Biography

Thomas Eakins Biography: Introduction

Thomas Eakins built his career around the city in which he was born. Philadelphia supplied his family home, his first schools, the rivers and hospitals he painted, the academy where he taught, and most of the people who sat to him. His four years of European training gave him an academic command of the figure, but he returned in 1870 rather than establishing himself abroad. The long career that followed was therefore both unusually local and outward-looking: a sustained attempt to make contemporary American experience carry the weight traditionally assigned to history painting.^[1][2]

That career did not advance in a straight line. Eakins earned authority as a teacher, lost his institutional position amid disputes about classroom practice, and spent much of his later life painting portraits that were seldom conventional commissions. Photography, anatomical study, perspective, sculpture, drawing, and repeated observation all entered his working method. His marriage to the painter and photographer Susan Macdowell joined two artistic lives, although hers was constrained after marriage and revived strongly after his death. A complete biography must therefore hold achievement, conflict, collaboration, and posthumous reputation in the same account.^[1][2]

At a Glance

• Full nameThomas Cowperthwaite Eakins ^[1]
• BornJuly 25, 1844, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ^[1]
• EducationPennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Jefferson Medical College lectures; later the École des Beaux-Arts and private ateliers in Paris ^[1][2]
• MarriageSusan Hannah Macdowell, painter and photographer, in 1884 ^[1]
• DiedJune 25, 1916, at his longtime Philadelphia home ^[2]
• Career arcEuropean training, modern Philadelphia subjects, PAFA teaching and directorship, then an increasingly portrait-centred practice ^[1][2]

Thomas Eakins in context

Movements1820–1930 Artists1800–1940 Key works1870–1905

Movement context

1820184018601880190019201930

Academic and Beaux-Arts training

c. 1820–1900

Realism

c. 1840–1900

American Realism

c. 1870–1930

Eakins's life and career

1844–1916

Lifetimes

18001820184018601880190019201940

Jean-Léon Gérôme

1824–1904

Eadweard Muybridge

1830–1904

Winslow Homer

1836–1910

Thomas Eakins

1844–1916

Susan Macdowell Eakins

1851–1938

Henry Ossawa Tanner

1859–1937

Works

18701875188018851890189519001905

The Champion Single Sculls

1871

The Biglin Brothers Racing

1872

The Gross Clinic

1875

Swimming

1885

The Agnew Clinic

1889

The Concert Singer

1890–92

The Thinker

1900

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Philadelphia Beginnings
3. Paris and Spain
4. River, Home, and Early Portraits
5. The Gross Clinic
6. Academy, Camera, and Marriage
7. The Break of 1886
8. Portraiture After PAFA
9. Late Recognition
10. A Life in Context

Philadelphia Beginnings

Eakins was born into a comfortable Philadelphia household, the eldest of four siblings. His father, Benjamin Eakins, taught writing and practised calligraphy, a profession in which the disciplined movement of the hand carried both practical and aesthetic value. Thomas showed ability in mechanical drawing as a young man. He attended Central High School and entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1862, when formal American art education still offered fewer opportunities for sustained figure study than the European academies.^[3]

His preparation was broader than art-school attendance alone. From 1862 to 1866 he took classes at PAFA while also attending anatomy lectures and demonstrations at Jefferson Medical College. Anatomy was not a decorative scientific interest added to an artistic career later. It helped establish his conviction that credible representation begins with the structure, weight, and movement of a particular body. Mathematical perspective and careful drawing likewise became practical tools, visible later in the racing shells, medical amphitheatres, and studio interiors surveyed on the paintings page.^[2][3]

Philadelphia also offered a dense network of museums, exhibitions, professional schools, river clubs, music-making, and family connections. Those resources mattered after his return, but his first ambition required training abroad. In 1866 he crossed the Atlantic for Paris, following a path that was still relatively uncommon among American students. His surviving letters from 1866 onward include correspondence from those European years, but the archive’s published descriptions—not assumptions about unread letters—provide the evidential boundary for this account.^[1][4]

Paris and Spain

Eakins studied in France for almost three years, principally in the École des Beaux-Arts atelier of Jean-Léon Gérôme. Gérôme’s instruction stressed exact drawing, the modelled figure, legible action, and carefully constructed space. Eakins also worked briefly with the portrait painter Léon Bonnat and studied sculpture with Augustin-Alexandre Dumont. Together, those experiences enlarged his means: painted surfaces, three-dimensional form, and anatomical structure could all be tested against one another.^[1][2]

Academic training did not make him a simple follower of Gérôme. Its value lay in the demanding procedures he could redirect. A figure had to occupy measurable space; a gesture had to remain plausible; a group had to read across a large canvas. These lessons would later support subjects for which there was little established American precedent, including competitive rowing and surgery in a teaching hospital.

After France, Eakins spent about six months in Spain in 1870. He studied Spanish painting and worked in Madrid and Seville before returning to Philadelphia that July.^[1][2] A Street Scene in Seville, painted from the roof of his hotel with a hired family of musicians as models, shows him tackling bright outdoor light and a complicated gathering before leaving Europe. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes it as an ambitious student work made over more than three months, evidence that direct contemporary observation was already pressing against the conventions of his academic education.^[5]

The European period is sometimes treated as a preface to the “real” American career, yet its disciplines remained active for decades. Eakins did not reject academic art when he chose Philadelphia subjects. He relocated its methods, asking whether the Schuylkill River, a medical college, or an unadorned portrait sitter could sustain the seriousness of the figure compositions he had been trained to make.

River, Home, and Early Portraits

Back in his family’s city, Eakins first looked closely at activities he understood from experience. He was an able rower, and the river pictures of the early 1870s joined personal knowledge to difficult pictorial problems: narrow shells seen in perspective, bodies rotating through a stroke, reflections broken by oars, and recognisable bridges receding across water. Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, completed in 1871, placed his friend in the foreground and included Eakins himself in a second boat.^[6]

The subject was modern sport rather than an allegory. That choice did not reduce its ambition. Racing required Eakins to organise a long horizontal field while preserving exact relations among athlete, equipment, current, and distance. The Biglin Brothers Racing of 1872 shifted the problem from a single sculler to the synchronised effort of two professionals. Watercolours, oils, drawings, and perspective studies made the rowing sequence one of his first sustained demonstrations that local life could generate a serious body of work.^[2]

At the same time, Eakins painted relatives and friends in interiors. Women reading, sewing, playing music, or resting were not merely rehearsals for public portraiture. These quieter images tested how posture, light, and an occupied room could disclose relations among familiar people without theatrical incident. His father appeared repeatedly, eventually becoming the absorbed calligrapher in The Writing Master of 1882. Family access gave Eakins subjects over long periods, but it did not turn every picture into uncomplicated domestic testimony. Composition and character still had to be inferred from what the paintings visibly establish.

This early alternation between outdoor exertion and indoor concentration would endure. Even when Eakins later narrowed his field almost entirely to portraiture, he retained an interest in practised action: writing, playing an instrument, singing, teaching, or simply maintaining a difficult pose. The transition was gradual, not a sudden abandonment of narrative painting.

The Gross Clinic

In 1875 Eakins undertook the work that most forcefully announced his ambition. The Gross Clinic presents the surgeon Samuel D. Gross addressing students while five doctors operate on a patient in Jefferson Medical College’s amphitheatre. Eakins placed himself among the spectators. The Philadelphia Museum of Art records that he intended the canvas for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, hoping to demonstrate his powers while honouring Philadelphia’s scientific achievement.^[7]

The painting united several strands of his education. Gross’s upright figure serves as portrait and organising axis; the operation requires anatomical credibility; the steep auditorium calls for controlled perspective; and the grouped witnesses turn professional instruction into public drama. It also risked rejection by showing blood, pain, and living surgery without the distance of historical costume. The work was excluded from the Centennial’s main fine-arts display and shown in a medical setting instead. Contemporary responses ranged from admiration to disgust, confirming that technical scale did not guarantee institutional approval.^[7][8]

Its immediate reception should not be converted into a simple story of an unrecognised masterpiece. Jefferson alumni bought the painting from Eakins and presented it to the medical college in 1878, so it acquired an important institutional home early. Nor did one disputed exhibition determine the rest of his career. He continued to paint, exhibit, and teach, while the clinic established a demanding model for his later treatment of professional identity.^[7]

The picture is now jointly owned by PAFA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, following a 2007 campaign to retain it in Philadelphia.^[7] That later history reinforces how thoroughly it became attached to the city, but its biography begins with Eakins’s own medical education and his attempt to translate contemporary surgery into monumental painting.

Academy, Camera, and Marriage

Eakins began teaching at PAFA in 1876 and rose to director of instruction in 1882. He pressed for a curriculum centred on the human figure, including anatomical knowledge, work from living models, perspective, and practical investigation rather than copying finished images. His influence was significant, though descriptions that credit one person with transforming an entire institution should be treated as assessments rather than neutral measurements.^[1][2]

Around 1880 he acquired a camera. Photography became part of the academy and studio environment in which teachers, students, and models moved between making and being pictured. It could preserve a pose, isolate a phase of motion, or offer material for projection and measurement. The surviving record does not support treating every photograph from that environment as Eakins’s personal exposure. The Metropolitan Museum of Art attributes a large body to “Eakins and his circle,” while object records assign individual photographs more cautiously; the photography and working studies page follows that item-level distinction.^[9]

Susan Hannah Macdowell entered this world as an artist, not simply as a future spouse. She met Eakins in 1876, enrolled at PAFA, won prizes there, and exhibited with the Philadelphia Society of Artists in 1879 and 1880. They married in 1884. The Philadelphia Museum of Art identifies her as a talented painter who later took up photography, and the Metropolitan Museum’s portrait of her also calls her both painter and photographer.^[10][11]

Marriage changed the conditions of Susan’s career. The museum notes that she largely put aside her artistic ambitions afterward, although she remained active with the camera. It would therefore be misleading either to erase her work or to describe the marriage as an equal professional partnership for which the evidence is incomplete. She was a trained artist whose practice had its own record, and she later returned to painting with renewed purpose.^[10]

During these same years Eakins received notable commissions and pursued images of the nude figure, including Arcadia and Swimming. The Amon Carter Museum describes Swimming as a group portrait of Eakins and several students as well as a declaration of his belief in firsthand study of the body. Commissioned by PAFA instruction-committee chair Edward H. Coates, it was declined by its patron.^[12] The work belongs to the history of teaching, friendship, photography, and institutional unease rather than to a single explanatory label.

The Break of 1886

Tensions over Eakins’s methods culminated in early 1886. During an anatomy demonstration to a class that included women, he removed the loincloth of a male model to trace the course of a muscle. Complaints followed, and PAFA’s board asked him to resign. Institutional sources variously summarise the outcome as resignation, forced resignation, or dismissal; the essential fact is that he lost his teaching and directorial posts at the Academy.^[1][2]

The episode should be neither sensationalised nor reduced to prudish opposition to art. Nude study was central to Eakins’s pedagogy, but teachers also exercise authority within institutions and owe students clear boundaries. His educational purpose does not by itself settle questions about conduct. Conversely, the dispute did not make anatomical study artistically trivial. The teaching and anatomy page considers the curriculum, student responses, institutional rules, and subsequent influence together.

After his departure, some students withdrew from PAFA and helped form the Art Students’ League of Philadelphia, where Eakins taught in 1886–87. He also continued lecturing elsewhere in Philadelphia and New York.^[8] These facts complicate the image of total banishment: he lost his most powerful post and the community divided, yet his teaching relationships did not disappear. The event altered his professional path more than it ended his work.

Portraiture After PAFA

From 1887 onward, portraiture occupied most of Eakins’s attention. Many sitters were people he knew or admired rather than patrons seeking public display. He pared back settings and worked near life size, allowing face, hands, posture, and direction of attention to carry the image. This was not simply retreat after institutional injury. It extended his longstanding interest in people whose knowledge or vocation had shaped their bearing.^[2][13]

The 1887–88 portrait Walt Whitman grew from friendship and geographic proximity: Whitman lived across the Delaware River in Camden. PAFA emphasises the mutual admiration between artist and poet and their common interests in individual identity, physical life, and the outdoors.^[14] Eakins dispensed with literary props, presenting age through the sitter’s weight, face, and direct presence rather than through an emblematic setting.

A major public commission followed. University of Pennsylvania medical students asked Eakins to commemorate the retiring surgeon D. Hayes Agnew in 1889. The Agnew Clinic returns to the amphitheatre, but its bright surgical field, larger team, and visible nurse register a different procedure and professional order. Penn Nursing identifies Mary V. Clymer as the nurse and situates the work within changing surgical and nursing practice.^[15] Fourteen years after The Gross Clinic, Eakins could revisit medicine without merely repeating his earlier composition.

Music offered another route into specialised action. For The Concert Singer, painted from 1890 to 1892, Weda Cook posed repeatedly and sang a phrase by Mendelssohn so that Eakins could observe the physical act of producing a note. He carved the opening music into the painting’s frame, joining portrait, performance, and object.^[16] The result is neither a society likeness nor a frozen anecdote: Cook’s concentration makes professional labour visible.

Eakins’s sitters also included physicians, scientists, clergy, artists, teachers, musicians, family members, and former students. His portraits often withheld the social polish expected of commissioned likenesses, which limited their commercial appeal. Yet it would be inaccurate to imagine that no one valued them. Friends accepted sittings, institutions exhibited his work, and portraits entered collections during his lifetime. His position was difficult and uneven, not one of complete isolation.^[2][13]

Late Recognition

Eakins briefly returned to large athletic scenes in the late 1890s, painting boxers and wrestlers with the same concern for trained bodies that had shaped the rowing works. The settings were modern sporting venues populated by identifiable contemporaries. At the same time, the quieter portraits continued, including older sitters whose faces and hands carry the evidence of sustained work and age.^[2][13]

The Thinker: Portrait of Louis N. Kenton of 1900 shows how much Eakins could ask of a standing figure with few narrative cues. Kenton, his brother-in-law, occupies a sparse, dark setting, his head lowered and hands pushed into his pockets. The Metropolitan Museum of Art identifies the life-size canvas as object 17.172 and makes its image available under its open-access programme.^[17] Its familiar title names an inward state, but the painting does not illustrate a particular thought. It lets posture, scale, and the sitter’s withdrawal from the viewer carry the portrait.

Recognition became more visible after 1900. Eakins served on exhibition juries and showed his work widely. The National Academy of Design named him an associate in 1902, and PAFA awarded him its Temple Gold Medal in 1904.^[8] These honours did not erase earlier conflicts, but they contradict a legend in which the art world ignored him until after death. His reputation expanded during his final decades even while commissions remained limited.

Declining health and eyesight restricted him increasingly, and after 1913 he rarely left home. He died there on June 25, 1916, aged seventy-one.^[2][8] The location matters: except for his European years and short absences, the family house and Philadelphia remained the fixed point of a career whose subjects ranged across the city’s social institutions.

Memorial exhibitions quickly gathered the work. The Metropolitan Museum of Art presented sixty paintings in November 1917, followed the next month by a PAFA exhibition of 139 works.^[2] By the early 1930s, the Met records, Eakins had acquired the national stature now associated with him. That ascent was not automatic. Exhibitions, scholarship, collecting, and the work of people close to him all helped shape the posthumous view.

Susan Macdowell Eakins was central to that process. After Thomas’s death she resumed painting, producing an intimate posthumous portrait based, it is thought, on one of her photographs. The Philadelphia Museum of Art describes her as a forceful advocate who helped place his art in major public collections.^[10] Her stewardship should not eclipse her authorship: the same record that documents her advocacy also preserves a substantial work of her own. Eakins’s afterlife thus depends in part on recognising a woman artist whose career had too often been folded into his.

A Life in Context

Eakins’s biography explains why his subjects repeatedly converge on learning. A rower acquires control through practice; a surgeon performs knowledge before students; a singer’s technique becomes visible in breath and stance; a portrait sitter bears the effects of a profession and an ageing body. His own route through art school, medical lectures, European ateliers, teaching, camera work, and portrait sittings gave him several ways to study those processes.

It also explains why the work remains ethically and historically demanding. Exact observation could produce extraordinary clarity, but the right to observe was not distributed equally among teacher, student, model, patient, and painter. The Academy dispute cannot be detached from his art, nor should it swallow the whole career. Susan’s work cannot be treated as an incidental footnote, and collaborative photographs cannot all be assigned to Thomas by habit. Institutional records make those distinctions possible.^[9][10]

The most useful account is consequently neither heroic nor prosecutorial. Eakins was an ambitious artist with formidable technical knowledge, an influential educator whose judgment drew serious objection, and a portraitist whose attachments to Philadelphia gave modern American lives uncommon gravity. His biography provides the chronology; the paintings, photographs, and records preserve the unresolved relationships inside it.

Follow Thomas Eakins's career through four stages

1844–1870Formation 1870–1879River and modern life 1879–1886Academy and camera 1886–1916Portraits and recognition

1844–1870

Philadelphia, anatomy, Paris and Spain

Eakins grew up in Philadelphia, studied at PAFA and attended anatomy instruction before training in Paris with Jean-Léon Gérôme and others. Several months in Spain sharpened his attention to direct, materially forceful painting.

1870–1879

Rowers, portraits and a modern clinic

Back in Philadelphia, Eakins made the Schuylkill and people he knew into ambitious subjects. The rowing pictures and The Gross Clinic applied academic discipline to recognisably contemporary American experience.

1879–1886

Teaching, photography and contested authority

At PAFA, Eakins placed anatomy and life study at the centre of training and incorporated photography into studio work. His methods drew loyalty and criticism before the 1886 dispute ended his directorship.

1886–1916

Independent teaching, concentrated portraits and later honours

Eakins continued to teach outside PAFA and increasingly focused on searching portraits of writers, physicians, musicians, artists and friends. Institutional recognition grew late in his life and more fully after his death.

Researched works directory

This searchable evidence census was assembled from public museum records and a reproducible Wikidata snapshot. It is not a catalogue raisonné, not a claim to complete oeuvre coverage, and not a substitute for the published catalogue literature, which was not used to claim absolute completeness.

Search artworks Medium All media Drawing Painting Reset

275 artworks

Name	Date	Medium
A Singer (Mrs. W.H. Bowden)	1906	Painting
A Singer: Portrait of Mrs. W.H. Bowden	1906	Painting
A Street Scene	Date unknown	Painting
A street scene in Sevilla	1870	Painting
A Street Scene in Seville	1870	Painting
African-American Man	1884	Photography
An Actress (Portrait of Suzanne Santje)	1903	Painting
Anna Lewis	1890	Painting
Annie C. Lochrey Husson (Mrs. Louis Husson)	1905	Painting
Antiquated Music (Portrait of Sarah Sagehorn Frishmuth)	1900	Painting
Arcadia	1883	Painting
Arcadia	Date unknown	Sculpture
Arcadia: Figure Study, Female Nude	1883	Painting
Arcadia Sketch	1883	Painting
Arcadian	Date unknown	Painting
Archbishop Diomede Falconio	1905	Painting
Archbishop James Frederick Wood	1877	Painting
Archbishop James Frederick Wood (1813-1883)	1876	Painting
Archbishop William Henry Elder	1903	Painting
Arthur B. Frost	1886	Painting
Artist and His Father Hunting Reed Birds: Marsh Landscape Sketch	1873	Painting
B.J. Blommers	1904	Painting
Baby at Play	1876	Painting
Baseball Players Practicing	1875	Artwork
Benjamin Eakins G38	Date unknown	Painting
Bertrand Gardel (Sketch for The Chess Players)	1875	Painting
Between Rounds	1898	Painting
Billy Smith	1898	Painting
Billy Smith (Sketch for Between Rounds)	1898	Painting
Boy Reclining	1883	Painting
Carmelita Requena	1869	Painting
Charles Edmund Dana	1902	Painting
Charles Percival Buck	1904	Painting
Clara	1890	Painting
Courtship	1878	Painting
Cowboy Singing	1892	Painting
Cowboys in the Badlands	1888	Painting
Cowboys in the Badlands sketch 2	1888	Painting
Delaware River Scene	1881	Painting
Delaware River Study	1881	Painting
Dr. Agnew (Dr. D. Hayes Agnew) (1818-1892)	1889	Painting
Dr. Agnew (Dr. D. Hayes Agnew) (1818–1892)	1889	Painting
Dr. Horatio C. Wood	1886	Painting
Dr. Thomas H. Fenton	1916	Painting
Drifting	1875	Painting
Eakins G184	1916	Painting
Ecorché: Relief of a Horse (Josephine)	1882	Sculpture
Edward W. Redfield	1905	Painting
Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand: Landscape Study of Fairmount Park	1879	Painting
Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand: Study of a Horse's Leg	1879	Painting
Fairmount Park (Sketch for The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand)	Date unknown	Painting
Female Model	1867	Painting
Female Nude	1884	Painting
Female Nude from the Back	1889	Photography
Female Nude (Study)	1881	Painting
Fifty Years Ago (Young Girl Meditating): Study	1877	Painting
Figure Study: Masked Nude Woman	Date unknown	Painting
Figure Study: Nude Woman, Seated, with Arms Lowered (r)	Date unknown	Painting
Figure Study: Nude Woman, Seated, with Arms Raised	Date unknown	Painting
[Four Sketches: Seated Man, Sleeping Dog, Two Vases(?)]	Date unknown	Painting
Frances Eakins	1870	Painting
Francis J. Ziegler	1890	Painting
Frank Hamilton Cushing	1895	Painting
Frank Jay St. John	1900	Painting
General E. Burd Grubb (1841-1914)	1898	Painting
Girl with a Fan; Portrait of Miss Gutierrez	Date unknown	Painting
Harriet Husson Carville (Mrs. James G. Carville)	1904	Painting
Harrison S. Morris	1896	Painting
Hauling the Seine	1882	Painting
Head of a Man (Rutherford B. Hayes?)	1877	Painting
Hiawatha	1874	Painting
Hiawatha	Date unknown	Artwork
Home Ranch	1892	Painting
Home Scene	1871	Painting
Homespun	1881	Painting
In the Studio	1884	Painting
Interior of a Woodcarver's Shop (Sketch for William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River)	Date unknown	Painting
James MacAlister (Sketch)	1895	Painting
John Biglin in a Single Scull	1873	Painting
John Biglin in a Single Scull	1874	Painting
Joseph R. Woodwell	1904	Painting
Kathrin	1872	Painting
Knitting	1881	Sculpture
Knitting	1882	Sculpture
Knitting	Date unknown	Sculpture
Lafayette Park, Washington, D.C.	1877	Painting
Landscape	1881	Painting
Landscape	1882	Painting
Landscape Sketch	1880	Painting
Landscape (Sketch for Cowboys in the Bad Lands)	1887	Painting
Landscape Study: Cultivated Field and Tree	1874	Painting
Landscape Study: Shoreline with Trees	1874	Painting
Landscape with a Dog	1874	Painting
Letitia Wilson Jordan	1888	Painting
Louis Husson	1899	Painting
Major Manuel Waldteufel	1907	Painting
Masked nude standing	1880	Painting
Maud Cook (Mrs. Robert C. Reid)	1895	Painting
Mending the Net	1881	Painting
Mending the Net: Study of a Fisherman	Date unknown	Painting
Miss Alice Kurtz	1903	Painting
Miss Amelia Van Buren	1891	Painting
Miss Eleanor S. F. Pue	1907	Painting
Miss Gertrude Murray	1895	Painting
Monsignor James P. Turner	1906	Painting
Mother (Annie Williams Gandy)	1903	Painting
Mrs. Gilbert L. Parker	1910	Painting
Mrs. Mary Arthur	1900	Painting
Music	1904	Painting
Nude man with beard	Date unknown	Painting
Nude Woman Standing	1908	Painting
Old Lady Sewing	1879	Painting
Portrait of a Little Girl	1897	Painting
Portrait of a Woman Reading	Date unknown	Painting
Portrait of Adam S. Bare	1903	Painting
Portrait of Alfred Reynolds	Date unknown	Painting
Portrait of Arthur Burdett Frost	1886	Painting
Portrait of Ashbury Wright Lee	1905	Painting
Portrait of Benjamin Eakins	1894	Painting
Portrait of Benjamin Eakins (Sketch for The Writing Master)	1882	Painting
Portrait of Blanche Hurlburt	1885	Painting
Portrait of Douglass Morgan Hall	1889	Painting
Portrait of Dr. Edward J. Nolan	1900	Painting
Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic)	1875	Painting
Portrait of Edward Taylor Snow	1904	Painting
Portrait of Elizabeth L. Burton	1905	Painting
Portrait of Florence Einstein	1905	Painting
Portrait of Henry O. Tanner	1902	Painting
Portrait of J. Harry Lewis	1876	Painting
Portrait of John B. Gest	1905	Painting
Portrait of Joshua Ballinger Lippincott	1892	Painting
Portrait of Leslie W. Miller	1901	Painting
Portrait of Lucy Lewis	1896	Painting
Portrait of Margaret Eakins in a Skating Costume	1871	Painting
Portrait of Mary Adeline Williams	1899	Painting
Portrait of Mary Adeline Williams	1900	Painting
Portrait of Mrs. Fairman Rogers (Study for The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand)	1879	Painting
Portrait of Mrs. Frank Hamilton Cushing	1895	Painting
Portrait of Mrs. James Mapes Dodge (Josephine Kern)	1896	Painting
Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand	1874	Painting
Portrait of Professor W. D. Marks	1886	Painting
Portrait of Rear Admiral George Wallace Melville	1904	Painting
Portrait of Walter S. Macdowell	1904	Painting
Porträt des Alfred Bryan Wall	1904	Painting
Porträt des David Wilson Jordan	Date unknown	Painting
Porträt des John McLure Hamilton (1853- 1936)	1895	Painting
Professionals at Rehearsal	1883	Painting
Professor William D Marks	1886	Painting
Professor William Woolsey Johnson	1896	Painting
Pushing for Rail	1874	Painting
Rail Shooting on the Delaware	1876	Painting
Rear Admiral Charles Dwight Sigsbee G388-2	1903	Painting
Rear Admiral George W. Melville	1905	Painting
Reclining Male Nude	1887	Photography
Reclining Nude	Date unknown	Painting
Retrospection	1880	Painting
Riter Fitzgerald	1895	Painting
Robert M. Lindsay	1900	Painting
Ruth (Ruth W. Harding)	1903	Painting
Saddle (Sketch for Cowboys in the Bad Lands)	1887	Painting
Sailboats Racing on the Delaware	1874	Painting
Sailboats Racing: Study of the Delaware River	1874	Painting
Sailing	1875	Painting
Salutat	1898	Painting
Seated Figures	1886	Painting
Self-portrait	1902	Painting
Seventy Years Ago	1877	Painting
Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware: Delaware River and Gloucester Pier	1881	Painting
Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River	1881	Painting
Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River: Study of a Woman's Head	1881	Painting
Ships and Sailboats on the Delaware	1874	Painting
Ships and Sailboats on the Delaware: Study	1874	Painting
Shoreline of the Delaware River, with Fishing Nets	Date unknown	Painting
Signora Gomez d'Arza	1901	Painting
Singing a Pathetic Song	1881	Painting
Sketch for Cowboys in the Bad Lands	1887	Painting
Sketch for Music (The Violinist)	1904	Painting
Sketch for Portrait of Dr. Jacob Mendez da Costa	1893	Painting
Sketch for Portrait of Leslie W. Miller	1901	Painting
Sketch for Portrait of Letitia Wilson Jordan	1888	Painting
Sketch for Portrait of Monsignor James P. Turner	1906	Painting
Sketch for Portrait of Mother Patricia Waldron	1903	Painting
Sketch for Portrait of Professor George F. Barker	1886	Painting
Sketch for Seventy Years Ago	Date unknown	Painting
Sketch for The Concert Singer	1892	Painting
Sketch for The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand	1879	Painting
Sketch for The Gross Clinic	1875	Painting
Sketch for the Surrender of General Lee to General Grant at Appomatox	Date unknown	Painting
Sketch for William Rush and His Model	1908	Painting
Sketch of a Landscape	1882	Painting
Sketch of a Man and Study of Drapery	1882	Painting
Sketch of Harry	1892	Painting
Sketch of Max Schmitt in a Single Scull	1874	Painting
Sketches for “Home-Spun”, (recto and verso)	1881	Painting
Sketches (Four on one panel)	Date unknown	Painting
Spinning	1881	Painting
Spinning	1882	Sculpture
Spinning: Sketch	1881	Painting
Starting Out After Rail	1863	Painting
Starting Out After Rail	1874	Painting
Study for Arcadia: Youth Playing Pipes	1883	Painting
Study for "Cowboys in the Badlands	1887	Painting
Study for "Negro Boy Dancing": The Banjo Player	Date unknown	Painting
Study for "Negro Boy Dancing": The Boy	Date unknown	Painting
Study for Portrait of John McClure Hamilton	1895	Painting
Study for Salutat	1898	Painting
Study for 'The Meadows, Gloucester'	1882	Painting
Study for "William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River	1876	Painting
Study of a Groom	1879	Painting
Study of a Nude Man	1869	Painting
Study of a Nude Man (The Strong Man)	1869	Painting
Study of a Seated Nude Woman Wearing a Mask	1863	Drawing
Study of a Young Woman	1868	Painting
Study of Dr Samuel David Gross	1875	Painting
Study of Horse for The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand	1879	Painting
Swimming	1885	Painting
Taking the Count	1898	Painting
Taking the Count, study	1898	Painting
Taking Up Net	1881	Painting
Talcott Williams	1889	Painting
That's a New Game Down in Frisco": Study for the Central Standing Figure	1878	Painting
The Agnew Clinic	1889	Painting
The Art Student (James Wright)	1890	Painting
The Artist's Wife and His Setter Dog	1884	Painting
The Biglin Brothers Racing	1872	Painting
The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake	1873	Painting
The Black Fan (Portrait of Mrs. Talcott Williams)	1891	Painting
The Bohemian (Portrait of Franklin Louis Schenck)	1890	Painting
The Brinton House	1878	Painting
The Cello Player	1896	Painting
The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull)	1871	Painting
The Chaperone	1908	Painting
The Chess Players	1876	Painting
The Concert Singer	1890–1892	Painting
The Courtship	1878	Painting
The Crucifixion	1880	Painting
The Dancing Lesson	1878	Painting
The Dean's Roll Call	1899	Painting
The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand	1879	Painting
The Fairman Rogers Four-In-Hand (A May Morning in...	1899	Painting
The Meadows, Gloucester	1882	Painting
The Model	1908	Painting
The Oarsmen (The Schreiber Brothers)	1874	Painting
The Oboe Player (Portrait of Dr. Benjamin Sharp)	1903	Painting
The Old-Fashioned Dress (Portrait of Helen Montanverde Parker)	1908	Painting
The Pair-Oared Shell	1872	Painting
The Pathetic Song	1881	Painting
The Pianist	1896	Painting
The Poleman in the Ma'sh	1881	Drawing
The Red Shawl	1890	Painting
The Spinner	1876	Painting
The Thinker: Portrait of Louis N. Kenton	1900	Painting
The Timer	1879	Painting
The Translator, Portrait of Monsignor Hugh T. Henry	1902	Painting
The Veteran (Portrait of George Reynolds)	Date unknown	Painting
The Writing Master	1882	Painting
The Young Man (Portrait of Kern Dodge)	1898	Painting
Thomas Eakins and John Laurie Wallace on a Beach	1883	Photography
Three Boys Wading in a Creek	1883	Photography
Trenton Battle Monument	1893	Sculpture
Two Pupils in Greek Dress	1883	Photography
Views of Harry	1885	Painting
Walt Whitman	1887	Painting
Whistling for Plover	1874	Painting
William H. Macdowell	1884	Photography
William H. Macdowell and Margaret Eakins in Saltville (or Clinch Mountain), Virginia	1875	Photography
William Hance Macdowell (1816-1906)	1897	Painting
William Rush and his Model	1908	Painting
William Rush and His Model	Date unknown	Painting
William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River	1876	Painting
William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River	1908	Painting
William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River, Study	1876	Painting
William Rush's Model	1908	Painting
Wrestlers	1899	Painting
Young Girl Meditating	1877	Painting

Frequently Asked Questions

References

1. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Biographical Note: Thomas Eakins Letters, 1866–1934, accessed 30 August 2026.
2. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Eakins (1844–1916): Painting, accessed 30 August 2026.
3. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Eakins: Exhibition Overview, accessed 30 August 2026.
4. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Thomas Eakins Letters, 1866–1934, accessed 30 August 2026.
5. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, A Street Scene in Seville, accessed 30 August 2026.
6. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), accessed 30 August 2026.
7. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic), accessed 30 August 2026.
8. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Thomas Eakins: American Realist, accessed 30 August 2026.
9. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Eakins (1844–1916): Photography, 1880s–90s, accessed 30 August 2026.
10. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Susan Macdowell Eakins, Portrait of Thomas Eakins, accessed 30 August 2026.
11. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Artist’s Wife and His Setter Dog, accessed 30 August 2026.
12. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Swimming, accessed 30 August 2026.
13. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Thomas Eakins, accessed 30 August 2026.
14. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Walt Whitman, accessed 30 August 2026.
15. University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, Eakins and Clymer, accessed 30 August 2026.
16. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Concert Singer, accessed 30 August 2026.
17. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Thinker: Portrait of Louis N. Kenton, accessed 30 August 2026.

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