The Boating Party

This picture was painted MARY CASSATT in the bright sunlight of the Medi terranean at Antibes, on the French Riviera. Its subject, a vari ation on the artist’s favourite theme of motherhood, is the boatinj
excursion of a woman and her little boy. As the boat drifts from ashore, the hired rower gently pulls on the oars and the mother sits a little tensely, trying to restrain the wriggling child.
The artist shows less interest in the sentiment, however, than in the design of the painting. Like Whistler she minimizes the roundness of forms, treats them more like flat shapes. It is the man’s silhouette that she emphasizes, the crisp outline of the mother and child, and the swelling profile of the boat, repeated in the curved edge of the sail. Like Whistler again, she follows Japanese influence in composing the scene as if viewed from above. But her choice of colours is very different from that of her older contemporary. She uses the bright hues that her friends the impressionists had introduced. The dominating blues of the sea and of the boatman’s clothes contrast strikingly with the yellow-green boat and the mauve and pink dresses. The colours seem all the more vivid because shadows do not dull them and because strong lines separate one colour from another.
(Margaret Bouton. American Painting in the National Gallery of Art)

MARY CASSATT
(1844-1926)
Mary Cassatt was the most distinguished woman painter of America. She spent most of her life in France. Essentially self-taught, she joined the impressionist group on the invitation of Degas, who became her lifelong friend and adviser. Despite the fact that she borrowed liberally from Degas and there was about her work something of Manet or Renoir, with it all she remained herself: she imitated none of them. She developed a personal style which shows a strong influence of Japanese prints apart from Degas. Her individual style had about it a freshness and directness free from affectation, which was peculiarly American. Her favourite theme is womanhood. About one third of her works are devoted to the woman-and-child theme. Her treatment of it is characterized by a certain tenderness, yet it is objective and original and completely free from sentimentality.
(…) An early member of the movement was the American-born Mary Cassatt, who had settled in France in her early twenties, become a friend of Degas, and at his invitation had exhibited with the impressionist group from 1879 on. Mary Cassatt, however, was never an orthodox impressionist. The influence of Degas with his insistence on precise draftsmanship outweighed the new tendency to dissolve forms in light and atmosphere. She remained characteristically American in her adherence to a naturalistic vision, and in the simplicity and wholesomeness of her favorite theme, women with their children -a completely feminine, matriarchal world. French art with its rational sensuality, its constant awareness of sex, its unending search for new forms, never affected her fundamentally. Through all her lifetime in France she remained a downright American spinster, who kept on painting the themes that meant most to her in a style of crystalline cfarity and quiet strength.
(Lloyd Goodrich. Three Centuries of American Art)

Other notable portraits of these years include: Harmony in Gray and Green: Miss Cecily Alexander (1873), Mrs.-F. R. Ley-land: Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink (1873), Arrangement in ‘ Black, No. 3: Sir Henry Irving as Philip II of Spain (1876), Arrangement in Black and Brown: The Fur Jacket (1877); and, among his finest “moonlights”: Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (c. 1875) and Cremorne Gardens, No. 2 (1875).
(Milton W. Brown. American Art to 1900)
The Artist’s Mother
His first major venture, however, was, appropriately, the famous portrait of his mother, the Arrangement in Gray and Flack, No. I, in the Louvre, on which he was certainly engaged by 1871. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in the following year, it became his most popular picture, and twenty years later, Watts could write to him that it was “a real poem of the highest order, a most serene harmony, the impression of it remains with me like a strain of sweet and solemn music”. Watts was right. It is a most tender picture in which the purity and integrity of Mrs. Whistler are conveyed by means of the tightly constructed composition; and the concentration is emphasized by his placing the sitter in side view against an even-toned background, vivified by the presence of the rectangular shapes of the picture frames. She has an air of permanence about her. The cameo-like treatment of her head not only echoes the sort of approach found with Holbein, but bears a curious resemblance to certain contemporary American portraits.
(Denys Sutton. Nocturne: The Art of James McNeill Whistler)
(…) The figure is shown in profile, the body a simple, flat shape, held tautly in place by the lines of curtain, skirting and! picture frames. The narrow and sombre range of hue, the severej simplicity of composition, combine with the slight rounding of the shoulders and drooping of the head to convey an impression] of an ageing woman still strict and dignified.
(Hilary Taylor. James McNeill Whistler)
Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge
While the Impressionists struggled to represent the effects of sunlight on the Seine, Whistler was painting nighttime scenes’ inspired by nocturnal boat trips on the Thames. {.. .) He intended,
the Nocturnes not to represent specific sites, such as the Old Battersea Bridge, but to convey the mood created by the dim, blurred forms and dark, subdued tones of night. <...>
Working on an especially absorbent canvas prepared with a red ground to bring up the predominant blues of the Nocturnes, Whistler used his highly personal vision to create images that’ are both evocative and daring. The vast, misty blue spaces of sky and water are brightened by the lights and spatter of fireworks from the pleasure grounds of Cremorne Gardens. These open areas are set off by the strong dark, vertical pier of the bridge, balanced by the three lighter horizontals formed by the bridge railing, the shore on the horizon and a barge in the foreground. In such an asymmetrica! balance of forms and voids, Whistler went far beyond the superficial inclusion of Oriental motifs in earlier works to a deeper appreciation of the Japanese sense of composition.
(Andrew McLaren Young. James Mc-Neill Whistler)
Nocturne in Black and Gold: the Falling Rocket
One of his most brilliant Nocturnes {Nocturne in Black and Gold: the Falling Rocket) was one of fireworks at night at Cremorne Gardens, a famous London pleasure haunt. Sparks and flares of light momentarily illuminate the night sky and evoke* the mystery of dimly revealed forms. What he was interested in as he said was line, form and colour. Cremorne Gardens had merely furnished the motif from which he developed a creative painting which was to be admired for its own sake without regard to any specific associations. During the summer of 1877 Whistler exhibited this and several other paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery. John Ruskin, considered the arbiter of taste in England, now well past his prime, went to the exhibition. Utterly outraged by The Falling Rocket he wrote a most insulting review in Fors Clavigera, in which he said: “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler sued him for libel in what proved to be the most sensational, art trial of the century. As might be expected, there was not much sympathy for Whistler’s work, Yet libel was clearly indicated. Whistler won a Pyrrhic victory with a farthing damages without costs. Ruskin’s friends paid his court costs, but no one helped Whistier who was financially ruined.
(Frederick A. Sweet. James McNeill Whistler)

In Paris, Whistler entered the studio of Charles-Gabriel Gleyre and settled down to concentrated bohemian living. He seems also to have worked, and in 1858 he published the first of his etchings, the French Set. He had made many friends, including Fantin-Latour, who introduced him to Courbet. His earliest mature efforts show a strong influence from the leader of the realist movement, and his first major painting, At the Piano (1859), rejected by the Salon, was highly praised by Courbet. Though modest, it is a remarkable picture, as advanced as anything being done by his avant-garde contemporaries. The Music Room (1860), in compositional pattern, framing, and sense of arrested movement, predates the use of similar devices by Degas. In a sense, he had already made his mark among his peers when he moved to London, where he lived for the rest of his life. In Wapping-on-Thames, he did a series of paintings of iife on the river, of which Wapping (1861—64) is probably the most famous, a picture of unusual promise and originality, though clearly out of Courbet. In contrast, The Coast of Brittany (1861), the first of his seascapes, may have anticipated Courbet’s later paintings of the sea, begun when both artists worked at Trouville in 1865. At Wapping, .Whistler also began the Thames Set, which established his reputation as an etcher. In 1863 The White Girl (1862), rejected by both the Royal Academy in London and the Salon in Paris, was exhibited at the famous Salon des Refuses, where, along with Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur I’Herbe* it was the butt of ridicule. On the other hand, it brought him the praise of avant-garde critics and artists, and he was at this time equally accepted by the Courbet entourage and by the younger Realists led by Manet in Paris and the Pre-Raphaelites around Dante Gabriel Rossetti in London — often acting as a kind of ambassador between the two. Also during the early 1860s in Paris Whistler became interested in Japanese art and began to buy Japanese prints and blue-and-white porcelain, for which he started the vogue in London. The White Girl and subsequent paintings placed him on the threshold of Impressionism, but a trend away from the main direction of Realism soon became evident, first, in his continuing concern with Japanese art and, second, in his growing involvement with subtle nuances of visual phenomena. His early preoccupation with Oriental art parallels that of Impressionists and is expressed more in exotic and colourful Oriental paraphernalia than in an adaptation of its design principles. The Lange Lijzen of the Six Marks (1864), La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelains (1864), and The Golden Screen (1864) are almost entirely Western jn their naturalistic effects, although the last introduces a new interest in pattern. With the Peacock Room, the fateful project he executed for the London home of Frederick R. Leyland in 1876—77, he entered a new and decorative phase of japonnoiserie, revealing a flair for interior decoration, in which he became a seminal figure.
Those years also saw a turn toward the subjective, tonal impressionism that was to be the hallmark of his style. Instead of the more objective recording of nature in dazzling sunlight which occupied the French impressionists. Whistler sought the evanescent, crepuscular moments in which mist shrouded the ugly banks of the industrialized Thames and created a mood of gentle mystery. Old Battersea Bridge (1872—73), one. of the early “nocturnes”, combines Japanese composition with a blue tonal haze out of which hulking shapes loom indistinctly, lights of gold twinkle from the opposite shore, and bursting rocket speckles the sky.
In the late sixties Whistler was torn between fidelity to nature and internal aesthetic order. <…) However, when he began to paint seriously again in the early seventies, he had arrived at his mature style. In the next fifteen years he painted his most famous portraits, beginning with the Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1871) and followed almost immediately by the Thomas Carlyle (1872—73). In them, he stated a new credo: that aesthetics takes precedence over reality, either objective or emotional. It was also then that he began to retitle pictures, without reference to subject, as “symphony”, “arrangement”, “nocturne”, “harmony”, in accordance with musical practice. The Mother was called Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 1 and the Carlyle, Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 2. Physical reality has been subordinated to a compositional format emphasizing flatness, silhouette, rectilinear spatial balance, and tonal harmony, much of which is derivative from Japanese art, although without the Oriental detail of earlier works except for the curtain in the Mother. It is difficult to approach the Mother freshly, since it has been so overexposed; but in spite of some feebleness in drawing, Whistler’s most obvious failing, it is an exquisitely composed picture, capturing something of the ineffable balance of Japanese art. The more moving portrait of Carlyle, seated in pathetic grandeur, is handled with greater assurance and less sensitivity to formal relationships. Restrained as both portraits are in statement, their revolutionary aesthetic significance was appreciated only later in the century

JAMES ABBOTT McNEILL WHISTLER
(1834—1903)
The third great artist of this remarkable period of American art is James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who was intimately connected with European art movements and is as much a part of European culture as of the United States. At nine Whistler was taken to Russia, where his father was invited to build a railroad between St. Petersburg and Moscow. The boy was interested in drawing from the time he was four. Because of his marked tajent, he was admitted to the Academy of the Fine Arts in St. Petersburg when he was eleven. Petersburg impressions must have played an important role in shaping the artist’s concepts. After the death of his father in 1849 the family returned to America. At 22 he left America to study art in Paris where he made friends with Fantin-Latour, Courbet and Baudelaire, who had a profound influence on him. After 3 years of studies in Paris he moved to London in 1859. He always felt himself an outsider in British and French society. He detested the Victorians whom he found ignorantly self-righteous and corrupt. Like his friends and comrades-in-arms, Courbet, Manet, Degas, and Baudelaire, he became a rebel against Victorian pretension and conventions. His art ran counter to the academic art of Victorian England and the French Salon art of the Second Empire. His innovations shocked the Victorians. His pictures were rejected by the Royal Academy and the Salon in Paris.
To the end of his life Whistler remained an American artist inseparably and profoundly tied to the best traditions of,American art. His best works — The Artist’s Mother, Thomas Carlyle, Self-Portrait, Miss Cecily Alexander— reveal an austere simplicity and restraint, frankness and pointed democratism that speak volumes for his affinity with the native portrait tradition of the United States. Whistler was the first of the American artists to represent American art in Europe. And he remained faithful to his country.
Among the influences that helped to shape his painting style was the realism of Courbet and Manet, the aesthetics of the Pre-Raphaelites, Japanese prints and the cool, reserved portraits of Velasquez. Out of these diverse elements he gradually evolved his own exquisite and entirely personal style, which in its refined and muted harmonies, was the ultimate perfection of delicate tonal poetry.
In his later years Whistler was associated with the “aesthetic movement”. But in his works he was not so radical as the views which he espoused. In his works of the eighties formal decorative qualities began to play a much greater role subordinating sometimes actualities of life. Emphasizing the purely Pictorial qualities of his delicate and subdued compositions, he gave them titles analogous to musical compositions: “harmonies”, “symphonies”, “nocturnes” or merely “arrangements”. Tet his concession to the “art for art’s sake” theory was not sizable enough to incur loss of the realistic essence of his art.

THE ARTIST
Seldom has there been so consistent a realist as Eakins — one whose art was such a direct outgrowth of reality. He used the material that lay closest around him. Every figure he painted was a portrait, every scene or object a real one — always the particular rather than the generalized, the individual rather than the type, the actual rather than the ideal. His whole philosophy was naturalistic, with little bent towards the romantic, the exotic, °r the literary.
His vision was close to familiar visual reality. He saw reality steadily, with penetrating observation, and seemed to get entire
satisfaction from it, feeling no need to idealize it. He painted what he saw, with almost terrible candour; anything that appeared in the subject, and that seemed to him significant, reappeared in his work, regardless of conventions. He distorted little; the liberties he took with nature consisted rather in the omission of non-essentials, the concentration on fundamentals. There was hardly a trace of conscious stylism or decorative intent.
His art was essentially original. Most artists of any sensitiveness see reality partly through their memories of other art, but he had the rare ability to face it without the need of anything to soften its hard outlines or make it more acceptable. His eye was as innocent as that of a primitive, observing things as if they had never been painted before—as indeed many of his subjects had not been. Few artists have been so little influenced by others, or have shown so few signs of a borrowed style.
The viewpoint set forth in his work was as near complete objectivity as is possible for a creative artist. He presented the external world as he saw it, without trying to express his subjective emotions about it. His impersonality was like that of a scientist. Even the people closest to him were painted entirely without glamour. But there was nothing cold in his attitude; underlying his relentless realism were deep humanity and intense” personal emotion, revealing themselves not in subjective emotionalizing but in the creation of a powerful and penetrating record of things as he saw them.
He differed from the ordinary naturalistic painter in that while the latter presented the’surface facts, he gave the vital, essential truths. He was no plodding copyist, piling detail on • detail to achieve a lifeless verisimilitude; he might be called a creative realist. Disregarding small truths, he concentrated on the most significant elements of reality, searching always for essential structure, character, and action.
The commonest complaint about his art has been that it lacked “beauty” and “poetry”. Those who make this criticism are apt to mistake prettiness for beauty, sentimentality for poetry. With most of his “poetic” contemporaries, one exhausts-their work when one has felt its mood, for there is little else. Eakins on the-other hand presented She thing itself — the person, object, or scene — and thereby created something more enduring than those who merely painted their emotions about the thing. And the austere poetry which did appear in many of his works, being inherent in the fhings portrayed, was genuine.
Although his aim was not “beauty” as that shopworn word is commonly understood, but truth, his work nevertheless attained aesthetic qualities more permanent than that of most of the beauticians of his time.
(Lloyd Goodrich.Thomas Eat/ins His Life and Work)

THE LATE PORTRAITS
<…) From 1884 on, his major work was in portraiture with few exceptions {…)
The smaller and the less formal portraits are often more satisfying, perhaps because Eakins allowed the innate warmth of his nature to show through, as in the pensive Miss Amelia C. Van Buren (1889—91), painted with a wonderful feeling for weight and texture, luminous in the ivory skin tonalities. Such portraits are documents of emotional involvement, psychological probing, and affection. No American portraitist has ever approached the poignancy of Addie (1900), Mrs. Thomas Eakins (c. 1899), and the Self-Portrait (1902); or the romantic intensity of Signora Gomez D’Arza (1902), the rollicking earthiness of Walt, Whitman
(1887—88), the tender sweetness of Mrs. Letitia Wilson Jordan Baker (1888), or the total revelation of what may be his greatest portrait, that of his wife and their dog, Harry, in Lady with a Setter Dog (1885). The last is exceptional in the relationship of the figure to its setting, the high-keyed colour, the almost miniaturist yet broad treatment of surface, and the skillful handling of interior light and atmosphere. The vulnerable and appealingly fragile lady remains one of the unforgettable images in American
art.
(Milton W. Brown. American Art to 1900)
Portrait of a Lady with a Setter Dog
For subjects Eakins ranged little beyond the compass of his personal life and interests, and those that touched him intimately were likely to be most sympathetically treated. Soon after marrying Susan Hannah Macdowell, one of his most capable students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he painted her in Portrait of a Lady with a Setter Dog.
Here seated at ease on a chair in the studio, hands dropped in lap and holding a Japanese picture book, she watches the painter, the Eakins’ favorite dog, Harry, sprawled alertly near her. In dark areas flanking the drape suspended behind her ^re a secretary, dimly seen pictures, and at right, the artist’s Arcadia, a bas-relief of recent date. From inclined head to extended foot the slim figure of Mrs. Eakins is a marvel of characterization, anatomical precision, and disciplined execution. The lady’s crisp turquoise blue dress — with a sharpening accent of bright red stocking protruding from under the ruffle— shines from a setting in which dull gold above reddens in descending to the setter’s ruddy coat and the warmth of an oriental rug. This is one of Eakins’ most colourful works.
(Harold E. Dickson. Portraits USA

Eakins had always been intensely interested in the nude, and entirely natural about it. He enjoyed swimming, sailing, and taking his ease nude, and observing the bodies of others. With Walt Whitman he might have said: “Perhaps he or she to whom the free exhilarating ecstasy of nakedness in nature has never been eligible, has not really known what purity is — nor what faith or art or health really is.” The human figure was the basis of his whole study, of his anatomical work, and later of his teaching.
Hence it at first seems curious that in early years he painted no nudes. This abstention from attempting a subject ‘which interested him so profoundly, was no doubt due chiefly to his realism. The nude was to him, as he had said in an early letter, “the most beautiful thing there is”, and the very foundation of learning, but his concern was less with “beauty” than with the truth of the life around him; and he could have seen few opportunities to picture the nude in the Philadelphia of his time. The puritanism of early America, which had objected to Vanderlyn’s chaste Ariadne and had made it impossible to exhibit the icily idealized Greek Slave ‘of Hiram Powers without the approval of the clergy, had always been especially strong in this city, with its heritage of Quaker modesty, where the casts in the Pennsylvania Academy had been swathed in muslin on ladies’ days, and an English artist who had brought over a copy of the Venus de Medici was obliged to keep it locked in a chest in his own studio. Even in the seventies this prudery had not changed radically. The nude was still taboo, and comparatively few American artists had attempted it (…)
But in early 1877, soon after he began teaching the life class-es of the Pennsylvania Academy, he painted his first picture containing a nude, and almost his only female nude — the small William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River — which was also one of his few historical subjects, not part of contemporary life. {…) For Eakins the story must have had a symbolic value; he admired Rush’s and the girl’s naturalness and courage in defying convention, and felt an affinity between the old sculptor and himself, for in painting the picture he no more than Rush made use of a professional model; she was a young teacher, a friend of his and his sisters’. While her posing did not cause as much scandal as Miss Vanuxem’s, the picture was looked at somewhat askance — one of his first conflicts with the prudery of his environment, which was to play so large and unfortunate a part in his career. Not only was the subject advanced for the time; whereas the few nudes which had been painted in this country had been “classical” and idealized, here was a realistic figure, pictured not in an imaginary setting but in a studio, and with all its grace, seen with the Northern realism of a Rembrandt; not an ideal creature, but a naked woman of flesh and blood. He made unusually careful preparations for the picture, studying Rush’s works, visiting the former site of his shop and getting a description of it from some old people, so that every detail was historically correct, even to the scrolls and drawings on the wall, which were from a sketch-book of the sculptor’s preserved by an apprentice. He prepared small wax models of the figures, and painted several preliminary studies of the composition, making it at each stage more integrated and harmonious. The austere grace of the nude figure, the delicate precision of such details as the clothes on the chair, the depth and mellowness of colour, and the unity and balance of the whole design, make this one of the most aesthetically satisfying of his works.
(Lloyd Goodrich. Thomas Eakins. His Life and Work)

William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River
On the other hand, in William Rush, Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River (1877) Eakins transformed a history subject into a genre painting. The story of the early Philadelphia sculptor who sought a model to pose nude for him had symbolic, meaning for Eakins, and he used it later as an image of his own struggle against puritanism. The painting shows him at his imaginative and painterly best. In all his work there is no more sensuous painting than that of the buxom nude and her clothes scattered on the chair. The frankness of the naked (a word he preferred to “nude”) model is far removed from the erotic ideality of Gerome and completely new to American painting.
(Milton W. Brown. American Art to
1900)

Gross Clinic
In the course of his anatomical work at Jefferson Medical College, he became acquainted with many of the leading physicians of the city. At this time the dominating figure in the college was Dr. Samuel D. Gross, one of the greatest surgeons in the country, a magnetic teacher, and a man of impressive appearance. Eakins saw him many times operating in his clinic before his students, and from this experience conceived the most ambitious picture of his early years, the Gross Clinic.
The scene is a sombre amphitheatre into which cold daylight falls from above, bringing the principal actors into dramatic relief. Dr. Gross has paused in the operation, and scalpel in hand, stands talking to his students. On the operating table lies the patient, surrounded by the assistants, one of whom is Probing the wound. Instead of the immaculate white of present-day surgery, all the doctors wear dark, everyday clothes, characteristic of the days before modern antisepsis. In the background the clinic clerk takes down the great surgeon’s remarks; and “further back rise tier after tier of seats filled ‘th deemly seen figures of students absorbed in the operation, 1 every variety of attitude. At one side, unnoticed, sits the Patient’s mother, covering her eyes — a contrast to the scientific ‘^personality of everyone else.
While the picture represents a whole scene, it is at the same time the portrait of one man. Dr. Gross dominates it, with his
silvery hair, fine brow, and strong features catching the full force of the light — an imposing figure, with the rugged force of a pioneer in his profession. Every detail in the picture contributes to the dramatic value of his figure and the subordinate drama of the group of assistants clustered around the patient. Every person is an individual, whose character is depicted with a sure grasp, and each is doing his work with absorbed intentness. The viewpoint is absolutely objective; the hand that guided the brush was as steady as the hand that guided the scalpel. But there is no lack of humanity; not the sentimentality that hides its eyes and shrinks from the less pleasant aspects of life, but the robust understanding of the scientist who can look on disease and pain, and record them truthfully. The work has the impersonality of science, and its humanity. It represents a drama of contemporary life, a phase of man’s search for knowledge. In its truth of characterization, its formal strength and balance of design, it shows a power and completeness of realism that could be matched by no other American painter of the time.
This picture, the masterpiece of Eakins’ early manhood, was finished in the latter part of 1875, when he was thirty-one years old. He had worked hard over it, persuading friends and fellow students, doctors, and the famous surgeon himself, to pose. Soon after its completion it was exhibited at the Haseltine Galleries on Chestnut Street — probably his first public exhibition of an oil in this country. It created a sensation; crowds visited the galleries, and long accounts of it appeared in the papers. <.. .) the bulk of the criticism was unfavourable. Complaints were made about the darkness of the colour, the strong lighting, the realistic style, diagnosed as “the modern French manner”, the •”puzzle” presented by the patient’s body — even the perspective. The subject, however, was what condemned the picture utterly in the eyes of most writers, especially the fact that the artist had dared to show blood on the hands of the surgeon. {.. .)
When painting it Eakins had had in mind the Centennial Exhibition, due to open in Philadelphia the following spring. But the art jury of the Centennial, while accepting five other works by him, rejected the Gross Clinic. He finally succeeded in getting it hung in the medical section. (…)
Eakkis had pinned high hopes on the picture, but they were not realized. There had been no order for it, and not until three years after it was painted did the Jefferson Medica! College buy it, for two hundred dollars. (…)
The reception of the Gross Clinic must have been a blow to Eakins — the first of many he was to receive. But he showed no signs of discouragement, or of any attempt to compromise with popular taste.
(Lloyd Goodrich. Thomas Eakins. His Life and Work)