thomas eakins and "pure art" education

The Smithsonian Institution

Thomas Eakins and "Pure Art" EducationAuthor(s): Elizabeth JohnsSource: Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 23, No. 3 (1983), pp. 2-5Published by: The Smithsonian InstitutionStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1557376 .

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Thomas Eakins and

"Pure Art" Education Elizabeth johns

What is best known about Thomas Eakins as a teacher of artists is that he was fired. That was a stunning conclusion to his career at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Although several historians have enumerated in detail Eakins's procedures and problems during his years as a teacher at the Academy,' I will take a more general and interpretive point of view in this essay, assessing Eakins's teaching by discussing three questions: What aspects of it upset the Academy authorities so drastically that they fired him? On what examples did Eakins model his teaching? And in what intellectual context might we best understand Eakins's convictions about teaching-and about learning?

Eakins (1844-1916) was on the faculty of the Academy in Philadelphia for ten years: from 1876 to 1879, when he taught as an assistant; from 1879 to i882 when he taught as Professor of Drawing and Painting; and from 1882 to 1886, when he was Director of the Schools.

When the Board of Trustees demanded Eakins's resig- nation only four years into his tenure as director, explanations for the rupture focused on his use of the nude model: some said that he was fired because he insisted on using male and female models together, others that he used students as nude models for the life class of the opposite sex, still others that he lifted a loin cloth from a male model in a female life class. Although subsequent historians have endorsed these explanations, a look at the larger picture indicates that no such isolated actions by Eakins led to his dismissal. Instead, two general areas of disagreement caused the clash.

First, Eakins had imposed a single instructional program on the Academy curriculum, and the board disagreed strongly with its narrowness. As Eakins made clear in a state- ment in 1882, he believed that the Academy's curriculum should train students exclusively in "pure art education." Acknowledging to the board that the Academy had three categories of students, Eakins set forth the philosophy that he insisted should undergird all Academy training: "To furnish facilities and instruction of the highest order to those intend- ing to make painting or sculpture their profession. Second- arily, to extend as far as practicable the same benefits as a foundation for those pursuing... industrial art. Such per-

sons are engravers, die-sinkers, illustrators, decorators, wood carvers, stone cutters, lithographers, photographers, etc., and have always been largely represented in the school. No other benefits whatever but those of pure art education are ex- tended to them, they learning outside [the Academy] the mechanical parts of their art or trade. Lastly, to let amateurs profit by the same facilities ... The course of study [for all three groups] is purely classical. . ... Its basis is the nude human figure."2

Disagreeing with Eakins's narrowly focused program, the board wanted to offer courses that would appeal to the prac- tical needs of the Academy's diverse group of students- a group that included lithographers and decorators who wanted to improve their drawing skills, photographers who needed work on their compositional skills, and young women who wanted to learn watercolor technique. Although the board needed a broad tuition base so that the Academy could be self-sustaining, what had considerably more weight in their breach with Eakins was their belief that training in art should cater to students' immediate needs and wants. This was a position with which Eakins had no sympathy.

The second general difficulty that Eakins experienced with the Academy administration lay in his role as a teacher. When the board officially organized the Academy instruction in 1868 (after years of informal arrangements), they expected that the instructor would preside over the courses and the serious aspects of "art" in a conspicuous manner. But in Eakins's fulfillment of the role, he refused to give his students advice in such aesthetic matters as pictorial composition and the principles of beauty, and except for scheduled visits to the classrooms once or twice a week, he left his students alone. While such relative student autonomy was by no means unique to Philadelphia, it was certainly not consistent with the board's expectations. One of Eakins's students proudly reported later that his procedures "made [them] very self- reliant."3 The Board considered such methods evidence of arrogance and disinterest, but Eakins did not conceive of teaching in any other way and was astonished by their inter- pretation.

In what preconceptions did Eakins's curriculum and teaching procedures originate ?

Let us examine his own experience as an art student. It began in Philadelphia, actually in his high school drawing classes where he learned all types of drawing, including the copying of machines and of academic casts, under the principle that to draw correctly was to see and think correctly.4 How closely his teacher guided his work is not possible to determine, but Eakins's drawing of a lathe done for one of his

ELIZABETH JOHNS is the author of Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life, published by Princeton University Press in 1983. An associate professor of art history at the University of Maryland, College Park, she has published essays and reviews in The Art Bulletin, Winterthur Portfolio, and The College Art Journal, among others. Her essay "Washington Allston and Samuel Taylor Cole- ridge: A Remarkable Relationship" appeared in Volume 19, Num- ber 3, 1979 of the Archives of American Art Journal.

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assignments reveals that he was an astonishingly capable draftsman. In 1862, after he had graduated from high school, he enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where he drew from casts, attended anatomy lectures, and eventually was admitted to the life class. Supervision by a teacher at the Academy was at a minimum; in fact, during these years before the board organized a curriculum, help was usually limited to occasional comments by older students. In I866 Eakins went to Paris to begin his four years of study under Jean Leon G&r6me at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, his last experience as a student. We have reports of this training because he wrote letters home about it (fig. I).

Several things about Eakins's studentship in Paris are distinctive. First, although the Ecole's curriculum called for drawing from casts one or more days per week, Eakins skipped those days because he felt drawing from the antique hampered him as a painter. Second, he began painting from the model within a few months after his arrival in Gerome's studio and relished it so much that he was seldom to draw again. The third distinctive aspect of Eakins's study in Paris was that he had a very difficult time learning to paint. His letters home are full of what he called "downheartedness" at his tendency to muddle colors, at his slowness; he reported that even his dreams were haunted by unruly colors night after night.s Then toward the end of his third year he began to write with a sense of triumph that because of his persist- ence he was finally overcoming his clumsiness. The fourth aspect of Eakins's study in Paris, closely related to this third, was that his teachers did not guide him closely, and Eakins considered the independence this gave him essential to his progress. G6r me apparently looked frequently at his students' work, either making comments or keeping quiet to encourage the students simply by his endorsement. He actually took brush in hand to correct Eakins's work on only a few occasions, to which Eakins had varying reactions. Early on Eakins took the corrections in stride, reporting to his father that he was grateful for the help. But as Eakins developed his own working method, and watched the students around him developing theirs, he did not want correcting. Once when G&r6me repainted a head he had underway, Eakins was fur- ious and wrote home that he would have learned more from "slathering around"6 (by which he meant working and re- working on his own even when the results were a mess). In fact, "slathering around" on his own had been and became even more firmly the central motif in Eakins's own development. For example, after he had been in G&r6me's studio about a year and was not making the kind of progress Ger6me and he both thought he should have been making, he rented his own studio to practice away from the class on techniques he needed to develop. As he had in Philadelphia, he went to nearby hospitals for further practice in dissection, deepening his understanding of human anatomy.

Thus as far as Eakins was concerned, his teachers' strength lay in their demand that their students depend on nothing but their own hard work and developing sensibility. G&6me had been an excellent teacher, Eakins wrote his father as he drew close to the end of his studies. "G~r6me is too great to impose much.... aside [from] his overthrowing completely the ideas I had got before at home, & then telling me one or two little things in drawing, he has never been able to assist me much &

oftener bothered me by mistaking my troubles."' Eakins had a similar assessment of the portraitist L6on Bonnat, with whom he studied for a month during his last year in Paris. Only a few years older than Eakins, Bonnat was particularly good as a teacher, Eakins wrote, because he remembered his own recent difficulties with tyrannical teachers. "Bonnat is now a big man. I am very glad to have gone to Bonnat & to have had his criticism. He says do it just as you like. He will never impose any way of working on his boys. ... He never finds fault with any thing but the result."8 And although Eakins did not study with Thomas Couture, he idolized him as a painter and wrote his father that Couture, too, had suf- fered under dictatorial teachers. "Couture came near giving up painting on account of his masters & his conclusion is the best thing a master can do is to let his pupils alone."i

The foundation ofEakins's trust in his teachers was that he extravagantly admired them as painters. He wrote home with

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Fig. i. Letter from Thomas Eakins to his mother and sister, in which he praises Jean Leon Ger6me, his teacher, written from Paris on April I, I869. Thomas Eakins Papers, Archives of American Art.

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long analyses of the paintings, the character, the fine looks of his teachers G&r6me and Bonnat and of Couture. He reported in detail the historical and psychological character he found in their work, and he emulated the self-discipline with which he believed they had developed their authority.

Six years after he returned from Paris, Eakins took up the role of teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy and modeled his procedures and expectations on what had been so important to him in Paris. In teaching methods, he criticized his students' work once or twice a week, by schedule, and the rest of the time pursued his own work. In commenting on student work, he was often direct, more often quiet, and only occa- sionally did he correct a study. He expected his students to work as hard as he had; because painting had not come easily to him, he did not look compassionately on students who would not persist. Just as in his own student years he had responded to the criticisms of G&r6me and Bonnat on the basis of their authority as painters, he expected his students to respond to his criticisms in the same way. It was an appro- priate expectation; when Eakins began teaching in 1876, he had already painted the Gross Clinic.

In considering Eakins's curriculum, it is important to note that a few aspects of it were not of his making. Students at tme Academy had been studying from the nude model before he began teaching, and they had been encouraged to paint rather than draw in the life class early in their studies. They had also been attending anatomy lectures, but irregularly.

Eakins made the following changes: using his own experience as a guide, he deemphasized drawing from the antique and indeed drawing of any kind; he turned the modeling class (fig. 2) from a preparation for a career in sculpture to a study class for painters; and he instituted dissection for all advanced students (about one-fourth of the student body) (fig. 3). He insisted that all students attend lectures on anatomy twice a week. He lectured on perspective, began classes in portraiture for the study of the human face, and proposed

classes in still-life painting for the development of skills in color and tone. He introduced photography as a study of the human body in motion. Eakins was proud that in the context of other academies, the course was rigorous, and he boasted to the Committee on Instruction that it was "more thorough than in any other existing school." Not even at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was dissection so important (although students could take advantage of dissection facilities in the school if they wanted to); at no other academy was modeling from life required; at no other academies was drawing from the antique so discouraged.

What intellectual convictions guided Eakins's insistence on this rigorous curriculum for such a varied body of students, the majority of whom had industrial and amateur rather than professional goals ?

The explanation lies, I think, in the world view in which Eakins was trained even before he studied as a painter. This was the Enlightenment conviction that empirical knowledge served as an ordering principle, derived as it was from careful observation and reflection, and furthermore, that a certain core of knowledge was a necessary basis for activity in any sphere whatsoever. This conviction dominated Eakins's education at Central High School, his father's career as a writer and teacher of script, and his own study as a developing artist. The Central High School curriculum, established in the early I840s, called for the study of the natural sciences, of history, of foreign languages, of mathematics, and of writ- ing and drawing; annually the School Board reaffirmed its conviction that all citizens in a democracy needed such training whether they later became physicians or stone masons, lawyers or bakers, artists or geologists. The High School even endorsed the teaching of anatomy and the attendance of students at dissections so that they would see first hand the order of the physical universe and the correlation between what is seen and what is unseen. In Benjamin Eakins's capacity as a writer and teacher of script (a profession in which Thomas

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Fig. 3. Dissection class, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Photog- rapher unknown. Thomas Anshutz Papers, Archives of American Art.

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joined him during his first few years after high school), he himself subscribed to the faith in the ordering function of knowledge gained through experience. Writers of script saw their vocation as built on intellectual clarity: one could not draw or write correctly unless one first observed carefully and then ordered those observations. And finally, Eakins was guided by these convictions in his direction of his own study to be a portrait painter, a goal he declared quite early during his study in Paris. He assigned to himself the mastery of anatomy, of dissection, of sculpture as a study for painting, of perspective, of still life, all in addition to earnest investi- gation of a wide range of painting techniques. Knowledge was to be the foundation for painting even the simplest bust portrait.

Eakins's commitment to knowledge rings again and again in the memories of his students. A contemporary wrote of the Academy under his direction that its objective was to impart knowledge, not inspiration.Io "Strain your brain more than your eye," Eakins was reported to have urged his students;," and he commented on his own painting that it had not become good until he finally knew enough to paint from memory rather than observation.

Thus Eakins's insistence at the Academy on a pure art education, one that taught the students to look carefully at the real world, to know thoroughly what they saw, and to order it appropriately, grew from his education as a general citizen, from the ideals of his father's profession (for a while his own), and from his own extraordinarily disciplined study of art.

Although to his directors at the Academy Eakins's ideals were impractical, inefficient, and even threatening in their severity (an assessment most of us wrestle with in our own careers as educators), Eakins had no doubts. That an artist should receive a "pure" art education as a foundation for whatever he might do later with brush or pencil was to him a simple given.

NOTES This essay is adapted from a talk at the "Symposium on the Education of Artists in the United States" held at Mount Holyoke College, April 9, 1983. As the following footnotes indicate, material in the Archives of American Art assists the study of many dimensions of Eakins's career, including his teaching.

i. The most recent published secondary source for information on Eakins's years as a teacher is Lloyd Goodrich, Thomas Eakins, 2 vols. (Cambridge; Harvard University Press for the National Gallery of Art, 1982). Especially pertinent are vol. I, pp. 167-i89 and 279-309, and accompanying notes. Two articles written during Eakins's lifetime are William C. Brownell, "The Art Schools of Philadelphia," Scribner's Monthly Illustrated Magazine 18 (September 1879): 737-750; and Fair- man Rogers, "The Art Schools of Philadelphia," The Penn Monthly 12

(June I88i): 453-462. Reminiscences of an Eakins student are recorded by Charles Bregler, in "Thomas Eakins as a Teacher," The Arts 17 (March 1931): 378-386; and "Thomas Eakins as a Teacher: Second Article," The Arts 18 (October 1931): I8-42. Recent interpretive essays include Louise Lippincott, "Thomas Eakins and the Academy," In This Academy: The Pennsylvania Academy ofthe Fine Arts, 1805-1976 (Phila- delphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1976); and Ronald J. Onorato, "Photography and Teaching: Eakins at the Academy," Amer- ican Art Review 3 (July-August 1976): 127-140, and "The Context of the Pennsylvania Academy: Thomas Eakins' Assistantship to Christian Schuessele," Arts Magazine 53, no. 9 (May 1979): I2I-129.

2. Archives of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Archives of American Art, microfilm roll P67, frame I165.

3. Goodrich, I: 184. 4. I discuss Eakins's high school curriculum and its implications more

fully in "Drawing Instruction at Central High School and Its Impact on Thomas Eakins," Wlinterthur Portfolio 15 (Summer i980): 139-149.

5. Many of Eakins's letters from Paris to his family are owned by the Archives of American Art (microfilm roll 640, frames 1432-1565). Among these he discusses his general convictions about painting (especially that of his teachers) in letters to his sister Frances of November 13, 1867 (frames 1463-1465) and to his mother and sister of April i, I869 (frames 1480-i492) (see fig. i). About his own progress in painting he usually wrote directly to his father, Benjamin Eakins; the most revealing of these letters, now lost but copied in 193o by Lloyd Goodrich, are published in Goodrich, Thomas Eakins I: 23-27, and 50-57.

6. Goodrich, 1: 27. 7. Goodrich, I :53- 8. Goodrich, I:51. 9. Goodrich, I: 51-52. io. Brownell, 746. ii. Bregler, "Thomas Eakins as a Teacher," p. 383.

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thomas eakins and "pure art" education

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