The Artist's Wife and His Setter Dog
Thomas Eakins American
Eakins began this portrait shortly after his marriage to his former student, Susan Hannah Macdowell (1851–1938), a talented painter and photographer. The setting is his Philadelphia studio, where the couple—and their dog, Harry—lived from 1884 to 1886. A photogravure of the painting from 1886 reveals a more robust woman, suggesting that Eakins reworked the portrait. The alterations may have reflected Eakins’s anguish over his controversial dismissal from teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, partly for removing the loincloth from a male model in a mixed-gender class.
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