About Me
BORN in Philadelphia in 1844, I am one of America's few indisputably great painters. My friend Walt Whitman the subject of a splendid 1888 portrait by me insisted that I am not so much a painter as a "force": high praise from the cosmic bard. Today, many critics conclude that my later portraits searingly frank yet also gentle, respectful, affirmative have earned me a place alongside such 19th-century masters of psychological realism as Courbet, Manet, and Degas.My passion for exactness and technical precision is evident throughout my oeuvre, from the perspectival and anatomical studies I did as a student through my meticulous paintings of boaters and other sportsmen to my late experiments in serial photography (on some of which I collaborated with Eadweard Muybridge). It is no accident that some of my most famous pictures are of men of science, especially surgeons.Like all genuinely original artists, I am deeply traditional. That is to say, my originality issued from my fertile assimilation of certain artistic conventions and techniques. In 1866, after studying briefly at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, I departed for Paris, where I studied with Gerome at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Excursions to Madrid and Seville brought me into contact with the work of Velazquez and Ribera, the two old masters whose tenebrist palettes and unflinching exploration of character most decisively influenced the aesthetic temperature of my work.Because Europe was the inescapable source of artistic tradition in the 1860s, I apprenticed in Paris. But unlike such popular society portraitists as John Singer Sargent, who became a professional expatriate in London, I found my vocation as a distinctively American painter. In 1870, I returned to Philadelphia, never to set foot in Europe again.It was in the matter of peering "deeper into the heart" that I differed most profoundly from painters like Sargent and Chase, whose slick technique and tendency to flatter their clients made them both rich. I never flattered my sitters. My art is a masculine art: unfussy, blunt, direct. I prefer to explore the truth of what I see, which is not to say that I don't discover beauty or dignity in my contemplation. Some of my portraits, The Concert Singer (1890-92) and Maud Cook (1895), for example are positively ravishing; none lacks dignity.Yet the critic who observed that I was an "annihilator of vanity" was right. Even when I preserve a facade, I glimpse the human melancholy behind it. Many clients complained that I made them look older than they were. In fact, I paint very slowly and tend not to talk much while painting; this often lulls my sitters into a meditative repose, bereft of the rejuvenating sparkle that full attention brings. Some of my most penetrating portraits of my wife (1900), of the singer Edith Mahon (1904), of my friend Amelia Van Buren (1891) discreetly exploit tokens of aging to suggest the pathos of mortality.All this made my work a specialty taste. Although respected by other artists and a handful of critics, I never had a wide following. Consequently, many of my portraits are of friends, family, or students. There was also some mild scandal. In 1886, for example, when I was director of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, I sought to illustrate a point of anatomy by removing a loincloth from a male model in a drawing class in which female students were present; I was promptly dismissed.Nor did my unsentimental treatment of certain subjects recommend me to established taste. The surgeon's bloodspattered hand in The Gross Clinic (1875) led the squeamish jury to reject it as "unsightly" when it was first exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. The painting one of my most famous was finally sold to a medical school for the insulting sum of $200. In 1894, I wrote that "My honors are misunderstanding, persecution, and neglect, enhanced because unsought."It was not until the early 1900s that I began to attract significant public interest. In 1902, when I was in my late 50s, I was finally invited to join the National Academy of Design. I painted a bust length self portrait as a "diploma picture" to mark the occasion. A preparatory oil sketch, which I completed in a single session, shows me head on, half swallowed by shadows. Everything below the neck is lost in a scumbled darkness. My face is full of weary sadness, resigned but unconquered. In the finished portrait, I brought myself forward into a warm, invigorating light and accoutered himself in coat and tie. My head is cocked to the right, my gaze is even, sure, assessing. The sadness is still there, but so is a dignified humanity.
