ART/ARCHITECTURE; The Truth Is Out: How Realists Could Be So Realistic By RICHARD B. WOODWARD Published: Sunday, November 25, 2001 THOMAS EAKINS had a secret. For decades he engaged in a practice that many in late-19th-century Philadelphia would very likely have regarded as scandalous had they known. Not wanting to risk exposure, he kept quiet about it all his life. If any of his students or friends ever guessed -- and someone could easily have discovered him in the act -- they never talked either. His wife said in an interview that if he did it, he didn't enjoy it. I refer, of course, to the stunning discovery -- revealed for the first time at the current Eakins retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum Art -- that the artist hailed by an 1882 critic as ''the greatest draughtsman in America'' often relied on projected images to make paintings and watercolors during the 1870's and 80's. To be blunt: he traced from photographs. According to Darrell Sewell, the museum's chief curator of American painting and the show's organizer, ''This is big news.'' What was long suspected as a practice among realist artists of the time has finally been proven. Never before has a 19th-century painter -- and not just any painter -- been ''caught'' seeking such direct aid from the novel and then controversial 19th-century invention. Curators around the world must now re-examine all kinds of post-1839 work in the light of this new discovery. At the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where the exhibition travels next year, the process has already begun. As a special video about the revelation spells out, uncovering the truth was fortuitous. Eakins left a trail in the form of hundreds of photographs. By chance, these were saved by his wife and then by an acolyte. The museum's conservators, Mark Tucker and Nica Gutman, knew what to look for when they began to study the paintings. Using infrared reflectography, they detected odd preparatory drawings beneath layers of pigment and were able to match them to the photographic prints and glass plates owned by Eakins. In some cases, like ''Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River,'' from 1881, Eakins drew from a single photograph projected on the canvas. But more commonly, as in an earlier version of the same painting, or in ''Mending the Net,'' also from 1881, the composition was built up from a half-dozen or more separate photographs. Like a digital film director, he would set the scene by choosing one image as the establishing shot, for drawing in trees and various landscape features. Then, from other photographs he had taken, he would project the human or animal figures he wanted in the painting. The process involved planning and rigorous editing. A science-minded realist, Eakins never hid his appreciation for the new medium. He urged students to photograph one another nude for purposes of anatomical study and was an early champion of Eadweard Muybridge's attempts to capture motion with a camera. In 1878 he even a.

1. ART/ARCHITECTURE; The Truth Is Out: How Realists Could
Be So Realistic
By RICHARD B. WOODWARD
Published: Sunday, November 25, 2001
THOMAS EAKINS had a secret. For decades he engaged in a
practice that many in late-19th-century Philadelphia would very
likely have regarded as scandalous had they known. Not
wanting to risk exposure, he kept quiet about it all his life. If
any of his students or friends ever guessed -- and someone
could easily have discovered him in the act -- they never talked
either. His wife said in an interview that if he did it, he didn't
enjoy it.
I refer, of course, to the stunning discovery -- revealed for the
first time at the current Eakins retrospective at the Philadelphia
Museum Art -- that the artist hailed by an 1882 critic as ''the
greatest draughtsman in America'' often relied on projected
images to make paintings and watercolors during the 1870's and
80's. To be blunt: he traced from photographs.
According to Darrell Sewell, the museum's chief curator of
American painting and the show's organizer, ''This is big news.''
What was long suspected as a practice among realist artists of
the time has finally been proven. Never before has a 19th-
century painter -- and not just any painter -- been ''caught''
seeking such direct aid from the novel and then controversial
19th-century invention. Curators around the world must now re-
examine all kinds of post-1839 work in the light of this new
discovery. At the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where the exhibition
travels next year, the process has already begun.

2. As a special video about the revelation spells out, uncovering
the truth was fortuitous. Eakins left a trail in the form of
hundreds of photographs. By chance, these were saved by his
wife and then by an acolyte. The museum's conservators, Mark
Tucker and Nica Gutman, knew what to look for when they
began to study the paintings. Using infrared reflectography,
they detected odd preparatory drawings beneath layers of
pigment and were able to match them to the photographic prints
and glass plates owned by Eakins.
In some cases, like ''Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware
River,'' from 1881, Eakins drew from a single photograph
projected on the canvas. But more commonly, as in an earlier
version of the same painting, or in ''Mending the Net,'' also
from 1881, the composition was built up from a half-dozen or
more separate photographs. Like a digital film director, he
would set the scene by choosing one image as the establishing
shot, for drawing in trees and various landscape features. Then,
from other photographs he had taken, he would project the
human or animal figures he wanted in the painting.
The process involved planning and rigorous editing. A science-
minded realist, Eakins never hid his appreciation for the new
medium. He urged students to photograph one another nude for
purposes of anatomical study and was an early champion of
Eadweard Muybridge's attempts to capture motion with a
camera. In 1878 he even adapted Muybridge's animal
locomotion studies for use in a zoetrope, an ancestor of the
movie projector.
Eakins left no public record of his technique for tracing from
projected photographs, and for reasons still unknown, he seems
to have stopped the experiments around 1886, although
conservators haven't given up hope of finding other paintings
for which photographs served as a drawing tool.

3. More than 100 years later, the use of mechanical devices for
making art is no longer a big deal, as the Whitney Museum's
current exhibition ''Into the Light: The Projected Image in
American Art 1964-1977'' (through Jan. 6), raucously
illustrates. The installations by Andy Warhol and 18 of his
peers revel in the possibilities of film and video for reordering
spatial perception and narrative logic. This is machine-made art
without apologies; projectors hum or whirr in every room.
Eakins was too much the stern, embattled humanist to have been
amused by Warhol's often quoted wish to be a machine. But
given the new technological kinship between the two men, it's
instructive (and poignant) to consider that an aspect of his art
the older man felt he had to conceal should now be so freely
acknowledged and explored.
As the ranks of younger artists reliant on cameras and lenses for
their work swell by the week, academia and museums have kept
pace, offering intellectual context for them. The hottest, and
most contentious, topic in art history at the moment is the
longstanding but murky relationship between painting and
optics. And painting exhibitions all over the place now boast a
photographic element.
Last year, for example, ''The Artist and the Camera,'' at the
Dallas Museum of Art, assembled a group of 19th- and 20th-
century odd fellows. Featured were not only the photographic
efforts of Degas, Vuillard, Picasso and Brancusi, but also
examples by some whose dabbling has been less well-
documented, including Gauguin, Rodin, Munch and the formerly
obscure Franz von Stuck, a turn-of-the-century decadent from
Munich and, it seems, another painter who traced from
photographs.
Last spring the Metropolitan Museum presented, as an
instructional sidelight to ''Vermeer and the Delft School,'' a

4. room of optical devices from the 17th century, including a
camera obscura and a perspective box. (A much vaster array of
such hardware from many periods can be seen, through Feb. 3,
at the J. Paul Getty Museum in their show ''Devices of Wonder:
From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen.'')
For well over a century art historians have suspected that the
maniacal detail and harmonious spaces found in paintings by
Vermeer and his 17th-century colleagues depended on visual
aids like these at some stage of creation. The task has been
proving it.
Over the last several years the painter David Hockney has set
himself the task of doing just that. As an artist who knows a
difficult technical problem when he sees one, he is convinced
that few painters of note between about 1440 and 1860 -- Van
Eyck, Rubens, Caravaggio, Vermeer and Ingres, for starters --
could have achieved their startling realistic effects by, as Mr.
Hockney says, ''simply eyeballing it.'' He has concluded that
they must have (even if they wouldn't or neglected to admit it)
relied on visual technology -- lenses, mirrors, the camera
obscura, or the camera lucida, an apparatus that reflects an
object onto a surface so that it can be traced.
In his lectures, as well as in his new book, ''Secret Knowledge:
Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters,'' which
accompanies a BBC documentary on the topic, Mr. Hockney
pleads his case, with support from a University of Arizona
physicist, Charles Falco. Adoption of these optical devices in
European art, they claim, can be dated back as early as the
1420's, to Bruges, Belgium.
At ease with both camera and brush, Mr. Hockney has thought
hard about the advantages and shortcomings of each medium.
He believes the rapid spread of photography after 1839 led to
just as rapid a disillusionment with the ''optical look'' among

5. painters; and that Impressionism and the modernist movements
arose in its wake to disrupt photography's smooth hold on visual
power.
Whether he has sufficient evidence to back up his claims may
be decided at a conference on Saturday and next Sunday at the
Institute of the Humanities at New York University. A stellar
lineup -- the art historians Svetlana Alpers, Michael Fried,
Richard Wolheim, Linda Nochlin and Rosalind Krauss; the
critic Susan Sontag; the artists Chuck Close and Philip
Pearlstein; and the former Getty Museum director John Walsh --
will critique the theories, with Mr. Hockney and Mr. Falco there
to defend them.
Among the many problems the revisionists face is separating
guarded secrets from lost wisdom, lies from oversight. How
should missing information be explained? Was the use of lenses
by painters a monopolized prerogative of their guild,
accidentally forgotten after the guilds dissolved? Like a family
recipe, was the practice stored in memory and not on paper to
thwart theft by rivals? Or was this knowledge so taken for
granted that no one thought it worth mentioning?
Eakins is a case in point. Ms. Gutman from the Philadelphia
Museum will present a paper at the N.Y.U. conference on
Eakins's photographic tracing. Was there subterfuge or not? As
evidence of a cover-up about the practice, there is his silence.
He was a teacher, eager elsewhere in his professional life to
pass along technical know-how to students. There are the glass
plates exactly matching the paintings; and finally there are the
unbroken lines, which under infrared reflectography indicate
tracing rather than freehand drawing.
Then again, a fascinating advertisement for magic lanterns from
1875, unearthed by the dogged Eakins researcher W. Douglass
Paschall, suggests that photographic tracing from projected

6. images was common among painters and draftsmen. The item
reads: ''The artist, with a charcoal crayon, works on the side
from the lantern, and makes a careful tracing of every line and
feature in such a way as to best suit his purpose.''
Fears of new technology among critics and the public in the
making of art have abated only post-Warhol. As Ingres is
reported to have exclaimed, ''What a wonderful thing
photography is -- but one dares not say that aloud.'' Either way,
the case should buck up Mr. Hockney and his followers. If an
artist as exhaustively probed as Eakins could keep his optical
sleight-of-hand a secret until now, anyone could.
Photos: An uncanny resemblance that's no coincidence: ''Shad
Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River,'' above, an 1881
oil painting by Thomas Eakins; ''Shad Fishermen Setting the Net
at Gloucester, New Jersey,'' left, a photograph taken by Eakins
in 1881. (Ball State University Museum of Art, Muncie, Ind.
(above); Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (below)
Richard B. Woodward is editor-at-large for DoubleTake
magazine.