Born in Philadelphia in 1851, Susan Hannah Macdowell was raised in a progressive-minded family and encouraged early on to pursue an artistic career. A major turning point in her education and personal life came in 1876, when Macdowell first encountered Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins and his painting The Gross Clinic.
The Gross Clinic was a groundbreaking American work which showed surgery being performed while medical students watched along the sidelines. The patient’s lower limbs were visible amid a backdrop of blood-soaked technical accuracy and the intense emotion of a female witness horrified by the scene.
An Education with Thomas Eakins
Rather than being unnerved by The Gross Clinic, Susan opted to take classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Eakins was an instructor. Susan did quite well at the Academy, winning the Mary Smith Prize in 1879 and becoming one of Eakins’ star pupils. She also became Eakins’ friend and ultimately his wife in 1884.
While the Eakins marriage initially was based on equality and both artists had their own studios, soon enough Susan had assumed more of a supportive and administrative role for her husband. The house ran smoothly due to Susan’s management of domestic and social affairs, just as she also occasionally modeled for Eakins, handled his professional matters and tirelessly bolstered his ego and reputation. She and Eakins were strong proponents of the use of photography as an aid for painting, and Susan took many photographs of her own, with various pictures being possibly credited to Eakins when they were in fact Susan’s work.
The personality of Thomas Eakins was complex and contradictory. He was a realist in method and insisted that both his male and female students work from nude models, ignoring the Victorian era rule that females only be permitted to draw male models covered with loincloths. Eakins eventually lost his position at the Pennsylvania Academy because he progressively defied that barrier, yet his teaching career was marked by other questionable indiscretions involving nudity that surely would have troubled many other wives.
Portraits and Later Years
Still, despite the controversies he attracted and years of limited sales of his work, Susan remained devoted to Eakins. Her own artistic output was minimized, though she did manage to find time to create some quietly remarkable paintings. Her posthumous portrait of Thomas Eakins is a fine reflection on the artist’s complexity, as well as showing her unique love for her subject.
Eakins’ portraits of his wife also became more complex. In the 1880s, he had Susan pose contentedly with his other faithful companion: an Irish setter named Harry. Eakins’ 1899 view of Susan, however, shows her with a careworn yet close to saintly expression.
On the day following Eakins’ death in 1916, Susan wrote in her journal: My poor Tom, away forever from the house this day. As time passed, Susan continued to promote her husband’s legacy, yet she also eased back into painting again. Her palette and general persona reportedly became more colorful, with her widowhood perhaps being less stressful than her marriage.
Susan died in 1938 at the age of 87. In 1973, she was spotlighted in her own retrospective at her alma mater, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and her reputation is now broadening beyond her role as the selfless wife of a major American artist to being an artist worthy of notice herself.
Sources
- American Women Artists -- Charlotte Streifer Rubenstein (Avon Books, 1982)
- Philadelphia Museum of Art: Thomas Eakins, American Realist
- Susan Macdowell Eakins: Collection by the Artist -- Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
