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g.donahue, January 27, 2008

A charming, short (200 pp) biography of this all-American artist. His close ties with his family, friends, his heartaches, and his successes in his lifetime are treated with clarity, compassion, and succinctness, along with nodding references to his homosexuality and the Victorian repressions that thwarted it. I loved the author’s chapter on the relationship with Walt Whitman. Both artists, Whitman 20 years Eakins’ senior, sought for the freedom of the soul of the artist, and both are revered to this day for that work. “Whitman said of Eakins that he was more than “a painter—a force.” Thomas Eakins lived during a burgeoning and newly-defining period of American Art History. Art schools and art museums in all the big cities were just getting started in the latter half of the 19th century and Eakins was instrumental in challenging traditional mores in these academies. Classical European artwork filled the homes of the wealthy with an American style still finding its direction. Thomas Eakins’ life and work existed at a very important time in the country. His verisimilitude of the American soul in art pointed to the future, indeed, to the New York Ash Can School of the early 20th century and beyond. Biographies don’t have to read like novels, but a good biography should inspire and educate and McFeely does just that in a much-appreciated 200 pages.

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