Art

Masterpieces find a new home: Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Philadelphia Museum of Art welcomes two masterpieces by two of nineteenth century America’s finest artists, Thomas Eakins and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Born in Philadelphia, Eakins was described by his friend Walt Whitman (yep, THAT Walt Whitman) as not so much a painter as a ‘”force.” Most critics agree he is one of America’s few indisputably great painters.

Sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens has been described as the “American Michelangelo”. Born in Ireland but moved with his family to New York at six months of age, Saint-Gaudens was a friend and contemporary of Eakins, both having trained in Paris and traveled Europe before returning to the United States about 1870 to begin distinguished careers. Sharing a belief in the expressive power of the human body as a subject for modern painting and sculpture, they developed different styles.

Eakins, committed to the depiction of contemporary life, celebrated the heroes of his own day—as in The Gross Clinic—in a grand and unsparing realism evoking the Dutch and Spanish masters of the seventeenth century. Saint-Gaudens, trained in the same tradition of naturalism and life study, fused the real with the ideal—as in The Angel of Purity—following the poetic spirit of neoclassicism. At the peak of their accomplishment in these two works, both masters demonstrate the power of great public art to stir profound and complex emotions grounded in themes of human life and death.

Previously on display at various locations around Philadelphia, these masterpieces have made their way into the bosom of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where they await your visit. The museum is located at 26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA.

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