Thomas Eakins
Thomas Eakins | 1844–1916 | The Artist's Wife and His Setter Dog c.1884–89 | Oil on canvas | 76.2 x 58.4cm | Fletcher Fund 1923 (23.139) | Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York | Photograph courtesy: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Artist's Wife and His Setter Dog c.1884–89
Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) is celebrated as one of America’s great realist painters, with the human figure his major theme and subject. Anatomy lectures, demonstrations at Jefferson Medical College, and training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts contributed to his uncompromising approach to the human form in a variety of moods, poses and actions. His portraits tended to be of family and friends rather than society celebrities and notaries. Eakins studied in Paris from 1886 to 1870 with Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts. He also spent a winter in Spain before returning to Philadelphia. He established a career as a highly regarded teacher in Philadelphia and New York despite being forced to resign from the Pennsylvania Academy in 1886, for his emphasis on the study of the nude and the exposure of female students to male nudity.
The Artist’s Wife and his Setter Dog c.1884–89 was completed shortly after Eakins’s marriage to Susan Macdowell in 1884, and is set in Eakins’s studio in Philadelphia. Susan was also a talented painter who studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where she met Eakins in 1876.
