Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Thomas Eakins
American; 19th-century
New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery
86%
Kathrin. 1872. Oil on canvas
What is it about Eakins that vaults him so far above any of the rest of the American genre painters and portraitists? For one, it's in how he took his Caravaggism seriously, but also how he didn't take it as a given. Look at Kathrin's fingers and forearms, the way they're bodied by a darkness that's pierced by those long splinters of light; or at her foot, which looks set to kick through the picture plane till the corner of that stool holds it back. There's a tenebrist's sense of luminous volume in all of this, but also a jaggedness and a reservation that's all Eakins' own. (It's like he's using William Mount to fix Joseph Wright.) For two, Eakins' paint engages in a struggle with the things it represents: it's not exactly that his realism is undercut by the physical presence of his pictures, but rather that there's a palpable quality to his paintings that at first emerges out of, but then eventually detaches itself from and comes to work against, what they depict. Here, the cabinets and the chairback and all of the folds in Kathrin's clothing have more substance than the surface of this painting is able to manage; it's all realer than real. (TFS, 2026)