Significant Moments: Central High School Graduate Fired Because He Exposed What People Wanted Hidden

“ . . . He had a number of enemies who made trouble for him and the committee . . .
Philadelphia Press, Prof. Eakins Resigns: Trouble in Life Class Of the Academy of the Fine Arts Leads to His Withdrawal.
          —that’s to say . . .
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
                   . . . Eissler and his colleagues . . .
Craig Seligman, Janet Malcolm.
                               —“the Fanatics,” he had called them—
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days.
                                    . . . thought it best for the interests of . . .
Philadelphia Press, Prof. Eakins Resigns: Trouble in Life Class Of the Academy of theFine Arts Leads to His Withdrawal.
                                                  . . . the Freud Archives . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst.
                                                             . . . that he should resign.”
Philadelphia Press, Prof. Eakins Resigns: Trouble in Life Class Of the Academy of the Fine Arts Leads to His Withdrawal.
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An uncompromising realist whose works and teachings inspired generations of artists, Thomas Eakins was born July 25, 1844, in Philadelphia. Eakins attended The Central High School of Philadelphia, which was known for its academic emphasis on science, and from 1862 to 1865 studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, also attending courses on anatomy at the Jefferson Medical College, for which he created one of his most celebrated works, The Gross Clinic (1875). In 1866, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied under Jean-Léon Gérôme. He traveled to Italy, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and Spain before returning to Philadelphia in 1870, establishing a studio at his family home.

In 1876, Eakins began to teach at the School of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He was appointed professor of drawing and painting in 1879 and became director in 1882. Two years later he married one of his students, Susan Hannah MacDowell. Despite growing opposition to his methods, which included the use of nude models in his classes, Eakins continued to teach. After he was forced to resign in 1886, his student supporters retaliated by forming the Art Students League of Philadelphia (1886–93) with Eakins as their instructor. After this event, he concentrated on portraiture. His subjects were portrayed with the same unyielding attention to the fact of appearance and psychological presence that Eakins had demonstrated in his earlier scenes of athletes and figural compositions.

Due to his great knowledge of anatomy, Eakins became a portrait painter and specialized in rendering the male nude. He believed that the human figure was, “a miracle of muscle, bone and blood” and also said that, “[a female nude] is the most beautiful thing there is [in] the world except a naked man.” As an art and anatomy teacher, Eakins found it imperative to have fully-nude models of both male and female sexes—regardless of whether or not the classes were co-ed. This method was unprecedented and, in a co-ed anatomy lecture of February 1886, Eakins removed the loincloth from a male model.



The scandal caused an uprising among some students, many parents (most notably mothers), the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the media, causing the compulsory resignation of Eakins from his position. Despite the strict rules and regulations that governed what was acceptable as artwork, Eakins continued to paint overly realistic, un-idealized, erotic, and confrontational male nudes.

Eakins continued to paint regularly until his health began to fail in 1911. He died June 25, 1916.