Article
Newsletter: Spring /Summer 1991
Eakins is arguably America's greatest painter and certainly, in the visual arts, its most profound and moving poet. The introspective, somewhat immobilized quality of so many of his sitters is akin in spirit to the characters of his great literary contempo rary Henry James. Eakins's portraits also present us with a particularly American condition and perspective: the encounter of innocence and optimism with complexities beyond the ken of a socially prescribed and confining life. They convey an indefinable but immediately felt personal dilemma, perhaps of inhibited and disappointed dreams.
The portrait, dated 1904, complements, in both gender and technique, another late portrait by Eakins of ca. 1904-05, A Singer (Portrait of Mrs. W H. Bowden), acquired by The Art Museum in 1986. The Portrait of Charles Percival Buck is thickly painted in broad swaths of the brush; Mrs. Bowden is possibly unfinished, but, whether finished or not, more tentative and suggestive in the use of pigment and the touch of the brush; the modeling, so solidly defined in Charles Percival Buck, is in Mrs. Bowden fragmented and often roughly laid in. However, the expressive power, the baleful isolation of the Bowden portrait, is no less present or affecting in the Portrait of Charles Percival Buck.
The portraits may reflect the complexities of the aging artist's own nature. Of these portraits Professor John Wilmerding comments: "Poignant beyond possibility, weighted with age both in the personal as well as period sense, the late portraits of Thomas Eakins are among the supreme works of his career." (Arts Magazine 53 [1979]: 108).
The portrait, dated 1904, complements, in both gender and technique, another late portrait by Eakins of ca. 1904-05, A Singer (Portrait of Mrs. W H. Bowden), acquired by The Art Museum in 1986. The Portrait of Charles Percival Buck is thickly painted in broad swaths of the brush; Mrs. Bowden is possibly unfinished, but, whether finished or not, more tentative and suggestive in the use of pigment and the touch of the brush; the modeling, so solidly defined in Charles Percival Buck, is in Mrs. Bowden fragmented and often roughly laid in. However, the expressive power, the baleful isolation of the Bowden portrait, is no less present or affecting in the Portrait of Charles Percival Buck.
The portraits may reflect the complexities of the aging artist's own nature. Of these portraits Professor John Wilmerding comments: "Poignant beyond possibility, weighted with age both in the personal as well as period sense, the late portraits of Thomas Eakins are among the supreme works of his career." (Arts Magazine 53 [1979]: 108).
