Introduction+to+Thomas+Eakins

According to Barbara Novak in __American Painting of the Nineteenth Century__, Thomas Eakins epitomized scientific realism and subscribed to a "mensurational, machine-connected aesthetic" that profoundly transformed American Gilded Age art. Novak numbers Eakins among the most influential luminists of his era because of his near obsessive attention to atmospherics (time and weather) within his compositions. Novak suggests that Eakins sought to emulate with watercolor the tone and definition of stop-motion photography and to literally freeze time and space through the mathematical dissection of of the sculler's stroke in his Boating series. Novak supports her thesis with the following perceptive analysis of the "Perspective Study for 'John Biglin in a Single Scull'":

//The empty foreground plane, the scull marking off a dominant horizontal (slightly angled into space in a typically luminist escapefrom rigidity), the jutting edge of an adjacent scull at the left, and the careful placement of the scull near the horizon all recall luminist parallellism.// (Novak, 162)

For Novak the "halt of time and motion" as captured by the "material densities" of water and air "fix[es] location in space more clearly." Novak considers Eakins an exemplar of the American attitude toward "fixed reality" that predominatd during the aegis of the industrial age-- an era whose most magical tool was the camera obscura. Eakins in fact participated in research at the University of Pennsylvania in 1884 that "resulted in the invention of a camera with two disks in front of the lens, one revolving eight times faster than the other." (a precursor, Novak notes, to the motion picture camera). Eakins, like many of his contemporaries, was "enchanted by the veracity of the camera" His Boating series aims at nothing less than a clinical verism that celebrates man's vaunted place in nature, his uncontested ascent to the apex of the Great Chain of Being. Nature cedes ground to the sculler who conquers distance over time. The role of the painter as this scene unfolds is not only to observe and document the ingress of three dimensional agency into two dimensional space, but also to participate in the evangelization of a scientific realism worthy of modernity. Eakins is the apostle of the American moment within the scientific revolution that captured the imagination of The Philadelphia Academy of Sciences to which Eakins aspired most of his life. He pined for a clinical detachment that his brush refused to fully grant. Eakins remained intimately connected to the reality that he portrayed even as in public life, he grew more alienated from the sensibilities of his contemporaries. He came to inhabit the hermetic "limbo of empty space around a figure" that became his signature contribution to American art