Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) was at once the most powerful and the most problematic American painter of his generation. In his lifetime he was also one of the most isolated. Outside a small circle of friends, family, students, and acolytes in the Philadelphia of his day, his art seems not to have elicited a very wide response. Historians have tended—a little too eagerly perhaps—to attribute this public resistance to Eakins’s art to the genteel taste of the day, a taste that Eakins famously opposed. Yet I wonder if the spell cast by the genteel tradition entirely accounts for Eakins’s failure to win a public for his art in his lifetime. For even today, when he is everywhere acclaimed as an American classic and generally thought to be the greatest American painter to emerge from the nineteenth century, his art remains curiously isolated.

No American painter in this century has found anything in it to build upon and develop. Realists like Henri and the painters of the Ashcan school paid it reverent lip service, but in practice they much preferred the kind of sparkling painterly virtuosity that Eakins scorned. In our day Eakins’s putative heirs have strayed still further from the master’s course, honoring him with their words but betraying him by their deeds. Andrew Wyeth, for example, has succeeded only in softening and sentimentalizing one aspect of the Eakins inheritance, while Raphael Soyer has reduced another aspect of this tough-minded art to the sheerest schmaltz. Even the revival of