The Painting
Eakins returned to Philadelphia in July 1870, following four years of study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was a witness to Schmitt's victory in October. The painting's composition echoes the event by reproducing the weather conditions and position of the sun at the date and time of Schmitt's triumph. Rather than in the midst of the competition, Schmitt is depicted nearly at rest – dragging his oars with the disappearing eddies of his course visible in the water. The location is just downstream of the Columbia Railroad Bridge, the site of the turn in the race.
Eakins, who was also a keen oarsman, painted himself as the rower in the middle distance. He signed the painting – "Eakins, 1871" – on the stern of his scull. This was the first of his almost thirty rowing works – sketches, oil paintings, watercolors, perspective drawings – created by the end of 1874.
The painting shows the influences of his tutors in France, Jean-Léon Gérôme and Léon Bonnat, and of Diego Velázquez, the Spanish artist.
Read more about this topic: Max Schmitt In A Single Scull
Famous quotes containing the word painting:
“A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)