The art of Thomas Eakins, 1844–1916

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The Wrestlers.

Born in Philadelphia, Eakins studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he would later teach, from 1862, before travelling to Paris where he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts. His final six months in Europe were spent in Spain. Returning to Philadelphia in July 1870, he set himself up as a portrait painter with financial support from his father.

Eakins’ study of anatomy extended to the study of human movement and in 1884 he assisted the photographer Muybridge in his studies of human and animal locomotion. Eakins himself was a keen photographer and produced a number of photographic studies of the figure in motion.

Many of his paintings depict the athletic male body in action. The importance of the male figure for Eakins is particularly evident in the many photographs that he took throughout the 1880s of himself and his (mostly male) students posing nude either in the studio or else engaged in various outdoor sporting activities.

Nudity both inside the studio and beyond was intrinsic to Eakins’ aim of fostering camaraderie amongst his students, as he sought to recreate within his circle the ethos and practices of an ancient Greek Academy.

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The painting The Swimming Hole (c. 1884), which was based upon photographs taken by Eakins and depicts a group of seven nude men comprised of Eakins and his students, can be viewed as a contemporary rendering of a classical Arcadian theme.

Following a dispute between Eakins and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts over students admissions, the Board of Directors forced him to resign in 1886 – ostensibly over a claim that he had removed the loincloth from a male model in a mixed life drawing class.

Eakins died in Philadelphia, his growing reputation as a key figure in American realist painting secured by exhibitions held in New York and Philadelphia. After his death, a number of his negatives of nude men were destroyed.

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The Triangular Lodge

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England is filled with curious buildings, follies as they’re commonly known, most of them the creation of wealthy landowners with time on their hands and a degree of imagination. Many of them are fake ruins, imitations of antiquity or classical architecture intended to add a degree of romance to a picturesque landscape. Some buildings are simply unusual, however, and one of the strangest of all is Sir Thomas Tresham’s Triangular Lodge near the village of Rushton, Northants. Nearly ever aspect of the building’s design and decoration relates to the number three, a reference to the Holy Trinity and Tresham’s religious convictions.

Continue reading “The Triangular Lodge”

Cosmic zooms

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Cosmic Zoom was a short animated film by made by Eva Szasz in 1968 for the National Film Board of Canada.

This film probes the infinite magnitude of space, and its reverse, the ultimate minuteness of matter. Animation art and animation camera achieve this journey to the farthest conceivable point of the universe and then into the tiniest particle of existence—an atom of a living human cell—with a freshness and clarity that would seem impossible with other means of exposition. Film without words.

The film zooms out from a boy rowing a boat across a lake, into the farthest reaches of space, then back down to earth again to focus on a mosquito on the boy’s arm, then further down into cells and atoms.

A similar film called Powers of Ten (from which the still above is borrowed) was made in 1977 by Charles and Ray Eames. The Eames’ film is a lot more detailed and with a running commentary full of scientific information. You can see it on YouTube here.

The ultimate Eamesian expression of systems and connections, Powers of Ten explores the relative size of things from the microscopic to the cosmic. The 1977 film travels from an aerial view of a man in a Chicago park to the outer limits of the universe directly above him and back down into the microscopic world contained in the man’s hand. Powers of Ten illustrates the universe as an arena of both continuity and change, of everyday picnics and cosmic mystery. The film also demonstrates the Eameses’ ability to make science both fascinating and accessible.

Just to show the persistence of a fascinating idea, there’s a nice java animation here.

View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.