Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins at the LACMA

Source: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Manly Pursuits will be organized chronologically, from the 1870s to 1899, and thematically by type of physical endeavor.

1870s: Rowing, Sailing, Hunting and Coaching
Eakins began his career by depicting one of the activities he had missed while a student in Paris: rowing. His native Philadelphia was instrumental in developing sculling into a modern competitive sport. Although sun and fresh air pervade these river scenes, Eakins recorded the races with the precision and mathematical interest of a scientist. On view with their related paintings will be the large-scale perspective drawings in which he calculated the position of boats, oars, waves and even reflections. Eakins also sailed and hunted and was skillful with a rifle. After he contracted malaria while hunting in one of the local marshes, he abandoned participating in the sport, and transferred his interest, instead, to painting it.

His most colorful and impressionistic scene, Fairman Rogers’ Four-in-Hand was the sole example Eakins devoted to the upper middle-class activity of coaching (the art of driving horse-drawn carriages). It also was perhaps his most controversial sporting canvas since in it he attempted to depict the movement of the horses and wheels with photographic accuracy—an impulse many critics found to be at odds with the art of painting.

1880s: Swimming and Photography
At the end of the nineteenth century, swimming was deemed one of the most democratic of sports, especially in the United States, where doctors encouraged urban dwellers to maintain a healthy body through exercise. Eakins devoted his sole sporting canvas of the 1880s to this subject. Swimming (1884-85) was also one of the major paintings in which he demonstrated his new interest in photography. On view will be photographs that helped Eakins compose the scene along with his scientific studies of human anatomy and posture and his experimental motion photographs.

1890s: Boxing and Wrestling
Eakins’s last sporting images feature boxers and wrestlers and showcase the new indoor spectator sports that attracted the attention of middle and working-class enthusiasts. These paintings, some of which rank among the artist’s largest canvases, are ironically among his least known endeavors in the sporting genre. Boxing and wrestling imagery was typically modest in scale and relegated to journalistic reports and advertising. But the substantial size of Eakins’s depictions elevated the sport to a new level of importance and its athletes to a new heroic stature. Remarkably, the three canvas versions of the Wrestlers paintings (two of which now belong to LACMA) have not been seen together since they left the artist’s studio over a century ago. The LACMA exhibition will historically reunite them. In addition, the wrestling paintings will be shown along with a group of related wrestling photographs that were recently discovered and have never before been exhibited.