Painting: Portraiture with a Scalpel

"I never knew but one artist who could resist the temptation to see things as they ought to be, rather than as they are, and that's Tom Eakins." Walt Whit man was one of the few people who had anything good to say about the cold-eyed and ruthlessly honest Philadelphia realist. Aside from the poet, whom Ea kins portrayed in 1888 as a twinkling old sage, few people could stand having their character laid bare with the visceral objectivity that Eakins brought to portraiture. He used his brush like a surgeon's scalpel,...

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