THOMAS EAKINS: THE BODY NATURAL AND ITS USES

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) lived most of his life within the boundaries of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during times when the Victorian ethos was giving way to an expansion of the boundaries within which art was conceived and explored. He had a parochial outlook that didn't require a broad exposure to the wide world. He was exposed to art early in his life and influenced by his father who was a writing teacher and master calligrapher. It was from him that he developed the skill and habit of laying out a grid of lines for his paintings so that they were products of deliberate design. He was an athletic man in his youth and participated in sports of all kinds from rowing to gymnastics. His appreciation of the human body and its capacities was eventually translated into a fascination with its mechanics. He was an early proponent of photography as a method of studying both equine and human anatomy through motion. He and Edweard Muybridge did many studies of sequential motion in order to see more clearly how surface anatomy translated underlying anatomical structures and their connections. An early interest in medical school and the practice of medicine was abandoned in favor of a deep dive into the study of anatomy. When he became an art teacher, he began with the basics of anatomical dissection for all of his students, encouraging them to draw and paint with anatomical precision. He insisted that it was the nude human figure that represented the greatest truth of the human essence, stripped down to its essentials and reproduced in a form that was molded to represent the uniqueness of each subject. He encouraged them to combine knowledge of anatomy with their own experience of anatomical function.

With his focus on precision and the science of human anatomical dissection, it is no wonder that he showed very little interest in the movement in art that was to become Impressionism. He was controversial in his time, not least because of his views on the nude human figure. His career as an art teacher was cut short when he was dismissed from his position as professor of art in the Pennsylvania Academy when he removed the loincloth from a male model in a class where female students were present. He eventually moved to another teaching position but he was badly scarred by his experience, devoted as he was to the belief in the truth of the human body. But the society in which he circulated was sufficiently ensconced in the Victorian mindset that he was marginalized for his approach to his subjects. There is no evidence in the historical record that his love of the human form, especially that of the male, ever translated into behavior that even in this day and age of the 21^st century might be considered harassing or abusive or predatory. His outlook was that the human form represented an expression of purity and beauty and that the truth of it was the culmination of its dissectible parts. One could not know the body's beauty without knowing how it was assembled. It is interesting to note that Eakins only rarely painted the body nude. In fact, most of his paintings were of subjects living within their own contexts, wearing clothing that distinguished them in their roles within the contexts of their lives. This was true of the many portraits of Catholic clergy, the scientists, artists, and the physicians who became subjects of his most famous paintings. Few of his paintings were narratives, the most outstanding being The Gross Clinic and The Agnew Clinic, large scenes of surgical operations presided over by the imposing figures of the surgeons named and attended by medical students and assistants (and even included his own image amongst the groupings). Most of his paintings are portraits of people known in the society of Philadelphia at the end of the 19^th century.

My interest in Thomas Eakins was ignited when I was a medical student in Philadelphia. I had known him from a casual interest in his masterpieces of portraiture. I, too, had a reason to think of the human body as sacred and to learn about its truths in my gross anatomy class my first year. There were never any jokes or desecrations involved in our anatomical dissections. For Eakins and for most medical students during my times, anatomy was the first step in understanding how the human body was constructed. For Eakins, and for us medical students, it was just the first step in taking apart the pieces and then reconstructing the whole that would lead to a greater understanding of this bounded form with which all of us are gifted and eventually give up. It was Eakins's belief that the uniqueness of each of his subjects emerged from the commonality of their anatomical structures. This must have struck him as nearly miraculous, as it does for us even now in our age of technological assurances of truth. But each of us is an emotional and expressive portrait of the partial truths that emerge from our anatomical origins. I was fascinated by the original Eakins paintings in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and visited them many times over the course of my medical school training. However, I will always recall one of my rotations at Pennsylvania Hospital when I was traveling the halls there going from clinic to clinic and I just happened upon the Eakins portrait of Dr. Jacob Mendez DaCosta, done in 1893. It was common for Eakins to give his finished portraits to the subjects themselves and Dr. DaCosta had gifted it to the hospital. Viewing the paintings in the museum was a wonderful experience, but being inches away from an Eakins in such a casual and off-hand situation was more than I could imagine. At a time when the doors of the Philadelphia Museum were locked at night and the artwork secured, it was no small surprise that the existence of the DaCosta portrait could be available to me—and anyone else—no matter the time of day. I think it would have pleased Eakins to know that his painting had taken on such an extended life. And it would have pleased him, perhaps, to have stimulated someone into thinking how it was that he thought about his own work and about his view of life.

As I ruminated about how this artist that I admired might have thought about the human body, the word “temple” came to mind and then “teacher.” Both of these words seemed to apply to what I could understand about Eakins's life and work. He was a teacher of the human form and, for him, the human form and its constituent parts were his teachers. More words came to mind and they were words beginning with “T.” I think it is possible to pick out any other letter of the alphabet and to construct a list of those words that might characterize how one could think of the human body. But the cascade of “T” words kept flowing and it looked something like this, with a few explanations and additional thoughts:

Teacher, tutor

Tool, toolbox

Target (of sexual abuse, bullying, in war)

Temple, tabernacle

Temporal (of the times, socialized, tangible)

Temporary, transient, terminal (are we not destined to die?)

Transformed (are we more than our anatomical body parts?)

Template (now we are seeing that body parts can be produced by 3-D printing)

Transition (the body as a step in evolution of creatures)

Transport (a vehicle for the movement that characterizes our species)

Trauma, torment, terror (the body that carries evidence of our nightmares)

Trap, tomb, tether (how we think about the body as victim or attached in some way)

Taboo (do we not still think of the nude body as embarrassing or improper?)

Tactic (what excuses do we use in explaining the body?)

Toxin, threat (what is the body when it carries and spreads disease?)

Tragic

Tapestry (the body as a collage, a complex fabric)

Translation (of the divine?)

Transparent (the ego in the body, body language)

Traveler

Traitor (does it turn on us when we get sick?)

Triumphant

Trouble

Truthful

Trial

Trickster

Typical (the body as common language)

Timeless

Trash (how do we think about migrants fleeing violence? the homeless?)

Toy (the body as a plaything, a purchase)

Tender

Tireless

Technical (just anatomy and physiology, a set of grid lines?)

Taxonomy (how we arrange our anatomical pieces in a hierarchy—is the heart or brain the prime regulator?)

Tinder (a person who ignites emotional fires)

Tradition (the human body as representation of ancient practices)

I wondered how viewing the human body, the body natural, is really a combination of characterizations and how Eakins's view of it might be configured. No single one of the list above seems to describe what is a most miraculous and complex organism. I juxtaposed several, one upon the other to see what picture I could paint of the body natural:

Teacher + Threat + Toxic + Timeless

Traveler + Target + Trauma

Transition + Tapestry +Temporary

Translation + Triumphant

Trash + Tragic + Trauma

Temple + Truthful + Timeless

Trickster + Traitor + Threat

Try your hand at a similar exercise to see how nuanced the idea of the human body (or any other subject that comes to mind) can become.

I played with combinations of characteristics to see if I could further understand the Eakins view. Here is what I came up with:

Technical + Temporal + Truthful + Tradition + Teacher +Taxonomy

What is interesting about this approach is how it demonstrates how language and experience of the body are intimately bound. What we know of our own unique character and that of others is constructed from a common frame of bones and muscle. We are the same and we are different, one from another. Eakins was most comfortable with the idea that the anatomical details of the human body speak their own truth and that this truth, a partial truth, is what each of us is in our own expressive form. This begs the question about what truly separates each of us from “the other.” If each of us is a partial expression of truth, then no one deserves to dominate another. Thinking about the body natural is a way of thinking that can assist us in interpreting the world at large and then acting in accord with our most nuanced perceptions of what it is to be a human being. If we reference our own bodies in our perceptions of the body natural, see that we are commonly made, and have this as our perspective of human relationships, then how could we ever distinguish ourselves as different from “the other”?