It was 136 years ago, in 1874, that Thomas Eakins completed his series of five paintings and numerous sketches and studies of rowing and sculling on the Schuylkill River.
While his world-wide reputation as one of America's greatest painters is based primarily on his incisive and revealing portraits of upper middle class Philadelphians and on two monumental medical paintings, The Gross Clinic and The Agnew Clinic, to oarsmen and all admirers of the placid beauty of the Schuylkill as it winds through Fairmount Park, it is the rowing pictures that are the most appealing.
Eakins himself was a superb oarsman. In fact, at one time he was urged to become a professional oarsman. (In the late nineteenth century there was considerable betting on races on the river and strong oarsmen were much in demand.) Eakins declined the offer and instead concentrated on painting.
