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This is a list of professionally authenticated paintings, drawings, and sculptures by Thomas Eakins. As there is no catalogue raisonné of Eakins' works, this is an aggregation of existing published catalogs.
Contents
Background
During his lifetime, Thomas Eakins sold few paintings. On his death, ownership of his unsold works passed to his widow, Susan Macdowell Eakins, who kept them in their Philadelphia home. She dedicated the remaining years of her life to burnishing his legacy. In this, she was quite successful; in the period between Thomas Eakins' death and her own, she donated many of the strongest remaining pictures to museums around the world. The Philadelphia Museum of Art benefited particularly from these donations.
After Susan Macdowell Eakins' death in 1938, her executors emptied the house of anything which could be sold at auction. When former Eakins student Charles Bregler arrived at the house after it had been stripped he was horrified at what he found, describing it as the "most tragic and pitiful sight I ever saw. Every room was cluttered with debris as all the contents of the various drawers, closets etc were thrown upon the floor as they removed the furniture. All the life casts were smashed... I never want to see anything like this again." The number of works lost or destroyed at this time will never be known.
Bregler carefully collected what was left. Most of what remained were drawings and other preparatory studies. He was highly secretive about the contents of his collection and rarely allowed anyone to see it. After Bregler's death, ownership of the collection passed to his second wife, Mary Louise Picozzi Bregler, who was even more guarded as to its contents. In 1986, shortly before her death, Mary Bregler agreed to sell the works to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Historiography
In the early 1930s, Susan Macdowell Eakins invited art historian Lloyd Goodrich into her home. Goodrich inventoried the collection in the house, interviewed Eakins' surviving associates, and studied Eakins' personal notes. In 1933, Goodrich published Thomas Eakins: His Life and Works. Though it was incomplete, un-illustrated, and did not include Eakins' photographs, Goodrich's book was the first definitive study of Eakins and the first attempt to catalog his artistic output.
In the 1970s, Gordon Hendricks published two Eakins catalogs. The Photographs of Thomas Eakins (1972; ISBN 0-670-55261-5) is a fully illustrated catalog of photographs by Thomas Eakins and his associates. Because Eakins did not keep detailed records of his photographs, nor did he sign, title, or date them, many of the dates and photographers listed in the catalog are educated guesses on Hendricks' part. It is difficult to know who took a particular photograph because Eakins often had his students use it. Hence, the attribution on many of these photographs is "Circle of Eakins" to indicate that a photograph was taken either by Eakins or one of his associates. The Life and Work of Thomas Eakins (1974; ISBN 0-670-42795-0) included a checklist of Eakins' works, a number of which had not been included in the 1933 Goodrich catalog.
In the 1980s, Lloyd Goodrich returned to the subject of Thomas Eakins. He began writing a three-volume book, Thomas Eakins. The first two volumes, published in 1982, were biographic in nature. Goodrich was unable to complete the third volume, a Thomas Eakins catalogue raisonné, before he died in 1987. He donated his papers to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in the hopes that the curators there would finish the catalogue raisonné. This has not happened.
Until 1986, the Charles Bregler collection was effectively unknown to art historians. A few of the works in the Bregler collection were included in the 1933 Goodrich catalog, but after that they effectively disappeared from the scholarly community. A proper inventory became possible only after their 1986 sale to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1997, art historian Kathleen Foster published a definitive catalog of the Bregler collection, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered. (ISBN 0-300-06174-9)
List organization
Paintings, drawings, and sculptures are listed, where possible, by their Goodrich catalog number supplemented with modifications from Goodrich's notes for his never-completed Eakins catalogue raisonné. The Goodrich catalog can be subdivided into three parts:
Works in the Charles Bregler collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts are listed according to their number in Thomas Eakins Rediscovered.