In keeping with his French academic training, Eakins had a lifelong commitment to studying anatomy and drawing from the nude. He spent several years in Paris, where he studied at the famous École des Beaux-Arts. Unique among Gilded Age portrait painters, Eakins‘s primary interest was in painting the world exactly as he saw it, both visually and psychologically. Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) was dedicated to the principle of realism in art. Please check your inbox to activate your subscription Thank you! The Writing Master by Thomas Eakins The Writing Master by Thomas Eakins, 1882, via Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City The aesthetic vocabularies of these American portrait painters were much broader and more innovative than they usually get credit for. Most of them experimented with vivid colors and free-flowing brushwork like that of the Impressionists, though they did not share an Impressionist interest in transitory visual effects. Gilded Age portraitists also found inspiration in their French modernist contemporaries Edouard Manet and the Impressionists. These masters’ influences are readily apparent in works like Chase’s portrait of fellow painter James McNeill Whistler above. They studied the Old Masters, particularly great portraitists Anthony Van Dyck, Diego Velasquez, and Frans Hals. Through direct or indirect influence, these four artists shaped subsequent generations of American artists, including many of the avant-garde figures whose reputations later eclipsed them.Īll four trained in Europe, primarily in Paris, where they experienced both European academic naturalism and burgeoning French modernism. Sargent, meanwhile, was one of the most successful international portrait painters of the period. The first three were influential teachers at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The four great American portrait painters of the Gilded Age were Thomas Eakins, William Merritt Chase, Cecilia Beaux, and John Singer Sargent. A closer look at the paintings and artists, however, suggests a very different assessment.

Their reputation particularly suffered after Modernism came to America at the end of this period. Some later viewers have seen Gilded Age portraits as the shallow reflections of frivolous high society, with little artistic merit. In Defense of Gilded Age Portraits James Abbott McNeill Whistler by William Merritt Chase, 1885, via Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Old portraits