Cosmopolitan and Candid Stories, 1877–1915

Thomas Eakins (American, 1844–1916)
Swimming, 1885
Oil on canvas; 27 3/8 x 36 3/8 in. (69.5 x 92.4 cm)
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, Purchased by the Friends of Art, Fort Worth Art Association, 1925; acquired by the Amon Carter Museum, 1990, from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth through grants and donations from the Amon G. Carter Foundation, the Sid W. Richardson Foundation, the Anne Burnett and Charles Tandy Foundation, Capital Cities/ABC Foundation, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The R. D. and Joan Dale Hubbard Foundation, and the people of Fort Worth (1990.19.1)

Eakins shows five of his Pennsylvania Academy students at Dove Lake in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. He himself is at the lower right, swimming after his setter, Harry, toward an old stone foundation around which the sequence of action and repose unfolds. The painting's stylistic references are obvious, including stock academic poses that Eakins learned in Paris and taught at the Academy and Eadweard Muybridge's contemporaneous experiments in motion photography. Reflecting Eakins's extreme reticence as a storyteller, the narrative is more elusive. Swimming may recount a break from studio work on a hot afternoon by men who—under Eakins's tutelage—customarily studied naked bodies, including one another's, and may translate into mundane terms the Arcadian themes that preoccupied Eakins in the 1880s. It may also encode aspects of Eakins's sexuality.