I would have them taught facts and things, rather than words and signs.
—Stephen Girard, 1831

My honors are misunderstanding, persecution & neglect, enhanced because unsought.
—Thomas Eakins, 1894

At first blush, the realism of Thomas Eakins seems an unpromising method for probing psychology. His method was an empiricism of almost clinical ruthlessness, grounded in anatomical study, dissection, and the photographic investigation of posture and movement. He did not banter charmingly with his sitters in order to coax lively expressions from them, as Sargent did, preferring to work in silence and look for those truths that cannot be pried out by conversation. It is difficult to imagine an artistic method more likely to drain a painting of all content beyond the purely physical and mechanical. And yet Eakins, surely America’s most prosaic painter of facts and appearances, is also our most deeply psychological.

Eakins’s work falls into two categories. On the one hand, there are his portraits, which feature the pensive and introspective poses that showed his solid, nearly sculptural modeling to best advantage. On the other hand, there are the genre paintings, which are more than mere scenes of everyday life: they depict particularly intense physical effort or mental concentration (or both). In a sense, these too are portraits, invariably built around strong character studies, and it might be more fitting to divide Eakins’s work into portraits of thought and portraits of action. At any rate, the human form—solid, corporeal, elastic—is at the