Thursday, October 17, 2013

Following in the Wake of Oars and Paintbrush


Eakins took great pride in his city, the backdrop for most of his life and work. In a letter from Paris in 1866, shortly after he arrived to study, he wrote that he felt “6 feet and 6 inches high” whenever he told Frenchmen about Philadelphia. He added: “Many young men after living here a short time do not like America. I am sure they have not known as I have the many reasonable enjoyments to be had there, the skating, the boating on our river, the beautiful walks in every direction.”


Eakins made his rowing pictures in Philadelphia between 1871 and 1874, and although he produced fewer than a dozen oils and watercolors on the theme, they are among his most popular paintings. “The Pair-Oared Shell,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is the only one in this city. I’ve returned to see it dozens of times since my childhood, and it comes to mind whenever I’m paddling or rowing on any river, lake or ocean. The painting’s magnetic pull comes from its tangibly realistic rendering of two rowers in their shell passing under a bridge, bathed in early evening light.


What drew Eakins to this scene and to rowing pictures? For some answers, I hit the Eakins trail, choosing a sea kayak to navigate a stretch of river known even today for its world-class rowers. (This year alone, the city is host to 44 regattas.) It’s also possible to explore on foot and bicycle via the Schuylkill River Trail.


The logical starting place to take a stroke in Eakins’s waters is Boathouse Row, in Fairmount Park, the nerve center of rowing. It’s where Eakins, an amateur rower, would have put in. (His family’s home, with a fourth-floor studio where he did most of his painting, is on Mount Vernon Street, within walking distance; it’s now home to the city’s Mural Arts Program, but the friendly staff has been known to give informal tours.)


I wanted to follow suit. Lloyd Hall, at 1 Boathouse Row, is advertised as “Philadelphia’s only public boathouse.” But when I ambled up to the river’s edge one recent afternoon, I found a dock with no gangplank; although some public-school groups and rowing classes put in at Lloyd Hall, it’s not the city’s recommended access point for solo boaters.


Thwarted, I headed to the nearby Undine Barge Club. Frank Furness was a principal architect of this boathouse, as he was for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where Eakins taught and served as director. Outside, a young man was loading his 26-foot racing shell on top of his car as rush-hour traffic whizzed by. He was Charlie Biddle, 27, training for the United States national team, and after I shared my problem about where to put in — except for Lloyd Hall, the dozen or so boathouses on the Row are private — he invited me to kayak from the club on another day. Philadelphia, after all, is the city of brotherly love.


Eakins’s interest in painting rowing scenes may have emerged from his studies in Paris with Jean-Léon Gérôme, who painted oarsmen rowing on the Nile. The sport was also new in America, presenting a fresh subject for an artist eager to make his mark.


“He loved the subject of rowing,” said Kathleen Foster, senior curator of American art at the Philadelphia Museum. She added that Eakins also loved how rowing provided “beautiful bodies in the outdoors, and a huge opportunity for figure painting.”


To figure out how to render the long, slender racing shells in space, Eakins made the most detailed perspective drawings of his career.


“A boat is the hardest thing I know of to put into perspective,” Eakins told his art students. “It is so much like the human figure. There is something alive about it.”


Two large preparatory drawings for “The Pair-Oared Shell” (which can be viewed by appointment in the museum’s prints and drawings room) reveal how Eakins approached the shell — not just the rowers — as a portrait. One drawing positions the shell and oars on a checkerboard grid in relation to a pier from the Schuylkill’s Columbia Bridge. There’s even a shadow line on the bow of the boat that one scholar used to calculate the position of the sun and the time of day (around 7:20 p.m., in the early summer). The other drawing adds two rowers — and watercolor — in a mesmerizing study of how to render reflections in the ripples on the water.





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