Life and Death Struggle

Of all the “villains” in art history, Thomas Anshutz’s name rings with especially sinister tone for me for his betrayal of his mentor, Thomas Eakins. Born October 5, 1851, Anshutz helped orchestrate the 1886 dismissal of Eakins from his teaching position at the PAFA by handing over to school authorities nude photographs Anshutz had helped Eakins take. (Sidney Kirkpatrick’s The Revenge of Thomas Eakins argues the case against Anshutz in full.) In the undated charcoal drawing Two Male Figures Wrestling (above), Anshutz puts into practice the long hours he spent studying the male nude beside Eakins. In some ways it also illustrates the struggle between the two artists for supremacy. Anshutz stepped into Eakins position shortly after the dismissal and became one of the most accomplished teachers of the period, counting artists such as Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, Charles Demuth, John Marin, and Charles Sheeler among his long list of students. Anshutz even eventually assumed the role of director of the PAFA as the disgraced Eakins left teaching entirely and languished in relative obscurity until his death. Eakins never spoke to Anshutz after his dismissal, perhaps knowing who and how he was betrayed but taking that secret to the grave rather than attack perhaps his finest student and harm his young family.

You can never argue with Anshutz’s talent. In a series of bravura portraits of young women in fancy dress, including A Rose (above, from 1907), Anshutz combined the technique he learned from Eakins with the softer, prettified style of John Singer Sargent that sold well at the time. In the expression of the young woman, looking pensively off into the distance, you can see an echo of the typical Eakins-esque psychological touch found so often in his portraits. That deep “mind-reading” often marred portraits for the sitters, but Anshutz avoids Eakins’ marketing error in rendering the fabric of the dress beautifully while keeping the woman’s eyes just intelligent enough to flatter but not enough to distract. In such pretty portraits Anshutz betrays much of Eakins’ philosophy, going for the easier, more marketable picture than something deeper. Perhaps Anshutz didn’t share Eakins’ intellectual depth, or maybe he was jealous that he could never match it.

I found myself recently flipping through a book on the Reconstruction period in America and found myself stunned by seeing the name "Anshutz" beside a work titled The Way They Live (above, from 1879) depicting the hard life of African-American sharecroppers after the abolition of slavery. Anshutz’s most famous work, 1880’s The Ironworkers’ Noontime, shows white American factory workers on break from their labors. Anshutz painted both works while still under Eakins’ wing, apparently trying to find the same socially relevant subjects that Eakins found in the worlds of sports and science. Looking at The Way They Live made me wonder at what could have been for Anshutz and Eakins if their relationship had played out differently. For most art history people, Anshutz remains a one-hit wonder for The Ironworkers’ Noontime notable for his instruction of a whole generation of American artists. For me, however, Anshutz remains an enigma—the greatest student of one of America’s greatest artists who put his career before his art and before the bond of friendship between himself and his mentor.

Lost at Sea

"To paint the sea, you must love it,” Frederick Judd Waugh once said, “and to love it, you must know the sea." Born September 13, 1861, Waugh traveled throughout his life in search of the sea, growing intimate enough with the tides to paint such beautiful marine scenes as Breakers at Floodtide (above, from 1909). Although he studied at the PAFA under both Thomas Eakins and Thomas Anshutz, Waugh never found his footing in painting the figure as successfully as his teachers. Instead, Waugh’s best work looks like an Eakins depopulated, in the very best way. Genre paintings such as Chess Players (1891) and Family Resting Under a Tree (1889) show an awkwardness with the figure that totally disappears when Waugh gets flowing before a seascape. After studying in Philadelphia and Paris, Waugh resided on the Island of Sark off the French coast for two years and in St. Ives, Cornwall, for twelve years before moving back to the United States to live on the New England coast for the rest of his life. With the exception perhaps of Winslow Homer, no other American artist of that period studied the sea as closely and painted it as brilliantly as Waugh.

Waugh painted Southwesterly Gale, St. Ives (above, from 1907) while still living in Cornwall. It’s fascinating how he brought the classic Eakins-like fidelity to detail to the seascape, capturing all the atmospheric and light effects faithfully. Comparing a Waugh seascape to a work by J.M.W. Turner, the pre-eminent British painter of the sea, you find a lack of imagination in Waugh’s work. Turner’s one of the great visionaries in all of art, so such a comparison on those grounds is unfair, but Waugh brings a totally different perspective to the seascape that’s more analytical than Romantic. Countless hours of observation made Waugh into a scientist of the sea, yet he never lost that human connection to the subject.

As the Age of Illustration captured the American imagination around the turn of the century thanks to Howard Pyle and his students such as N.C. Wyeth, Waugh attempted paintings of narrative subjects such as his The Knight of the Holy Grail (above, from 1912). The awkwardness of his early figure paintings lessens in these later works, but despite his mature style you clearly see that his heart isn’t in it. The knight and the angelic figures dominate the foreground, but the real star of this show is the landscape behind them. You almost wish they would get out of the way. I’ve always found Eakins’ students fascinating in the sense of how they so often took paths so divergent from his. While Eakins found the human form and human psychology so compelling a subject to paint, Waugh, his student, tried his best to follow that path but always found himself turning away, lured by the siren song of the sea.

Lifting Spirits

"Paint what you feel. Paint what you see. Paint what is real to you." Robert Henri’s words, as recorded by former student Margery Ryerson and published in The Art Spirit, continue to inspire art students and professional artists even today. When I interviewed Karl J. Kuerner, he quoted Henri more than his famous neighbor, Andrew Wyeth. Born June 24, 1865, Henri learned the classic realist technique at the PAFA and then Impressionism in Paris. By 1895, however, he disowned Impressionism in search of a style that spoke to him, arriving finally at a brand of romantic realism that became disparagingly and inaccurately known as the Ashcan School. Just one look at Henri’s Salome (above, from 1909), which shows a contemporary dancer in costume for the stage role, and you can see that Henri’s work was anything but down and dirty. Although some of his protégés—William Glackens, George Luks, and John Sloan—got gritty at times, Henri’s work exemplifies the elegance of a refined man with a common touch, who could find beauty in both Old Masters and young children playing in the street.

At the PAFA, Henri studied under Thomas Anshutz, the former assistant and (as we now know today) betrayer of Thomas Eakins. That connection gives Henri’s admiration for Eakins a whole new dimension. Eakins’ “iron will and his will to paint and to carry out his life as he thought it should go,” Henri wrote, “cost him heavily, but in his works we have the precious result of his independence, his generous heart and his big mind.” “’Integrity’ is the word which seems best to fit him,” Henri says of Eakins, adding that he considered Eakins “the greatest portrait painter America has produced.” In Henri’s portraits we see a similar integrity, yet with a freer style vastly different than that of Eakins. In The Irish Boy in Blue Denim (aka, Anthony Lavelle) (above, from 1927), Henri captures the innocence and freshness of the boy’s face, but in a style that not only harks back to his Impressionist days, but also seems influenced by all the other European modernist movements swirling around him. Henri always remained true to himself, but never failed to keep his eyes and his mind open to new experiences.

Henri the never-ending student made for one of the greatest art teachers in American art history. William Merritt Chase and Henri waged an unofficial “war” for the minds and hearts of American art students at the beginning of the twentieth century. It’s hard to declare a winner, but the track record of Henri’s greatest students—Glackens, Luks, Sloan, George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, and Stuart Davis, among others—speaks for itself. Henri’s painting The Art Student (above, from 1906), a portrait of Josephine Nivison, the future Mrs. Edward Hopper, shows the affection Henri had for all his students, to whom he taught the ways of life as much as the ways of art. "Art cannot be separated from life,” Henri told them. “It is the expression of the greatest need of which life is capable, and we value art not because of the skilled product, but because of its revelation of a life's experience." Such sentiments ensure that Henri’s spirit will continue to live on in the hearts of artists and art lovers.

The Student Becomes the Teacher

In works such as The Ironworker’s Noontime (above), Thomas Pollock Anshutz exemplifies the realist side of the Ashcan School that recognized the urban existence of the early twentieth century as the new grand subject for American art. Born October 5, 1851, Anshutz attended the PAFA as a student from 1875 through 1881 under the tutelage of Thomas Eakins. After graduating, Anshutz became Eakins’ designated assistant and chief photographer, remaining with the PAFA in some capacity for the most part until his death in 1912. Students such as Maxfield Parrish and Charles Demuth recall Anshutz as a gifted and giving teacher, supportive even when they took their art in directions other than his own brand of realism. Not until 1985 did scholars discover the dark side of Anshutz and his involvement in the conspiracy to oust Eakins, his friend and mentor, from teaching at the PAFA, the scandal that began Eakins’ sad marginalization from the American art world.

Anshutz learned well from Eakins. In works such as A Rose (above, from 1906), Anshutz shows not only the technique of Eakins but also some of the gift for bold color of John Singer Sargent. Rebecca Whelen, the woman in A Rose, was the daughter of one of the trustees of the PAFA while Anshutz taught there. Anshutz’s artistic output is relatively small, due in part to his commitment to teaching. In such works as A Rose, his photographic realism reflects his interest in photography, which Eakins encouraged and developed in making Anshutz his chief photographer in his many photographic experiements of nude bodies in motion. Maxfield Parrish’s use of photographs in his works resulted from Anshutz’s teachings.

As a devotee of Eakins, I cringe at the sight of Anshutz’s Self Portrait of 1909 (above), showing the painter as respectable teacher and painter, comfortable in his position in society, a position he helped deny to Eakins. Sidney Kirkpatrick in The Revenge of Thomas Eakins sees Anshutz as “the prime mover of this conspiracy” to remove Eakins from his teaching position at the PAFA after the episode involving a nude model. Anshutz himself took many of the nude photos that incriminated Eakins before the trustees of the PAFA and the court of public opinion, yet he led the secret movement within the PAFA to take Eakins' teaching position away. With Eakins gone, Anshutz easily slid into his open slot. Anshutz went on to teach many years and earn a minor place in American art history. Eakins taught sporadically after his expulsion before ending his teaching days completely after another sexually charged scandal involving his niece. Today, Eakins has his revenge in his towering reputation in relation to that of Anshutz, but that seems cold comfort today.