THOMAS COWPERTHWAIT EAKINS 1844-1916
The Coral Necklace, 1904
Oil on canvas, 43 X 31" (109.22 x 78.74 cm.)
Signed, right center
Museum purchase, 958-0-101

Thomas Eakins was assuredly one of America's greatest artists, and at the heart of his accomplishment was the elevation of portraiture to a level equal with the highest precedents of the past. Although we know he admired the masters of seventeenth- century Dutch and Spanish realism from his early years of study in France and Spain, Eakins did not consciously aim in his own later portraiture to emulate directly Diego Velazquez, Frans Hals, or Rembrandt van Rijn. However, his best images achieve a comparable poignancy and power. Born in Philadelphia, he studied there in two disciplines that would shape all of his mature art: anatomy at Jefferson Medical College and art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  Reinforced by academic training in Paris with Jean-L6on G6r6me and others during the mid-1860s, this combined sensibility for scientific observation and technical craft resulted in organically understood human figures placed in clear and coherent compositions. Returning to teach at the Academy with a new freshness of vision and directness of approach, Eakins became a popular and influential figure during the 1870s and early 1880s. But his most ambitious early work, The Gross Clinic (1875, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia), drew severe criticism for its perceived brutal realism, and a decade later, Eakins lost his position running the Academy for a similarly insistent honesty in teaching methods.
Understandably, he increasingly turned inward during his later career, embattled and often lonely. Over time he undertook fewer narrative or group subjects, and eventually none set out of doors. But throughout, the human form and the portrait, explicitly or implicitly, remained the core of his art, for in the figure were always the fundamental elements he cared about: specificity and individuality, character and achievement, and ultimately the triumphant as well as tortured ingredients of the human condition. By means of a resolute self-reliance, Eakins searched himself and those close to him among his family and friends to scrutinize and record unflinchingly the truths of existence before him. Occasionally, he had little sympathy for his sitters, whom he saw as vain, or weak, or lazy, and the results accordingly were dry or in some instances too severe and revealing for the owners to accept. There is much interesting discussion whether he was a finer painter of women or men. Fortunately, the Butler Institute owns compelling examples of each, and the comparisons between them are revealing in the ways Eakins could make use of costume, pose, and coloring to express the distinctions of personality and profession. General George Cadwalader (Fig. 1), shows the figure frontally and hieratically, with the severe monochromatic palette and the rhythmic alignment of brass buttons rising to the attentive face, all suggesting a disciplined military presence. By contrast, the relaxed pose of Beatrice Fenton in The Coral Necklace, the delicate and almost elusive play of colors, and her introspective gaze, instead suit the creative meditations of a young sculptress in Eakins's artistic circle.
Such isolation of a brooding single individual is characteristic of the artist's late work at its best. The loose clothing not only reveals the solid weight and organic unity of the body beneath, but the gentle rising curves of the arms and long bright necklace lead our eye up to concentrate on Fenton~s head, face, and eyes, and thereby we feel both a physical and psychological presence. Eakins often employed color as an expressive device in his portraits, and a variety of pinks for the dresses of women sitters in this period expresses a strong emotional range from tenderness to passion. Among the most memorable related works, for example, are Maud Cook (1895, Yale University Art Gallery), Amelia Van Buren (1890, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), The Concert Singer and The Actress: Suzanne Santje (1890-1892, 1903, both Philadelphia Museum of Art). In pose, The Coral Necklace is close to two other of Eakins's most moving portraits of nearly the same date: Alice Kurtz, (1903, Harvard University Art Museums), and Edith Mahon (1904, Smith College Museum of Art).  Stripped of all incidental detail, they bear hints of strain and vulnerability in a taut neck tendon or watery eyes.
Many of these sitters also shared artistic temperaments or talents with Eakins, as painters, sculptors, pianists, or singers. Well known from this period are his portraits of fellow artists, William Merritt Chase and Henry 0. Tanner, and of his students Samuel Murray, Jennie Dean Kershaw, and Susan MacDowell, who later married Eakins. But others, as indicated in their early exhibition titles, were intended as portraits both of particular individuals and professional or occupational types: The Critic, The Veteran, The Bohemian, The Dean~ ,Roll Call, The Thinker, The Art Student, The Actress, and A Singer.  As in The Old Fashioned Dress: Helen Montanverde Parker (1908, Philadelphia Museum of Art), Beatrice Fenton's portrait also bears a title of a dominant article of clothing. Her necklace is strikingly large and elongated, the color coral, a distinctively bright pink, here perhaps a note of the exotic and idiosyncratic. Ultimately, these pensive selfabsorbed faces seem reflections as much of the artist, accumulated expressions of his own troubled self, as he sought obsessively to confront the burdens of life and the possibilities of art.

JOHN WILMERDING