Description:

Walt Whitman
1887
Thomas Eakins
When the Philadelphia painter Thomas Eakins met the poet Walt Whitman in 1887 (the poet was then residing in Camden, New Jersey, across the Delaware River), the two artists felt a kinship, and one result was this portrait. Eakins was the greatest American portrait painter of the later nineteenth century, and virtually the only major painter of the age, in America or Europe, to devote himself primarily to portraiture. Independently wealthy, Eakins reversed the usual patronage system and approached various Philadelphians to ask if they might sit for him. Many of his subjects were active professionals: by 1886 he had painted rowers, hunters, baseball players, musicians, singers, and surgeons. He usually offered the finished portrait to the sitter, who was often enough appalled at the result. Eakins`s portraits have an overtone of brooding solemnity and the faces of his subjects often seem burdened, strained, anxious. The overhauling energies of modern life combat their flesh. According to critic Elizabeth Johns, Eakins was portraying these active citizens as modern heroes (Thomas Eakins 3-5, 144-169).

Whitman was sixty-eight when he sat for this portrait and Eakins does not try to hide any of the years. Whitman`s complexion is ruddy but roughly sculpted; his eyes are dim and unfocused; his signature beard is looking a little dusty. If this is the poet-Santa Claus of legend, then it must be the morning of December 26. Whitman himself commented, "The Eakins picture is severe-keeps close to nature-slurs nothing-faces the worst as well as the best" (qtd. in Gopnik). Whitman`s approval suggests the close ties he shared with the painter in subject and method. Both were frank chroniclers of the modern people and things. Both wanted to portray the body openly and suffered criticism and rejection for their physical honesty.

Critic Adam Gopnik offers the following comparison between Eakins and Whitman:

If there is a lasting truth that Eakins` intense friendship with Whitman gives rise to, perhaps it has less to do with sexual politics than with the oscillating moods of American empiricism. Why does the passionate faith in things for their own sake, which is so ecstatic in Whitman ("Happiness not in another place, but this place . . . not for another hour, but this hour"), turn so sad in Eakins? Eakins believed in the here and now, but he didn`t get the happiness. Those endless lists of things in Whitman feel cheering, while the inventories of things in Eakins` paintings make us feel blue. Perhaps it is because, in writing, the nouns invest things with a human confidence-just by being named these things become part of our invented world and put under our power. Things painted for their own sake pass out of our control, back into a world of mute out-thereness.

Click here for Whitman`s famous catalog in Paragraph 15 of "Song of Myself"(1881 version).