Miss Amelia Van Buren - Composition

Composition

Van Buren's seated figure creates a pyramidal composition, activated by the movement of her head, arms, and torso. Her body is illuminated and given sculptural form by a strong shaft of light coming from the left. Her face is thin and serious, her graying hair pulled back, as she supports her head with her left hand, her right hand counterpoised in her lap, holding a fan. For Eakins's biographer John Wilmerding, the contrast between the arms is noteworthy: one arm is solid and "architectural...suggestive of an unspoken potential for great vitality", and "the anchor of the portrait" that belies the otherwise reflective countenance; the other hand is shadowed and limp. She sits in a Jacobean-revival chair, a prop that Eakins often used for his studio portraits. It is selectively detailed, so as to support without distracting from Van Buren's figure. Van Buren's dress contains complex passages, composed in part of broad, brilliant pink forms, and of creased light-colored fabric with floral patterns.

Her body twists "like an overused spring", culminating in the focal point of her head, its anatomical structure exactingly rendered, the broad forehead suggesting the sitter's intellectual presence. She exhibits what one reviewer had already referred to as "an Eakinsish expression", characteristic of his ability to portray "mere thinking without the aid of gesture or attitude." In a letter from his youth, Eakins explained his interest in the:

"higher class the thinking people and feeling ones who always want to see everything to know more".

Van Buren was often unwell, and was diagnosed as having neurasthenia; in 1886 she wrote to Eakins's wife Susan: "I have at last discovered that the trouble with me is in my head it is exhausted by worry or something or other..." The portrait seems to indicate as much. Touching on the picture's melancholy, John Updike referred to the painting when he wrote "Discomfort and a grieving inwardness distinguish the best of his (Eakins's) many portraits." The sense of weariness has been interpreted also as a projection of Eakins's personality, especially in the wake of his professional difficulties. As a psychological study, it has been noted that such a profound rendering of a former student is unusual, and that the painting may be seen as a sort of self-portrait.