Education

Homer, Eakins and Whistler

American Impressionism and Realism: Virtual tour

The American Impressionists and Realists were aware of, and responded to, works by several important American masters – namely James McNeill Whistler, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins – who spoke with distinctive stylistic voices in the late nineteenth century.

Whistler rejected the academic principles he studied in Paris in the late 1850s, became friendly with Gustave Courbet and experimented with his brand of Realism in the early 1860s, and then repudiated representational impulses in favour of abstracting from – rather than depicting – the visible world. Instead of going through Impressionism, as many followers of Courbet did, Whistler went around it, arriving at a prodigious version of Post-Impressionism by the mid 1860s, 20 years before Paul Cézanne’s or Georges Seurat’s experiments matured. Whistler’s importance for the American Impressionists arose from him being a model of artistic independence – he was an exemplar of painting softly and subtly, and an advocate of the manner of Diego Velázquez and Japanese prints. Whistler should not be mistaken for, or called, an Impressionist, although some critics of the period applied that label to him.

Homer, who had little formal training and worked only briefly in France (1866–67) and England (1881–82) without undertaking instruction, was unlike his much more cosmopolitan American contemporaries. After settling in Prout’s Neck, Maine, in 1883, he lived near the ocean and studied it continuously under different conditions of light and weather. It was not until 1890, however, that he left narrative behind to concentrate on the beauty, force and drama of the sea itself. In their dynamic compositions and richly textured passages, Homer’s late seascapes capture the look and feel of onrushing and receding water. For Homer’s contemporaries, these were the most admired of all his works, appreciated for their virtuoso brushwork and their depth of feeling. These magisterial canvases partake of the same nationalistic spirit that stirred the American Impressionists, and celebrate the same New England bedrock. They also inspired and challenged the younger American Realists. John Sloan, George Luks, George Bellows and others painted coastal scenes with similar energy, heavy impasto, and what has been deemed ‘masculine’ muscle.

Eakins dedicated his career to depicting the human figure – in oil and watercolour, sculpture and photography. With technical finesse and scientific rigour, he investigated an array of unprecedented modern subjects. Eakins adhered to traditional academic principles, which he had learned in Philadelphia and Paris. However, his unconventional themes, fascination with the nude, and willingness to flout decorum challenged all but the most progressive critics and patrons. As an innovative teacher in Philadelphia and New York City, Eakins shared his hard-earned knowledge with generations of art students, including Thomas Anshutz, who in turn taught Robert Henri and other leading American Realists. Eakins’s early scenes of everyday life featured friends, family and students. After 1886, he essentially abandoned anecdotal settings and concentrated on life-sized figures in isolation. These portraits, usually painted at his request rather than on commission, often offended viewers accustomed to flattery and dash rather than intense scrutiny. They constitute an in-depth exploration of American character around 1900.

Australia

The paintings of the expatriate American James McNeill Whistler were a significant influence on the work of many Australian artists around the turn of the last century – directly, when artists journeyed to Paris and London for further training, experience and commercial opportunities; and indirectly, through articles they read in contemporary periodicals and stories they heard from friends and colleagues.

Between 1881 and 1885, Tom Roberts travelled to Europe, and he probably saw Whistler’s well-publicised London exhibition ‘Notes – Harmonies – Nocturnes’ in May 1884. He returned home enthusiastic about the idea of painting rapid outdoor impressions, which led to the important ‘9 by 5 Impression Exhibition’ of 1889, the first self-consciously avant-garde exhibition in Australia.

Roberts was a popular portraitist, and commissions provided much of his livelihood. He produced more than 250 portraits during his working life. He also made portraits of friends and associates, as can be seen in his ‘Familiar faces and figures’ series on cedar panels. Their full-length compositions were influenced by Whistler. Roberts also painted an important group of portraits of Australian Indigenous people.

Rupert Bunny was another of the many Australian artists influenced by Whistler, whose well-known interest in Japanese art was an expression of a wider European fascination with Japanese culture at this time. Indeed, Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly was inspired by his attendance at a performance by Japanese actress Madame Sada Yakko in 1902, the subject of several works by Bunny.

Thomas Eakins

1844–1916

The thinker: Portrait of Louis N Kenton 1900

Oil on canvas

John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1917

Acc. 17.172

Eakins studied and worked abroad from September 1866 to July 1870 before returning to work for the rest of his life in his hometown of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In a 1868 letter to his family written from Paris, he derided the paintings he had recently seen at the Salon as affected and sentimental. In his art, Eakins practiced an empirical form of Realism based on science and acute observation. Unwilling to flatter his sitters, he found little patronage and most often painted friends and acquaintances, some of whom even declined to accept their portraits as gifts.

The thinker depicts a member of Eakins’s family, Louis N Kenton, who had married his wife’s sister in 1899. Eakins’s lack of sentimentality is obvious. Kenton appears neither refined nor handsome, standing in an awkward pose, with his hands thrust into his pockets. He shows no interest in projecting a particular identity or any awareness that he is being observed as he stares at the floor. Although Eakins does not flatter Kenton, he enlists for the portrait a style that recalls the court portraits of Diego Velázquez, which he saw during a trip to Spain in 1869–70.

Eakins’s unaffected Realism made him a hero to members of the Ashcan School, all of whom began their careers in Philadelphia. The figural work of Robert Henri, John Sloan, and their associates, with its loose, quick brushwork and generalised detail, seems to have little in common with Eakins’s oeuvre. Yet, these artists admired their older colleague’s artistic independence and desire to depict the world around him. Like him, they too strove to locate meaning in the people, places and events of daily life.

James McNeill Whistler

1834–1903

Arrangement in black, no.3: Sir Henry Irving as Phillip II of Spain 1876

Oil on canvas

Rogers Fund, 1910

Acc. 10.86

Henry Irving (1838–95) was one of the best known British actors who emerged on the London stage in the mid 1860s, earning renown for his Shakespearean roles, and later serving as a director and manager of London’s famed Lyceum Theatre (1878–1902). He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1895, becoming the first actor to receive the honour. For one month in spring 1876, Irving assumed the role of King Philip II of Spain in the Lyceum’s production of Alfred Tennyson’s 1875 play Queen Mary: A Drama. Whistler, who was an avid theatregoer, probably asked Irving to pose after attending one of the performances. For his representation of the contemporary actor, Whistler adopted the sombre, monochromatic palette and flat background characteristic of the seventeenth-century Spanish master Diego Velázquez, who had painted both Philip III and Philip IV of Spain. When Whistler’s portrait was first exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, critics derided his dark palette and sketchy, thin paint. This supposed lack of finish in Whistler’s work, which was also famously at the centre of Whistler’s libel suit against the art critic John Ruskin in 1878, was later to be applauded and admired by a generation of American artists.

James McNeill Whistler

1834–1903

Harmony in yellow and gold: The Gold Girl – Connie Gilchrist c.1877–78

Oil on canvas

Gift of George A Hearn, 1911

Acc. 11.32

Connie Gilchrist (1865–1946) was involved in both the London art and theatre worlds from an early age. She began modelling for Whistler’s friend, the painter Frederic Leighton, when she was six years old, and appeared in several of his major canvases. From the mid 1870s, she performed on the English music hall and vaudeville circuit and, when she was 12 years old, she joined the company of London’s famed Gaiety Theatre, where she was renowned for her skipping-rope performance. In this life-sized canvas, Whistler depicts Gilchrist in costume performing her rope-skipping routine. Unlike most of his portraits from this period, in which he left the settings indistinct, Whistler creates here a well-defined draped background evoking a stage curtain. As is characteristic of his portraits, Whistler balances his interest in recording a likeness with a desire to produce a harmonious arrangement of colour and form. He conceived the painting as a ‘harmony in yellow and gold’, using a limited tonal range of these colours to represent all elements, adding only three small red accents in the skipping-rope handles and on Gilchrist’s lips.

Winslow Homer

1836–1910

Northeaster 1895

Oil on canvas

Gift of George A Hearn, 1910

Acc. 10.64.5

In 1883, Homer settled for the rest of his life at his family’s compound in Prout’s Neck, a small peninsula on the Maine coast, south of Portland. There, he continued his explorations of a theme he began investigating during a sojourn to Cullercoats, England, in 1881 and 1882: the struggle of people against the sea. At Prout’s Neck, he continuously studied the sea under different conditions of light and weather and by the 1890s, he began to eliminate narrative elements from his compositions in order to focus on the beauty, drama and force of nature.

In Northeaster Homer records the drama of a winter storm with a combination of naturalistic observation and bold technique. He made alterations to the canvas in the late 1890s, painting out of two figures in rain gear on the rocks and emphasizing the pattern of the crashing surf and the dense column of foam. Such adjustments characterise his rejection of narrative elements in favour of distilling the essential elements of nature to achieve monumentality. Homer’s individualism and his devotion to American subjects made him a role model for many later artists. His powerful late marine paintings resonated with twentieth-century artists, such as George Bellows, John Marin and Edward Hopper, who also responded to the Maine coast. In this exhibition, Homer’s legacy is felt in the winter landscapes of Pennsylvania Impressionists Walter Elmer Schofield and Edward Willis Redfield.

Thomas Eakins

1844–1916

The artist’s wife and his setter dog 1884–89

Oil on canvas

Fletcher Fund, 1923

Acc. 23.139

In 1884, Eakins married Susan Hannah Macdowell, his former student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and soon after commenced this portrait of her with their dog. His fastidious attention to detail and uncompromising realism makes this work a strange portrait of a new bride. Although accounts of her describe a talented artist and an active, intellectually engaged woman, she appears here to be afflicted by a deep, almost paralysing malaise. Her face is gaunt, her narrow shoulders sag and her left hand lies listlessly, palm up, on an open book of Japanese prints. Even the setter dog, Harry, echoes her lethargy.

At the end of the nineteenth century, a common diagnosis for a general sense of unwellness, irritability and lassitude was termed neurasthenia or ‘nervous exhaustion’. This was believed to be a result of strain on the nervous system caused by a rapidly changing society and women were considered especially susceptible. It has been noted that Eakins made alterations to this painting between 1886 and 1889, after it had been published as a photogravure in 1886. This reworking of the painting coincided with his dismissal from a prestigious teaching position at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for the impropriety of removing a male model’s loincloth in a class including female students. This was a cause of great anxiety and despair for Eakins and quite possibly influenced the modification of this portrait.

Rupert Bunny

1864–1947

Madame Sadayakko as Kesa c.1907

Oil on canvas

Collection: Philip Bacon, Brisbane

Between 1906 and 1911, Rupert Bunny painted many images of women at leisure. One of three paintings of the Japanese actress Sada Yakko exhibited by Bunny at the Salon d’Automne in 1909, Madame Sadayakko as Kesa presents its subject as an embodiment of the mysterious ‘Orient’ for Western admirers and clearly shows the influence of Whistler on the artist in its subtle tonal harmonies and marked Japonisme.

Kawakami Sada Yakko (1871–1946) was a successful geisha, who left her profession at the age of 23 to marry Kawakami Otojirô (1864–1911), an actor, playwright, producer and a leader of the shinpa or ‘new style’ Japanese theatre, which arose in opposition to classical kabuki theatre. At this time, only men were allowed to perform on stage in Japanese theatres. Kawakami’s company toured the United States and Europe in 1889–1902, and when the company’s two onnagata (female impersonators) died while on tour, Sada Yakko stepped in, adapting easily to her new roles due to years of grooming in singing and dancing. She performed in a digest, or montage, of several kabuki plays, abbreviated and played at an accelerated tempo to cater for European audiences. She was a sensation – Degas, Rodin and Picasso were among her devotees.