Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist
“With a wealth of fresh documentation and the page-turning momentum of a detective story, Henry Adams has uncovered the Gothic world of Eakins's private and public biography, a scandalous mixture of insanity, incest, suicide, and exhibitionism. But more important, he has woven this sinister story into new and deeper readings of Eakins's work, creating a seamless interpretation of how life is transformed into art.”
–Robert Rosenblum
“Adams...has reexamined the evidence of the artist's life and art and found a hidden world of insanity, incest, suicide, and exhibitionism. In Eakins Revealed, he challenges the work of nearly every previous writer on Eakins.... All of this adds up to a critical bull's eye for the author.”
–Joseph Phelan, The Washington Times
“Adams has probed more deeply than anyone thus far. One need not agree with all his conclusions to recognize that he has made Eakins a far more provocative and compelling artist than we knew before.... This new biography of Eakins may impact our understanding of the artist the way Fawn Brodie's biography of Thomas Jefferson changed our view of the author of the Declaration of Independence. It's no longer possible to see Eakins as a simple American hero or to ignore the dark shadows that shaped his life.”
–Bonnie Barrett Stretch, ArtNews
“At last a biography that brings fully to life the creator of American art's most astonishing works. Until this point the Thomas Eakins iconography has been staid and housebroken. Henry Adams' book breaks from that tradition brilliantly.”
–Jamie Wyeth
By Henry Adams
Oxford University Press, 2005
ISBN 9780199729463, 0199729468
“The most extraordinary biography I have ever read on an artist.”
Thomas Eakins is widely considered one of the great American painters, an artist whose uncompromising realism helped move American art from the Victorian era into the modern age. He is also acclaimed as a paragon of integrity, one who stood up for his artistic beliefs even when they brought him personal and professional difficulty--as when he was fired from the Pennsylvania Academy of Art for removing a model's loincloth in a drawing class.
Yet beneath the surface of Eakins's pictures is a sense of brooding unease and latent violence--a discomfort voiced by one of his sitters who said his portrait "decapitated" her. In Eakins Revealed, art historian Henry Adams examines the dark side of Eakins's life and work, in a startling new biography that will change our understanding of this American icon. Based on close study of Eakins's work and new research in the Bregler papers, a major collection never fully mined by scholars, this volume shows Eakins was not merely uncompromising, but harsh and brutal both in his personal life and in his painting. Adams uncovers the bitter personal feuds and family tragedies surrounding Eakins--his mother died insane and his niece committed suicide amid allegations that Eakins had seduced her--and documents the artist's tendency toward psychological abuse and sexual harassment of those around him.
This provocative book not only unveils new facts about Eakins's life; more important, it makes sense, for the first time, of the enigmas of his work. Eakins Revealed promises to be a controversial biography that will attract readers inside and outside the art world, and fascinate anyone concerned with the mystery of artistic genius.
“Written as compellingly as a novel, Eakins Revealed is a portrait of one of America's most important artists, warts and all. Yet, it avoids sensationalism, preferring instead to put Eakins into the kind of cultural and artistic contexts that deepen our understanding of him without excusing his sometimes inexcusable behavior. What Adams does in this compelling biography is introduce us to Eakins the man, whose sometimes disturbing behavior informed and inspired Eakins the artist.”
–Indianapolis Star