From Lesbos to New York

Curated by Camille O'Leary

The nude body has been used as the most direct way to teach anatomy and train artists since the Renaissance. Nudes were Thomas Eakins's discipline when he taught at the Pensylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and he used this painting, The Swimming Hole, to demonstrate his mastery of the subject. Six men pose, frozen, on an outcropping of rock, caught motionless in the act of bathing together. Eakins himself can be seen in the lower right, in the place where an artist might normally sign their name.

Unknown, Dying Gaul, 220-230 BCE

Eakins photographed and sketched the young men, his students, in preparation for this masterwork, but also drew poses from classical statuary like the Dying Gaul. Eakins transferred the classical subject of the nude to the contemporary outdoors, shedding clothing, shoes, and other marks of civilization. Unnatural lighting emphasizes the lines of their poses, which suggest a smooth arc of movement from reclining to standing to diving into the water. Their poses are idealized and beautiful, reminiscent of Greek nudes, and all six face away from the viewer, further obscuring their identities to focus attention on their bodies, including that magnificent butt.

Eakins himself was dismissed from the academy in 1886, two years later. The popular story says he was dismissed for removing the loincloth from a male model in front of women students. He was involved in many more incidents that strained the boundaries of Victorian propriety, such as "demonstrating" the movements of the pelvis to a female student, pressuring both male and female students to pose nude, and offering himself as a nude model. Rumors said that he participated in sodomy and bestiality; certainly, Eakins seemed to prefer his young protege Samuel Murray to his wife. His voyeuristic tendencies were scandalous under the tight guidelines of Victorian society, and still highly questionable today, but his fascination with the nude meant that he pioneered techniques in the new field of motion photography, capturing the human body in action more precisely than ever before.