cover image THOMAS EAKINS

THOMAS EAKINS

, . . Yale Univ., $65 (488pp) ISBN 978-0-300-09111-3

Accompanying the first major retrospective in more than 20 years of a major American artist, this catalogue is simply ravishing. Eakins (1844–1916) produced some of the most hauntingly beautiful pastoral paintings and portraits of any era, in a manner related to but distinct from contemporaries J.M. Whistler and Winslow Homer. Sewell, Robert L. McNeil Jr. curator of American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (in Eakins's home city, whence the exhibit originates), divides Eakins's career into four distinct periods, bringing together compelling strands of Eakins scholarship, particularly on the systematic sets of photographs the artist took and from which he often worked, including Muybridgian motion studies. Seeing—and reading about—the transformation of enigmatic sepia-toned photographic nudes (often including the artist) into Eakins's art is little short of breathtaking. The "homotextuality" of many of them has been the subject of much recent critical inquiry, but the essays gathered by Sewell are assiduously noncommittal as to Eakins's sexual practice. There are more than 575 illustrations in all, 250 of which are in color and full-page. Fabulously printed, thoughtful and formally exhaustive, this will be the definitive Eakins catalogue for the foreseeable future. (Nov.)

Forecast:The exhibition which will be in Philadelphia from October through January, travels to Paris's Musée d'Orsay and the Met in New York over the next year; it should be a blockbuster that results in strong sales at the museum shops. Gift tables (especially gay and lesbian) and university libraries are also a lock—price will deter few, given the lavishness of the printing.