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Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist

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There is no question that Henry Adams scholarly book EAKINS REVEALED: THE SECRET LIFE OF AN AMERICAN ARTIST is an important tome in the already extensive library of the life and works of Thomas Eakins, an artist still considered by many to be the greatest American artist who ever lived. And if many Eakins' devotees find this information as gathered and regaled by Adams as an attempt to push Eakins of his historic pedestal, then I think the chosen title for this treatise has been misleading.

Adams has poured over countless reams of notes and letters and documents and oral histories (all well documented and scrutinized in his extensive bibliography) and presents another aspect of Eakins' life - that of a crude, exhibitionist, sexually ambiguous vs disturbed, depressed man obsessed with nudity and body functions and a man whose family history of cruelty, incest and madness informed his paintings.

The book is divided into three sections: Part One - The Eakins Legacy (including Eakins family background, odd living conditions, family quarrels, the deaths and insanities of those close to him, and including the infamous Loin Cloth Scandal that contributed to his being fired from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Part Two - Life and Art in which the previous information is shown to have influenced Eakins' portraits, rowing paintings, swimming paintings and the BIG paintings like 'The Gross Clinic', 'The Champion Single Sculls', 'William Rush' etc; and Part Three - The Case of Thomas Eakins in which Adams pulls it all together maintaining that indeed because of Adams' scholarship, Eakins is still the most important painter America has produced.

The question arises as to just how much of this Freudian muck raking is necessary and whether ultimately how important is this 'new' information to the viewer of Eakins' paintings. Yes, facts such as those presented (ad infinitum!) in this lengthy volume provide smarmy interest, if not material for a movie about a strange but great man. Others have written similarly about Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Artemsia Gentileschi, Bacon, Warhol, de Kooning, Pollock etc. No artist can stand before an easel and not have his/her interior feelings and experiences influence the painted work. But does all of this innuendo-plucking make or break an artist's place in history?

The argument Adams makes is ultimately strong and deserves respect: "Eakins, far from being the most moral of American artists, was surely one of the most profoundly confused, even disturbed. By making art out of the chaos, conflict, and scandal of his own life, Eakins brought us more deeply into the world of sorrow, suffering, and despair than any other American artist of the nineteenth century. By some peculiar alchemy, he made his dark feelings beautiful, as anyone can attest who has contemplated one of his major paintings. Their effect can only be described as hypnotic".

Where Adams succeeds in making his points is in his painting by painting dissection of all of the Freudian implications of composition, exhibitionism, indeterminate gender buttocks, hidden models, etc, yet his visual examples are so poorly presented in this volume that they are all but indecipherable. Would that the publishers had devoted more space to the paintings and even used color, an important component of Eakins' works, to make the lesson more workable.

Yet as in Adams summary, Thomas Eakins is such an important painter that any additional information or perspective only results in expanding our appreciation for his greatness. Adams writes well (if excessively) and if the reader can drop preconceived prejudice that Adams is out to dethrone Eakins by prying into his psyche, this is actually a fine read. And given some time for reactionary responses to die down, EAKINS REVEALED will be an important contribution to the art libraries. Grady Harp, August 05

If a reader were to believe the many ludicrous claims that Adams makes about Thomas Eakins, one would think that the artist was homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, and a pedophile, exhibitionist, voyeur, sadist, and masochist; and further, that he practiced incest and bestiality (all of which, Adams suggests, was driven by a desire to posses his own mother). Take your pick! Adams covers all the bases. Eakins is not so much "revealed" in this book as he is "concealed." He seems to ignore altogether, what to my mind, are the most fascinating things about this remarkable man: that he studied logarithms for fun, that science, not art, was his first love, that he was conversant in five languages, and that he found beauty where others saw ugliness. Among the more humorous assertions that Adams makes about Eakins is that the artist painted while sitting on the floor (he used an easel), that he shot his sister's cat for fun (Adams conveniently leaves out the fact that Eakins' father ordered him to do so because the animal was rabid), and that he painted clergymen because they wore dresses, which supposedly reminded Eakins of outfits his dead mother wore. After reading this dreadful book I came to actually like it as a study of how inbred (dare I say incestuous?) that some members of our academic community have become. Even if you are convinced, or want to believe that Abraham Lincoln was homosexual, you will still have difficulty making the creative leaps necessary to take this book seriously.

Like most people who recognize the name, I came to Eakins first through "The Swimmers," an amazingly perfect painting. Later, I saw similar qualities in the rowing paintings, and realized that he was not a one hit wonder. Since then, my personal discovery of more paintings and the photographys have double underscored the mastery and the mystery I detected in each work. Reading about him, however, has been of little help. It seemed that articles were all over the place, each selecting a very particular array of facts from his wildly varied life and ignoring the facts of the other. Confusing, to say the least. This book, thankfully, pulls it all together for me. It's in three sections: the first summarizes writing about Eakins to date; the second goes through his life and works chronologically; and the third (like any good scholarly work) expostulates the authors own synthesis of the available data. Perhaps most distracting to potential readers may be the heavy reliance on Freudian psychology as an interpretive tool, a tool absolutely essential to a life so full of artifacts and so nearly devoid of primary-source, prose interpretation of their significance. If you either don't buy Freud or find it difficult to 'willing suspend your disbelief' for the sake of argument, this book will be a big zero for you. On the other hand, I am so grateful to have such a rich resource that draws together the obvious mastery of Eakins with the shadowy mystery of his life that I've intuited but been unable to name before now. As with most of the great questions about the origins of art, there are no concrete answers; too much is unknown, we have to assume too much from scattered iconographic hints. But this is a damned good exposition of both the questions, as they pertain to Eakins life, and possible answers that leave me more enthusiastic about Eakins's art, and more inspired by his craft than before.

The book is a swamp of innuendo and distortion and half-truths. Example: go look at a good color reproduction of Eakins' "William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River" and decide for yourself if the nude figure looks like a boy. Adams says it's the figure of a boy and proves Eakins' repressed homosexuality. Huh? Upon such unsupported assertions is this book built. And Eakins' famous "Swimming Hole"--yes, the painting celebrates the young male body, and childless Eakins was like a father for some of his students. One can't, as a male, celebrate the male body without raising questions about one's sexuality? I think my two sons' bodies are beautiful, as is my daughter's. And the lack of photos of Tom and Susan supposedly says something dark about their marriage. What the lack of photos speaks to is the lack of photos. To indicate a problem in a marriage requires positive evidence. And then there's....well, you get the point. Fortunately, I have faith that Eakins and his work will easily survive this shameless and self-promoting trashing. It would be fun to play Freud with Adams as he does with Eakins but let's not stoop to the author's level.

I stumbled upon this book by happen-stance, and grabbed it! My grandmother was Mildred Eakins, her father the first cousin (possibly 2nd) to Thomas Eakins, both men lived during the same era, my great-grandfather, George, a young man when Thomas was in his middle to later years. They met once in Thomas's studio where Thomas Eakins adviced my g-grandfather NOT to enter the art profession if he, as the quote has been told, "wanted to have a family", implying the life of an artist is far too time-consuming for family life. My great-grandfather took his advice. If you knew some of our family dysfunction, one might wonder about that advice, trust me! This book opened many doors for me as an Eakins family member, allowing me to piece things together that I had not been able to before. I even contacted the author who was gracious and eager to hear what info I had on Eakins and my family, though not much on Thomas. I think his attempts at telling the TRUTH about Thomas Eakins are accurate, and yes, I find this important to the art community, considering artists paint based on their psyches, their pasts, their unconcious, etc. Today, I am a self-taught artist and I can paint amazingly well, if I do say so myself. Something to be said about "blood memory", and to deny that our ancestry--on all levels--does not affect us is more nuts than to bash those who seek to speak truth. In fact, we MUST speak truth to grow and create and be all that we're meant to be. I honor what Adams has told. I find it truthful from an artistic AND family perspective, and if it helps, I have a masters in counseling and have practiced as a therapist for many years, so I know a thing or two about psyches!! ha ha This book is great! If an art buff and familiar with Eakins, it's a must.
Carmen Havens

The book is extremely well written, and while it chronicles a pivotal American artists life, it quickly digresses far too deeply into the unconscious of Thomas Eakins. Eakins sexual preferences are alluded to at the turn of every page, and how it shaped his life. Every symbol and pose in the artist's photographs or paintings is considered homosexual in nature and at times stretched just a little too thin. Hidden phallic symbols pop up all over the place throughout Eakins paintings and the relationship between Eakins and his mother is repeatdly psychoanalyzed and refered to page after page. The book gets extremely repetitive, very quickly.

EAKINS REVEALED is quite simply the most fascinating book I have ever read about an artist. The author, Henry Adams, has danced circles around tongue-tied critics who seek to drag his work down into the cesspool of their own inability to see the brilliance of the light he has thrown on the life and work of Eakins. But new insight always rattles the nerves of the faint of heart. In addition to exceptional writing, the book challenges the status quo in the way that all creative research does. Not for the faint of heart, it's in many ways a funny book, one with a great deal to say about human nature in general, and a major piece of scholarship in its own right. Highly recommended. Reads like a good novel with surprises on every page.

My name is Suzanne Hammitt, and I am from Dothan, Alabama. I have just stumbled upon this information and am totally astounded! I was doing genealogy work on the Hammitts in Philadelphia and stumbled upon all of this information about my great-great-grandfather, Dr. Charles Jefferson Hammitt (Yale Divinity School graduate), and have linked him to this Lillian Hammitt! This was his younger sister! This has obviously been a closely guarded family secret about Lillian's mental illness and scandal involving Thomas Eakins! He was caring for his mother, Mary Ellen Wetzel Hammitt (from Philadelphia), in his home in Kinsey, Alabama (near what is now Dothan). He was a Methodist minister, teacher, and principal of the Mallalieu Seminary, the local boarding school run by the Methodist Episcopal Church North. (Dr. Bob Jones was a famous graduate of the school and once was a boarder with the family.) Thomas Jefferson Hammitt, the father of Charles and Lillian, had died years earlier and had worked as a machinist (rictualler) in Philadelphia. I am a licensed therapist, and it sounds like Lillian might have had what would now be a very treatable mental condition involving psychosis. If anyone has more information about Lillian G. Hammitt and what had to be an inspeakable scandal at that time (fodder for celebrity news today), please email me at [...]. I am now ordering every Eakins book I can find to find out more about this secret family soap opera! This is better than As the World Turns! I have recently viewed his painting of her and can say she looks a lot like her mother and my great-great grandfather Charles. I have found a record that states, sadly, that she died in the Philadelphia mental asylum. She sounds like a very intelligent woman who was very lonely became obsessed after a sexual tryst, yet was in the throes of mental illness and poverty.

Suzanne Hammitt
Dothan, Alabama

p.s.--I am sure that bathing suit she wore running down the Philly streets was no string bikini! :)

This book is so riddled with errors and exaggerations that it is a wonder why Oxford University Press would publish it.

I have long been fascinated by Thomas Eakins's life and career. Over the years I have enjoyed Lloyd Goodrich's two volume biography and Elizabeth Johns's book about his art. This book by Adams has left me thoroughly confused.