Thomas Eakins

Kathleen Foster and Elizabeth Milroy were steeled for rejection when they mounted the steps of a certain South Philadelphia rowhouse back in 1983. Foster, an art historian with a special interest in Thomas Eakins, and Milroy, her assistant, knew the little house held an uncatalogued trove of letters and sketches by the Philadelphia figure painter who died in 1916, as well as photographs of Eakins, his family and his comrades-in-art. They also knew that a succession of scholars, collectors, dealers and museum officials had visited that doorstep over a period of 20 years, hoping for even a glimpse of the stash, only to be turned away.

"Thomas Eakins: American Realist," the first full-scale retrospective in 20 years of this great American artist, reveals new discoveries of his working methods that place him with our contemporary artists. More than 200 paintings, drawings, sculpture and photographs, borrowed from public and private collections nationwide, present a new viewpoint of Philadelphia's native son and give us an opportunity to savor gems borrowed from other collections. Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) lived most of his life in Philadelphia in the family house at 1729 Mt. Vernon St. He was the grandson of Irish immigrants; his father was a calligrapher and penmanship teacher at Central High School.

First of three parts As he sat in the smoky Arena Athletic Club on North Broad Street the night of April 22, 1898, sketching the scene that would become his last great painting, Thomas Eakins unknowingly was depicting themes - disillusionment, unrest, skepticism - that would resonate in Philadelphia sports throughout the next century and beyond. At the center of the artist's finished product, a brooding boxing tableau he called Between Rounds , a local athlete is about to disappoint a hometown crowd.

It rises 16 feet in the air, stretching toward the skylighted ceiling of the studio in Old Tarble Hall on the Swarthmore College campus. It is black and creepy. Skeletal fingers reach out toward anyone passing by. Beheaded bodies rise from the top and disembodied arms float near the center. A foot-long scalpel thrusts out, arming a confident Dr. Samuel Gross, the same Samuel Gross memorialized in Thomas Eakins' great 1875 painting, The Gross Clinic . But in this Swarthmore rendering, Dr. Gross has heft and weight.

Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia's most famous artist, didn't have any children, but he did produce lots of descendants. Forty-three-year-old Patrick Connors is one of them, a member of a Philadelphia cohort of realist painters that stretches back more than a century. Realism is a fact of nature here. It's the heart of Philadelphia art tradition, especially as passed down through generations of students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. And the heart of realism is illusion, using perspective to create three-dimensional space on a flat surface.

During the summer of 1882 or 1883, art teacher Thomas Eakins led a group of his students out to Dove Lake on Mill Creek near Bryn Mawr for a swim. When they arrived, both teacher and students stripped and went skinny-dipping in the lake. The swimming was recorded in a series of photographs. A few years later, in 1886, this group nude swim cost Eakins his teaching position and the authority it carried within the Philadelphia art community. Yet the painting that emerged from this excursion, The Swimming Hole (1883)

As he sat in the smoky Arena Athletic Club on North Broad Street the night of April 22, 1898, sketching the scene that would become his last great painting, Thomas Eakins unknowingly was depicting themes - disillusionment, unrest, skepticism - that would resonate in Philadelphia sports throughout the next century and beyond. At the center of the artist's finished product, a brooding boxing tableau he called Between Rounds, a local athlete is about to disappoint a hometown crowd.

By now, we expect the seasonal flood of art books that washes over the bookstores every fall to include at least one new volume on Georgia O'Keeffe and more startling revelations about the impressionists. This season delivers that and more - insightful biographies of two important American painters, an informative and thoroughly readable look at the history of art dealing and collecting, and the most unusual and imaginative art book I have ever seen. The last would be The Art Pack by Christopher and Helen Frayling and Ron van der Meer (Alfred A. Knopf, $40)

Thomas Eakins' masterpiece The Gross Clinic - an iconic painting that is irrevocably identified with Philadelphia, where it was painted more than 125 years ago - is poised for sale by Thomas Jefferson University for a record $68 million to a partnership of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and a new museum planned by Wal-Mart heirs in Arkansas. The university's board of trustees approved details of the sale late yesterday, virtually assuring a controversial departure for what many see as the city's greatest and most emblematic work of art - an enormous canvas depicting a Jefferson surgical amphitheater in bloody mid-operation.

EAKINS' EXHIBIT WOWS THEM IN ENGLAND If he had been a French painter, or even an English one, every European museum would covet his work. He would be as familiar to collectors, dealers and art students as Manet and Degas. But, although French-trained, Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), was a thoroughly American artist . . . virtually unknown in Europe. His only trace there is a single painting in the Musee d'Orsay, and that was given by an American museum. . . . However, John Hayes, the director of London's National Portrait Gallery . . . recognized Eakins brilliance more than 30 years ago (and)

Henry Ossawa Tanner deserves a kinder fate than to have a major retrospective of his work sandwiched between Zoe-mania and Vincent van Gogh. But how could it be otherwise? Local photographer Zoe Strauss is emphatically "now" and populist, and van Gogh is a modern master and a perpetual crowd-pleaser. Tanner, by contrast, is a less demonstrative artist whose work reflects the conservative values of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Consequently, his art attracts less attention and requires a more measured response.

It rises 16 feet in the air, stretching toward the skylighted ceiling of the studio in Old Tarble Hall on the Swarthmore College campus. It is black and creepy. Skeletal fingers reach out toward anyone passing by. Beheaded bodies rise from the top and disembodied arms float near the center. A foot-long scalpel thrusts out, arming a confident Dr. Samuel Gross, the same Samuel Gross memorialized in Thomas Eakins' great 1875 painting, The Gross Clinic . But in this Swarthmore rendering, Dr. Gross has heft and weight.

The Independence Seaport Museum's "Drawn to the Water," a gathering of work by dozens of painters from 1830 to the present, connects a multitude of dots. It presents Philadelphia as a city with a great maritime tradition, its waterfront boasting commercial, naval, and recreational boating activities. It shows that the region's waterways have served as a source of inspiration for artists for centuries. And every one of the artists in the show had or has ties to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the nation's oldest art school and art museum, as a student or faculty member.

Sunday Haves and have-nots Based on a sensational 1906 murder, Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel An American Tragedy uses the story of a poor boy whose conflict between his ambitions and his passions leads to a violent end as a commentary on social and economic differences that has echoes for our times. Dreiser, who lived for a time in Strawberry Mansion and loved to take long walks down Ridge Avenue to see the mills of Manayunk, was friendly with Hedgerow Theatre founder Jasper Deeter and cooperated with an adaptation of his novel there in 1935.

French philosopher Simone Weil observed that "the past, once destroyed, never returns. Its destruction is perhaps the greatest of all crimes. " That snippet of insight might apply to moving the Barnes Foundation, but fortunately not to Thomas Eakins' masterpiece, The Gross Clinic. Since it was exhibited in the Centennial exposition of 1876 (not in the art section but in a mock-up of an Army hospital), the painting has undergone five major conservation interventions. Given that several of these effaced history, one hesitates to describe them all as "restorations.

Today is the birthday of the well-known Philadelphia painter and photographer Thomas Eakins. Eakins was born here in 1844 to Benjamin and Caroline Eakins. He attended Central High School and went on to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Jefferson Medical College. He also studied art in France and Spain. In 1876, Eakins began his teaching career at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, first as a volunteer and later as a paid professor. He became the director of the academy in 1882.

A vacationing Belgian radiologist stood rigid and transfixed in front of the newly restored Thomas Eakins 1875 master painting, The Gross Clinic , on Saturday, the first day of an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Perelman Building. It looked as though the doctor, Francis Cuigniez of Gant, saw himself as one of the Jefferson Medical College students in the painting, humbled by the man once called the "Emperor of American Surgery," the formidable Dr. Samuel Gross.

As a young conservator, fresh from graduate school, Mark S. Tucker found himself facing a humbling task. In 1980, he joined the conservation department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was thrown into preparations for the large retrospective of Thomas Eakins' work the museum would be mounting in 1982. That's when he first encountered Eakins' 1875 masterpiece, The Gross Clinic , owned at the time by Jefferson Medical College. "I did a very, very minor treatment on it," Tucker said the other day. "It had surface grime on it and I removed that.

Tucked away on the third floor of the art deco Perelman Building, in a corner nook hidden by a towering black screen, hangs what is widely considered the greatest American painting of the 19th century. Thomas Eakins' masterpiece, The Gross Clinic (1875), is resting comfortably in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's conservation laboratory. The 8-by-6-foot canvas has a semiprivate room these days, sharing space only with a small Rembrandt head of Christ. Seeing the painting here is almost like barging unannounced into a convalescent's room.

The spirit of Thomas Eakins spoke of his evolution as an artist at a lecture yesterday at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The great Philadelphia artist, who died in 1916, spoke through historian and actor Christian Johnson, who presented a dramatic reading of a selection of Eakins' letters for an enthusiastic audience 100-strong. "I would like to thank the Woodlands Cemetery Association for letting me come here," Johnson-Eakins joked, referring to the cemetery in West Philly where the artist is buried.