (Charles-Émile-Auguste Durand), 215 Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste: Four Continents, 72; Negress (Pourquoi naître esclave?), 72–73, 73 Cash, Sarah, 142 Cassatt, Mary, 80 Castagnary, Jules-Antoine, 64–65, 76 Catto, Octavius, 128–29 Çelik, Zeynep, 53

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Index

Dewey, George, 182 Dewey, John, 3 diffusion, 2–3, 30–41, 46, 49–50, 61, 72, 111–12, 140, 148, 153–54, 159, 162, 175, 177, 181, 183, 186–87, 200, 205–6 dime-novel Westerns, 159, 165 Dorwart, Jeffrey, 133 Dove Lake, 106, 113, 142 Drexel, Lucy Wharton (Mrs. Joseph H.), 172–73, 177–78, 182, 220 Du Bois, W. E. B., 4, 29, 221

Cooper, James Fenimore, 104 Cordier, Charles, 53–54, 70–72; Capresse des Colonies, 54, 71 cosmopolitanism, 27–28, 38, 40–41, 43, 92, 95–102, 104, 106–7, 110–13, 115, 123, 129, 132–33, 139–40, 143, 146, 148, 181, 205, 210, 219, 225–26, 230 Courbet, Gustave, 60, 64, 230; Rêverie tsigane (Gypsy in Reflection), 82–83, 83 Couture, Thomas, 45, 80 cowboys, 10, 39, 149–53, 156–62, 165, 167, 169–71, 194, 205 cremation, 124–25, 189, 191, 226 Cresson, Charles, 119–21, 250n49 Culin, Stewart, 1, 175–76, 187–92, 190, 194, 198, 204, 206, 225–26 culture: bacteriological sense, 122, 131; “fish,” 136–37; modern anthropological sense (as in “culture concept”), 2–5, 14, 17–20, 22, 24, 26, 28–32, 34–41, 46, 48–50, 61, 64, 69, 72, 77–78, 80–81, 93, 102, 108, 111–12, 140–41, 144, 148, 152–54, 159, 167, 173, 175, 177–78, 183, 186, 192, 198–202, 205–10, 217, 219, 225; premodern, social evolutionary sense (as in “civilization”), 5–6, 8, 20, 22, 102, 117, 121, 144–45, 181, 186, 188, 210, 228 Cushing, Frank Hamilton, 174–76, 191– 212, 193, 199, 200, plate 9; on “culture” and “cultures,” 192, 201–2 social evolutionism, 202–5: works: “My Adventures in Zuñi,” 192, 202; “The Need of Studying the Indian in Order to Teach Him,” 202–3; “Zuñi Breadstuff,” 202; Zuñi Fetiches, 196 Custer, George Armstrong, 162, 171, 208 Custer, Jay, 185

Eakins, Margaret, 116, 119, 146–47 Eakins, Susan Macdowell, 29, 105, 150, 164, 170, 175, 215, 218–19, 226 Eakins, Thomas: and acrobats, 89–91, 91, 246n87; and African Americans, 2– 4, 12–22, 26, 28, 30–35, 37, 67–68, 90, 100–101, 103, 128, 130–31, 135–36, 140, 220–24; and Africans, 6, 42, 46, 49, 53, 60–61, 65–66, 69–79, 82, 129, 222; and Arabs, 6–7, 44, 63, 65–67, 82, 84–85, 218; artistic techniques of, 1, 5, 17–20, 37–38, 44–45, 66, 69, 77–80, 87–88, 96, 103, 112, 116, 125, 138–41, 148, 150, 206–9, 216, 224–26; “bohemianism” of, 22–23, 51, 82, 85–86, 90; on Catholicism, 3, 26, 45–47, 55–56, 86, 215, 219–20; and chess, 10, 28, 183, 189–91; and circuses, 26, 43, 45, 83, 89–91, 162, 246n87; and class, 2, 5–6, 11–13, 16–17, 20–24, 28, 30, 38, 51–52, 67, 78, 81, 86, 97, 100–101, 110, 112–14, 116–17, 126–27, 131–36, 140–43, 146– 47, 219, 221–22, 228, 237n38; as collector of exotic objects, 153, 175; and comparative method, 5–7, 10–17, 23, 46, 48–49, 60, 90, 165, 169–70, 177–79, 184–91, 195, 198, 202, 204, 226; cremation of, 124–25, 226; and Dakota cowboys, 10, 39, 149–53, 152, 155, 159–71, 194, 205; death of, 226; and dirt, filth, or pollution, 86, 114– 25, 129–38, 143, 146–48, 229; and the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 5, 18, 22, 24–25, 42–47, 50–53, 56, 63–66, 76, 96, 102–3, 106–7, 123; and ecological change, 96, 138; and folklore,

Dakota Territory, 39, 150–53, 156, 159– 61, 164–65, 167, 169–71, 194, 205 Darwin, Charles, 8, 24–25, 154, 195 Davies, Wallace E., 118 Delacroix, Eugène, 73–74, 230; Women of Algiers, 73–74 Delaware River. 93, 105, 131, 136–39, 169 Deloria, Philip, 159 Derrida, Jacques, 49, 65

Index

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285

12, 26, 38, 44, 48–49, 65, 80–90, 94, 102, 122–23, 184, 215–16; and types and stereotypes, 2, 12, 16, 34–35, 37–38, 46, 48–49, 55, 57, 65, 68–69, 72–73, 78– 79, 81, 88, 101, 105, 110, 133, 166, 198, 213, 216–17, 220, 230; and Velázquez, 1, 26, 30–31, 37, 44, 80, 214–17, 219, 223–24; works: The Agnew Clinic, 122; Antiquated Music (Portrait of Sarah Sagehorn Frishmuth), 28, 172, 178–80, 183–84, 196, Plate 5; Arcadia, 144, 145, 147, The Archaeologist, 189–91; The Artist’s Wife and His Setter Dog, 175, 176, 225; The Biglin Brothers Racing, 126; The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake-Boat, 98, 99, 102, 127; Carmelita Requeña, 80–88, 219, Plate 8; The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), 11–12, 12 (detail), 93– 96, 106, 116–17, 125–26, 131, 146–48, Plate 2; The Chess Players, 10, 28, 183, 190, Plate 4; Cowboy Aiming Revolver, 160, 161; Cowboy Aiming Rifle, 160, 161; Cowboys in the Badlands, 150, 151, 153, 169–70; The Dancing Lesson (The Negroes), 2–3, 12–22, 15 (detail), 26, 29–34, 37, 60, 72, 90, 105, 200, 209, 221, Plate 1; The Dancing Lesson (The Negroes): Perspective Study, 226, 227; Daniel Garrison Brinton, 171–74, 173, 180, 184; Elbridge Ayer Burbank, 191, 195–97; Female Model (A Negress), 66– 82, 77 (detail), Plate 7; Frank Hamilton Cushing, 174–75, 191–212, 199, Plate 9; Genjiro Yeto, 225; Girl with a Fan (Portrait of Miss Gutierrez), 220, 220; The Gross Clinic (Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross), 93, 113, 121, 167; Hiawatha, 167, 168, 171; Man in a Turban, 43–44, 44, 63, 65–67; Maud Cook, 67–68, 68; Mrs. Joseph H. Drexel, 172–73; “On the Harlem,” 98, 99; “The Only Gent that Lived to Tell About thet Spellin’ Bee,” 98, 98; photograph of Frank Hamilton Cushing, 200, 200; Portrait of Henry O. Tanner, 221–25, Plate 10; Portrait of Stewart Culin: Perspective Study, 189, 190; Professor Benjamin Howard Rand,

Eakins, Thomas (continued) 12–16, 20, 34, 36, 47, 181, 192, 203, 207, 210; and guns, 23, 57–58, 156– 67, 171; and immigrants, 13, 24, 28– 30, 37, 100, 104, 132–33, 147, 185, 187, 216–220; and Islam, 55–56, 85; and Japanese, 27, 48–49, 90–91, 225–26; and Japanese art, 1, 3–4, 175–76, 180, 183, 225–26; and juvenile education, 6–7, 11, 49, 60; and linear perspective, 125; and local color, 12, 36, 38–39, 47, 85, 93–113, 117, 122–24, 131, 136–42, 148, 186; and magazines, 98–100, 104–5, 110, 132–36, 139–41, 149–50, 158, 175, 188, 206, 226; and malaria, 116, 124, 135; and militarism, 122, 150, 162, 165, 170–71, 184,188–91, 195, 205; and nationalism/national character, 2, 11–13, 19, 32–33, 38–39, 45, 47–48, 60, 70, 86–90, 96–98, 102–17, 131, 151–53, 160, 167, 176, 180–81, 184, 213–32; and Native Americans, 5–9, 149–70, 174, 178–81, 185–212; and New York City, 16, 20, 98, 100, 141, 225, 228; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 13, 22–24, 33, 39, 67, 92, 105, 114, 116–17, 120, 128, 143–44, 148–52, 172, 192, 194, 221, 228 (resignation from, 149–50); as petit-bourgeois, 23, 237n38; and pet monkey, 194–95, 202; and picture frames, 30, 38, 78, 198–99, 205–8, 219–20; and portrait d’apparat, 195, 198–99, 205; and posthumous criticism, 228–32; and Quakers, 11, 55, 95–96, 112, 167, 171; and racial thinking, 2–4, 6, 13–21, 24–26, 30–40, 46–50, 64–72, 90, 102, 107–12, 125– 36, 140, 152, 167, 171, 177, 223–24, 231; and Republican Party, 15, 112, 116, 120, 133, 147, 246n81, 250n42; resignation from teaching, 22, 117, 143, 148–50, 152, 173, 192, 228; and rowing, 10–12, 93–96, 98–99, 106, 116–18, 125–31, 138, 146–48; and social evolution, 5–17, 23–27, 30–32, 36–39, 46–50, 58, 60– 61, 66, 90, 144–45, 153–54, 157, 163– 65, 169–70, 175–79, 181, 184–92, 195, 198, 202–5, 226; and Spain, 1, 3, 6,

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Index

frontier, 39, 56, 153–60, 162–65, 167, 170–71, 194, 204–5 Frost, Arthur Burdett, 13–14, 38, 105, 138, 156; “Plantation Play-Song,” 14

127–30, 128; Professor Henry A. Rowland, 207; “A Pusher,” 100, 100; Pushing for Rail, 100–101, 101; Rail Shooting, 100– 101, 101; “Rail-Shooting,” 100, 100; Rear-Admiral Charles D. Sigsbee, 184; “San Bernardo” Sign with Bullfight, 86– 87, 87; Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River, 136–42, 137, 169; Shad Fishing: Setting the Net, 138–39, 139; Signora Gomez d’Arza, 29–30, 37– 39, 216, 218–20, Plate 6; sketch of Japanese acrobats, 91; A Street Scene in Seville, 85–90, 95, 220, 246n81, Plate 3; Swimming, 93–94, 94, 106, 142–49, 171; Talcott Williams, 172, 172; “Thar’s such a thing as Calls in this world,” 99; The Thinker (Portrait of Louis N. Kenton), 213–16, 214; Three Women, Man, and Dog near the Delaware River, 138, 139; Two Cowboys with Horses in B-T Ranch Yard, 150, 151; William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River, 96–98, 97, 114, 124 Egan, Maurice, 100, 104, 114, 132–35, 138 Egypt/Egyptians, 5, 10–11, 56, 60–62, 84–85, 165, 167, 169–71, 178, 207 ethnographic present, 61, 85 Evans, Brad, x, 36–37, 40, 107, 111–12, 181, 207, 209–10

Galichon, Émile, 63–64 Garland, Hamlin, 36, 38, 102–4, 107, 109–10, 131, 186, 229; Crumbling Idols, 107, 110; “Up the Coullee,” 106 Gautier, Théophile, 62–65, 88,103 germ theory, 121 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 5, 10–12, 23, 26–27, 38–39, 42, 44–45, 51–56, 61–65, 76– 82, 84, 86, 94, 96, 103, 106, 110–11, 114, 123, 136, 167, 169–70, 172, 190, 207, 218; works: Bashi-Bazouk, 44, 62; Oedipus: Bonaparte before the Sphinx, 169–71, 170; Pifferari, 51, 82, 86; The Prisoner, 11–12, 12, 62; A View of the Plain of Thebes in Upper Egypt, 62, 207 Girard College, 7 Gloucester, New Jersey, 93, 105, 116, 131– 32, 136–39, 150, 169 Gomez d’Arza, Signora, Plate 6 Goodrich, Lloyd, 17, 19, 23, 39, 45, 67, 130, 180, 189, 213, 217, 228–30 Goupil, Adolphe, 62 Goupil, Albert, Two Models on a Terrace, 79, 79 Greece/Greeks and Hellenism, 5, 7, 23, 52, 57, 106, 143–48 Greenberg, Clement, 230 Greenhalgh, Paul, 59 Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo, 70–71 Grut, Marina, 88 guns, 23, 57–58, 156–67, 171 Gura, Philip, 33 gypsies/Gypsies, 26, 45, 49, 51, 82– 88, 103

Fabian, Johannes, 10, 84–85, 198 Fairmount Park, 11, 93–95, 110, 113–14, 116, 119, 125–27, 131 fatalism, 68–69, 72–73, 78–79, 83, 121 Fitzgerald, Riter, 209 flamenco, 88 folklore, 12–16, 20, 34, 36, 47, 181, 192, 203, 207, 210; Foster, Kathleen A., 2, 11–12, 45, 81, 90, 105, 125, 138, 144, 147, 149, 189–91, 256n32 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Historical Register of the Centennial Exposition, 8, 9, 11 Fried, Michael, 207 Frishmuth, Sarah Sagehorn (Mrs. William), 28, 172, 177–80, 182–84, 196

Index

Hals, Frans, 78 Hamdi, Osman, 53, 55; Discussion in Front of the Mosque, 55 Hardy, Chester, 137–38 Harris, Joel Chandler, Uncle Remus, 13–14, 36, 102–3, 105 Harte, Bret, 98, 102, 104–5 Harvey, David, 50, 59

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287

Ladd, Edmund, 211 Lagenevais, F. de, 111 Lang, Amy Shrager, 20–22 Leja, Michael, ix, 38, 40, 126 Leroi, Paul, 110–11 Liberty, 70–71, 78–80, 86, 90 life group exhibits, 199–201 Lincoln, Abraham, 13, 15, 19, 90, 224, 235n23 Lincoln, Thomas (Tad), 13, 19, 90, 235n23 Linn, Karen, 32 local color, 12, 36, 38–39, 47, 78, 85, 93– 113, 117, 122–24, 131, 136–42, 148, 186 Locke, Alain, 3, 35–36 London, Jack, 154–55; The Call of the Wild, 154 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, The Song of Hiawatha, 167, 171 Lubin, David, 224–25, 228 Ludlow, William, 119–21 Lutz, Tom, 106, 110, 113

Haussmann, Baron Georges-Eugène, 26, 50–51, 56, 61, 126 Hearn, Lafcadio, 36, 225–27 Hegeman, Susan, 231 Henri, Robert, 39, 228, 230 Hicks, Edward, Peaceable Kingdom, 95 Higham, John, 185 Hillers, John K., “Cushing in His Zuñi Garb,” 192, 193, 212 Homer, William Innes, ix, 25, 47, 138–39 Homer, Winslow, 15–16, 104–5, 228, 230; Sunday Morning in Virginia, 15–16, 16 Honour, Hugh, 2, 32, 67–69, 72, 75–76 Hoopes, Donelson, 2, 17 Hovenden, Thomas, Portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing, 196, 197 Howells, William Dean, 36, 108, 210 Hughte, Phil, The Big Photo, 212, 212 Hugo, Victor, 57, 82, 85 immigrants and migrants, 12–13, 24–25, 28–30, 37, 51, 84, 100, 104, 132–33, 140, 147, 157, 181, 185, 187, 216–220 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, Odalisques with Slave, 73, 230 Irving, Washington, 104 Islam, 53, 55–56, 85

Madrid, 1, 45–46, 48–49, 80, 122, 214– 15, 217 magazines, 8, 12–13, 27, 36, 56, 64, 98– 100, 103–5, 108, 110, 132–36, 139–41, 145, 149–50, 156, 159, 175, 188, 192– 94, 202, 206, 209, 226 Main Line, 113, 116, 142–43, 147–48 Manet, Édouard, 53–54, 56, 60, 76, 78, 80, 82, 88–90, 129–30, 230; model “Laure,” 76; Olympia, 53–54, 54, 56, 76, 129–30; Spanish Ballet, 88–89, 89 marksmanship, 162–65 Marsh, Margaret, 147 Marx, Karl, 237n38 Masson, Frédéric, 64 McBride, Henry, 228, 230 McCarthy, Michael, 119–20 McElroy, Guy, 67 McHenry, Margaret, 30, 175, 217, 219, 225 Mead, Margaret, 3 Menand, Louis, 35 Mérimée, Prosper, Carmen, 83 Meyers, Robert C. V., 165–66; Life and Adventures of Lewis Wetzel, the Renowned

James, Henry, 108, 210 Japanese, 27, 48–49, 90–91 Japanese art, 1, 3–4, 175–76, 180, 182, 225–27 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 102, 104 Jim Crow, 15, 35, 127–31, 140, 147, 185, 221 Johns, Elizabeth, 126 Johnson, Eastman, 20–21, 104; Old Kentucky Home—Life in the South (Negro Life at the South), 20–21, 21 Johnson, Frenchy, 127 Johnston, Richard Malcolm, 98–99, 102, 104 Kallen, Horace, 3 Kaplan, Sidney, 67, 79 Kenton, Louis N., 214 Kroeber, Alfred, 3–4, 16, 20, 26, 29, 39, 48, 108, 177, 230

288

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Index

61, 64–66, 68–79, 86, 88–91, 94, 102–3, 106–7, 110–11, 117, 122–23, 126, 129, 136, 152, 162, 165, 170, 178–79, 214, 221; Exposition Universelle 1867, 5, 26, 43, 46–47, 49, 56, 59–61, 89, 179 Parry, Ellwood, 100, 105 Peale, Rembrandt, 7 Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, 103 Pennell, Joseph, 28, 38, 100, 103, 109, 132–34; “Oil Refinery,” 133, 134 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 13, 22–24, 33, 39, 67, 92, 105, 114, 116– 17, 120, 128, 143–44, 148–52, 172, 192, 194, 221, 228 Phidias, 144 Philadelphia: banjo industry, 32–33; classical architecture, 7; Delaware River, 93, 105, 131, 136–39, 169; Dove Lake, 106, 113, 142; Fairmount Park, 11, 93– 95, 110, 113–14, 116, 119, 125–27, 131; grid plan, 125–26; immigrants, 25, 28– 30, 100, 132–33, 147, 216–220; League Island Navy Yard, 132–33, 184; local color, 38–39, 93–106, 109–13, 117, 124, 131, 136, 138, 140–42, 148; Main Line, 113, 116, 142–43, 147–48; Mill Creek, 142; philos adelphos (brotherly love), 143, 147–48; Quakers, 11, 54, 95–95, 112, 167, 171; racial segregation, 15–16, 127– 29, 131, 140, 147, 185, 221; Republican Party, 15, 112, 116, 120, 133, 147; rowing, 10–12, 93–98, 116–18, 125–31, 138, 146–48; “Schuylkill Navy,” 127–28; Schuylkill River, 11, 93, 94–99, 113– 14, 116, 118–20, 124–28, 131–32, 142, 229; suburbs, 93, 100, 106, 113, 115– 17, 119, 132, 138, 142–48; water pollution, 113–14, 116–24, 131–43, 146–48, 219, 228 Philippines, 182–84, 188 Pitman, Diane, 74, 76 Plessy v. Ferguson, 184 Pohl, Frances K., 2, 20, 34, 129 Pollock, Griselda, 75–78, 129 Poore, Henry, 100, 132–35; “Outdoor Tenants,” 134, 135 Pyle, Howard, 136–37

Virginia Rancher and Scout, 165–66, 168 Milroy, Elizabeth, ix, 25, 80–81, 116, 123, 125–27 Mitchell, S. Augustus, Mitchell’s Intermediate Geography, 6, 7, 11, 49 Mitchell, S. Weir, 254n9 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 8, 17, 154, 201 Moses, Phoebe Ann (Annie Oakley), 162–63, 163 Mount, William Sidney, 104 Muller, Kevin, 207–8 Munby, Arthur, Eliza Hayes, Rose Bridge, and Arthur Munby, 140, 141 Murray, Samuel, 188, 194, 217 Muybridge, Eadweard, 120 Myrick, Herbert, Cache la Poudre: The Romance of a Tenderfoot in the Days of Custer, 207, 208 nationalism/national character, 2, 11–13, 19, 32–33, 38–39, 45, 47–48, 60, 70, 86–90, 96–98, 102–17, 131, 151–53, 160, 167, 176, 180–81, 184, 213–32 Native Americans, 5–6, 8, 41, 56, 153, 157–60, 163, 165–69, 174–75, 178–81, 185–89, 191–212, 195, 200 Nattier, Jean-Marc, Mademoiselle Clermont, 69–70 Neck, the, 100–101, 104, 110, 114, 118, 131–35, 184 negress type, 66–79, 82 Nemerov, Alexander, ix, 40, 256 Norris, Frank, McTeague, Vandover and the Brute, 154 Oakley, Annie (Phoebe Ann Moses), 162–63, 163 Orient/orientalism, 10–11, 26, 28, 42, 50, 53–54, 58, 61–66, 68–69, 72–85, 103, 114, 121, 129, 136, 171–72, 175– 76, 179, 190, 202, 207, 218, 222, 224–25 Oriental Club of Philadelphia, 175, 179 Osborne, Carol, 80–81 Pareja, Juan de, 223–24, 223 Paris, 1, 3, 5, 18–20, 22, 24–26, 38, 42–

Index

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289

Spain, 1, 3, 6, 12, 26, 38, 44, 48–49, 65, 80–90, 94, 102, 109, 122–23, 171, 184, 215–16 Spanish-American War, 182, 184 Stewart, Samuel Swaim, 32–34 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 18–22

racial thinking, 2–4, 6, 9–10, 13–21, 24– 26, 30–40, 46–50, 64–72, 90, 102, 107–12, 125–36, 140, 152, 167, 171, 177, 223–24, 231 Rand, Benjamin Howard, 127–30, 128 Read, Helen Appleton, 230 Reconstruction, 13, 15, 20, 140 Regnault, Henri, 74, 80 Remington, Frederic, 38, 104; A Dash for the Timber, 169, 169–70; Paleolithic Man, 154 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 74, 77 Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold van, 22– 23, 102, 105 Reynolds, David, 109 Roosevelt, Theodore, 156–60, 163–64, 169, 196, 205; Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, 156–57, 158, 160; The Winning of the West, 157, 163 Rubens, Peter Paul, 1, 123–25

Taine, Hippolyte, 24–26, 38–39, 46– 48, 56, 64, 66, 90, 102, 106–10, 112, 115, 123, 131, 146, 148, 151–53, 176, 181, 183, 186–87, 207, 213, 219, 228– 29, 230; fossil shell, 46, 66, 102, 106, 112, 176, 181, 207, 219; Histoire de la littérature anglaise, 46, 107–9; on “race, milieu, et moment,” 24–26, 47, 50, 90, 96, 102, 107, 109, 112, 153, 176 Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 33, 221–25, plate 10; The Banjo Lesson, 33, 33–35, 221, 239n59 Tissot, James, On the Thames, 115, 115 Tripp, Albert, 156, 162, 164–65 Truettner, William, x, 204, 210 Trumpener, Katie, 84 Turks, 10, 46, 53, 55, 61, 69, 190 Turner, Frederick Jackson, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 155–56, 158 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 52, 102–4, 108; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 103; Huckleberry Finn, 103 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 5–6 types and stereotypes, 2, 12, 16, 34–35, 37–38, 46, 48–49, 53, 55, 57, 62–65, 68–74, 78–79, 81, 85, 88, 101, 105, 110, 133, 166, 198, 213, 216–17, 220, 230 typhoid, 114, 116, 118–19, 124, 146

Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 104 Salsbury, Nate, 160, 164; American Horse, Warrior Chief of the Sioux Nation, 162, 163 saltimbanques, 50, 82, 89–90 Sapir, Edward, 3, 231 Sargent, John Singer, 38, 80, 88, 90, 217; El Jaleo, 88 Schuylkill River, 11, 93, 94–99, 113–14, 116, 118–20, 124–28, 131–32, 142, 229 Serres, Étienne-René-Augustin, 53, 62 Seville, 12, 26, 45, 80–90, 95, 103; Triana neighborhood, 26, 83–87, 103 Shinn, Earl, 13, 15, 17–20, 22, 25–26, 37, 63, 105, 107, 127, 209 Silcox, Harry, 129 Simpson, Marc, 141, 144, 198, 214 Sixth Loan Exhibition (Museum of Modern Art, 1930), 228–29 Smalls, James, 70 Smithsonian Institution, 8–10, 14, 23, 59, 173–74, 177–78, 192, 196–98, 200, 202, 210, 220 social evolution, 5–17, 23–27, 30–32, 36– 39, 46–50, 58, 60–61, 66, 90, 144–45, 153–54, 157, 163–65, 169–70, 175–79, 181, 184–92, 195, 198, 202–5, 226

290

Union League (Club of Philadelphia), 116, 125, 147 University of Pennsylvania: Faculty Club, 175, 188, 197; University Museum (Free Museum of Science and Art), 28, 39, 153, 171–206, 220, 225

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Index

109; “Drum Taps” (“Ethiopia Saluting the Colors”), 222; “The Spanish Element in Our Nationality,” 216–17 Williams, Talcott, 142, 144, 171–72, 172, 174, 179, 182, 218 Winchester, 157–62, 164, 162 Wood, Horatio, 150, 155, 158; Brain-Work, 155 Wood, J., Phoebe Ann Moses (Annie Oakley) with Shotgun, 163 World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893), 8, 155 Wounded Knee Massacre, 171 Wyllie, William, London from the Monument, 115

Velázquez, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y, 1, 26, 30–31, 37, 45, 80, 214–217, 219, 223–24; and human variety, 217; tercentenary, 215–16; works: Juan de Pareja, 223–25, 223; Portrait of Jester Pablo de Valladolid, 214–15, 215; Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 30–31, 31 Walter, Edgar, Primitive Man, 154 Wanamaker, John, 27, 187 Warren, Louis, 163 Weinberg, H. Barbara, 11–12, 45, 214–15 Wemytewa, Edward, 211 West, Benjamin, Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, 95 Whistler, James A.M., 38, 115; Wapping, 115 Whitman, Walt, 108–9, 131, 146, 150, 152–53, 155–56, 171, 174, 181, 216–17, 219, 221–22; works: Democratic Vistas,

Index

Yeto, Genjiro, 225–26, “Fireflies,” 226, 227 Zuni, 174, 192–93, 195–96, 198–212

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Text: 10/15 Scala Display: Clarendon, Scala Sponsoring editor: Stephanie Fay Assistant editor: Eric Schmidt Project editor: Sue Heinemann Editorial assistants: Erica Lee, Lynn Meinhardt Copyeditor: Charles Dibble Designer: Lia Tjandra Production coordinator: Pam Augspurger Compositor: Integrated Composition Systems Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore