Thomas Eakins employed photography as a way to imbue his paintings with increased naturalism. He used his students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as models and began to compile a photographic catalogue that would aid his studies of the human form. This image is a study of pose and gesture in which the stance of the models consciously echoes that of the figures in Eakins' sculpted relief Arcadia (1883) seen resting on a worktable.

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