Hello, all of Mme. Guillotine’s readers! I am your guest hostess for today, Miss Liza, and I am here to take you on a little trip across the pond to 19th century Philadelphia. We’re going to look at some portraits of American artists’ wives, and talk a bit about how different artists used their lovely partners-in-crime to express their artistic vision.
The main focus of this is going to be Thomas Eakins’ portrait of his wife, Susan Macdowell, and his dog, Harry. The painting itself is visually interesting and intellectually stimulating; however, the time we spent looking at it greatly outstrips the amount of time spent on this painting in the academic literature. For all its incongruities, Eakins’ The Artist’s Wife and Setter Dog is generally relegated to a brief passing mention before the text moves on to other works or aspects of Eakins’ life. The only serious treatment of the painting is in the catalogue for an exhibition of Eakins’ work at the National Portrait Gallery from 1993, and even then it gets one meager page and a few sidelong mentions.
It is important to have a grasp on Susan Macdowell before attempting to understand the portrait of her. Susan Macdowell was born in 1851, to a successful engraver who encouraged her and her sisters in their artistic pursuits. At twenty-five she became a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she met Thomas Eakins. Though she won several prizes while she was a student, after she married Eakins in 1884 she set her own work on the back burner in order to support her husband’s career. That doesn’t mean that she in fact ceased painting all together, but that her own career was less important than Thomas’s. She had a space in Eakins’ home studio, where she continued to paint throughout their marriage while also assisting him in his work.
After Eakins’ death in 1916, she engineered a number of shows of his work and the sale of many of his paintings, because he did not leave her enough of an estate to exist comfortably on. One of the canvasses she parted with was The Artist’s Wife and Setter Dog, which in 1923 was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Macdowell’ first one-woman show as at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1973, thirty-five years after her death in 1938. Since then, however, her reputation as an artist has largely been hidden in the shadows of her husbands’, though Charles Bregler, a friend of the couple, declared that she “would have been a great painter if she hadn’t married.”
Thomas Eakins began his portrait of Susan Macdowell after their marriage in 1884. The setting for the painting is in Eakins’ studio, which can be deduced from the array of his work on the walls behind Macdowell and Harry. Macdowell is seated on a chair in the center of the canvas with a book on her lap and Eakins’ dog Harry lying at her feet. She wears a sky blue empire-waist dress, possibly made of silk, which looks like it is from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, and red socks- neither of which was remotely related to the fashion of the time period. She is also clearly not wearing a corset under the dress, because she is slouched at the waist and hunched at the shoulders in a manner that fashionable garments prohibited. The book on her lap is one of Japanese prints. Her other hand rests palm up, with the fingers curled in. In relation to the studio and to the dog, Macdowell seems petite and almost frail. Her complexion is approaching sickly, and the way Eakins painted her features makes her seem exhausted or ill. When compared to photographs of Macdowell from around the same time, the painted figure is emaciated and frail- the photographs of her in a white laced dress (also a studio costume) show a robust, healthy figure.
What is most important to note, however, is the gaze with which Eakins painted his wife. Unlike most other portraits of women from the time, Susan Macdowell looks directly out from the canvas at the viewer. Her expression isn’t vague or dreamy, and nor is she looking into the middle distance past the viewer of the canvas. She is interacting with the audience. The first member of the audience was, of course, her husband, and it is interesting to note that the second owner of the painting was not Macdowell herself but her father. She only became the official owner of the portrait after the men in her life died. Both the provenance and the issue of the gaze and audience will be discussed in more detail later in the paper.
The other portrait that will be used to show how Eakins’ portrait of Susan Macdowell and Harry will be Edwin Blashfield’s Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield, from 1889. This painting is much more in line with the sort of aesthetic, decorative portrait of a lady that one generally expects from this time period. Edwin Blashfield was an academic painter and muralist who exhibited this portrait of his wife in the Paris International Exposition of 1889 and won a bronze medal for it. Formally it makes a good comparison to Eakins’ portrait because both women are shown seated in an interior, surrounded by aesthetic objects and where they almost become one of the lovely objects themselves.
It should be immediately obvious, however, that there are a number of very important differences. Again, the issue of the gaze arises; where Macdowell looks back at the viewer, Blashfield painted his wife looking off into the distance past the right edge of the picture plane. She holds a fan, like van Buren, but her fan is open across her lap. The interior she is sitting in his a very stylishly aesthetic setting which doesn’t hold any references to Blashfield’s artistic production and certainly doesn’t look like the interior of a painter’s studio. Evangeline Blashfield’s features and figure are idealized and graceful, unlike Macdowell’ emaciated figure and tired face.
Certain subtle elements of the painting are directly related to Evangeline Blashfield and her family, but they are subsumed by the overall aesthetic qualities of the piece as a work of art. There is no indication of her work as an author or philanthropist in the portrait. Blashfield’s gown is a variation on contemporary fashion related to the health reform movement, which her mother was involved in. The decorative elements in the furniture refer loosely to her father’s work as an Egyptologist instead of her husband’s artistic career and style.
I keep bringing up the issue of Susan Macdowell Eakin’s gaze in The Artist’s Wife and Setter Dog for several reasons. The first and most immediately obvious in relation to the other works is that formally, the composition works differently when the subject looks out at the viewer directly. Susan Macdowell is not looking down or to the side, she is viewing the viewer. The second and third issues are built from this: the second, who is she looking at and the third, who is looking at her. The simplistic answer to both of these is you or the audience, but these are both loaded. The questions of who is looking and who is being looked at are important ones because they can reveal the artist’s intent as well as broader social contexts. For this paper however I am less interested in greater social contexts and am primarily looking at how this painting of Eakins’ and his possible intents varied from those of other artists and other paintings.
That Eakins’ painting was intended for a different audience than Blashfield’s is clear from its display history; Eakins did not submit it to the Paris International Exposition of 1889, for one, and it was owned not by a museum or society family where it would be seen by large numbers of people, but by Susan Macdowell’ father. The fact that Eakins reworked the painting two years after he started, and made his wife look worse, is also indicative that this was not a painting he intended for public consumption (though it is interesting that he gave such an unflattering portrait to Macdowell). Eakins also likely intended this for an audience who was previously familiar with his work. The studio behind Macdowell is decorated with the products of his artistic labors, including another painting that his wife may have modeled for and the Arcadia reliefs, which she certainly did. What is clearly absent from the studio setting, however, are signs of Macdowell’ personal artistic output, though it is documented that she did continue to paint for herself after marrying. The studio is full of Eakins’ prized objects.
These prized objects include Harry, his setter (instantly recognizable from other paintings Eakins did), and his wife. There, I think, lies the root of the issue. Unlike his portraits of other women (other women who he did not possess, other men’s wives and daughters), Eakins had a claim over Susan Macdowell that made it possible for him to objectify her in a way that he couldn’t with other women. Now that isn’t to say that there isn’t a degree of objectification happening in his portrait of Amelia van Buren- I would argue that there’s just as much there as there is in The Artist’s Wife- but it is a different kind of objectification. Amelia van Buren looks away, is wearing fashionable clothes, holds a decorative object rather than a book, and is shown in a vague setting. She is more traditionally objectified. Susan Macdowell, on the other hand, is objectified according to Thomas Eakins’ artistic sensibilities, as part of his artistic production and his setting. He is able to project his ideas onto her because she is his as much as Harry or the Arcadia relief. This suggests to me that Eakins intended this painting to be more personal, and that the presumed viewer for the painting was first and foremost himself. The way Macdowell was painted looking back may have reinforced for him the interaction between them as a married couple, as artistic colleagues, and as artist and his subject.
Edwin Blashfield’s painting, in direct contrast, conforms to a degree of aesthetic finish, loveliness, and predictable objectification that Eakins’ portraits, even of women he was not married to, never seem to have. Eakins patently refused to sentimentalize or idealize his female subjects in a way that would be easily understood by the general public. This can be seen in both of his paintings discussed here. Blashfield’s portrait of his prettily dressed wife is soft, elegant and non-confrontational. She is presented to a broad audience that would have no trouble accepting this image of a woman without an explanation of the artist’s personal principles. She is presented as an aesthetic object. And though like the painting of Susan Macdowell, the portrait of Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield lacks overt references to her work, it also lacks overt references to his. His identity as a man, a husband, and an artist was less important to the painting’s success than the formal qualities- at the Exposition, it was titled simply, Portrait, not Portrait of the Artist’s Wife or Portrait of Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield.
The final question of just who, exactly, is Susan Macdowell looking at may be the hardest to answer. If I am correct in surmising that the primary viewer of the painting was supposed to be Thomas Eakins himself, and that she was supposed to be read in this painting as one of the objects in his studio, then her gaze is directed at her husband, as an interaction between them as a couple or as previously said, artists, or as the subject of the artist’s work. However, reading her as an active viewer herself when I have said she was objectified is complicated. If she is read as an object in the painting, how can she have the agency to interact with the viewer? I would propose that this picture of her is in fact more layered than it first appears. Susan Macdowell is the canvas, the object, and the subject of this painting.
Macdowell functions as the canvas for Thomas Eakins in that her position as his wife gives him the authority to project his own artistic principles onto her. In the academic tradition of the female body as a tabula rasa for the male artist, Eakins takes his wife’s image as a starting point to reinforce his own style, ideas, and vision. She appears in two, possibly three places in the painting: as the central figure, in the Arcadia panel behind her, and possibly in Retrospection. This leads directly to her position as the primary object of the painting. Her training and successes as an artist are completely absent from the picture. She is an object that Eakins could repeatedly use in his work. She is as positioned in his space as the rug on the floor and the paintings on the wall. Even her costume, and it is a costume, is an element of his work. Were it not for her portrait and the title of the painting, she may as well have been a dressed up lay figure. It is her personal appearance and the title of the work that bring the third layer, the subjectivity, to the work.
Susan Macdowell’ subjectivity in this painting is derived from three things: the way she is named in the title (to a lesser degree), her face, and her gaze. The fact that she is not directly named as Susan Macdowell does slightly detract from this, though unlike the Blashfield portrait, where its original display title the woman was given no identity at all, the title of Eakins’ work confers some degree of individuality. Her face is the next part: though the portrait Thomas Eakins painted of his wife was by no means flattering, it is undeniably Susan Macdowell Eakin’s face that graces the canvas. Her individual appearance was not reduced or idealized to conform to an abstract, impersonal, impossible canon. When Eakins reworked the canvas in response to a period of stress, he painted her features to reflect the actual conditions of their lives. And it is this last note- their lives- that adds the final layer to her subjectivity. Macdowell’ gaze out at her husband as he painted reinforces her position as his wife, someone with whom he interacted on a daily basis, who was considered his helpmate and partner. The title of the painting, The Artist’s Wife, leads me to believe that Eakins intended this direct connection between Susan and Thomas, made permanent on canvas, to be a reflection of their relationship as husband and wife first and foremost.
I think it’s important to make a point of noting what Susan Macdowell did with this painting after she inherited it from her husband (who himself inherited it from her father). She sold it. It was included in the large retrospective exhibition of Eakins’ work at the Met in 1917 and then in 1923, it was purchased by the Fletcher Fund of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Why do I think this is so important? Really, I think it’s relevant because if she was as emotionally attached to this portrait as I imagine Eakins himself and her father were I think she would have held onto it out of the collection she took control of after Eakins’ death. In one letter, Macdowell expressed her sadness about having to sell another one of her husband’s paintings because he hadn’t left her a comfortable estate to exist on; no mention was made of distress at having to sell a portrait of herself. This leads me to believe that the painting was more important to Eakins as an expression of his artistry than to her as a commemoration of their relationship.
SO YEAH :D
Oh hurray, finally some real art history on my blog! Thanks so much Liza (@madmissliza on Twitter and definitely worth a follow). I’d never encountered Eakins before and am now keen to find more of his work. The Blashfield portrait is exceptional and on a par with Sargent at his most luxe.
