In Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity, Alan Braddock examines how dominant period concepts about cultural difference shaped the late Victorian American painter’s work. During his excavation of this complex body of thought, Braddock digs deep into the history of ideas, beneath the more familiar strata of modern anthropology pioneered by Franz Boas early in the last century. Unlike the cultural relativism of Boas and his many famous students at Columbia, including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, this older intellectual tradition depended heavily on social evolutionist discourse and biological models to account for cultural forms considered specific to distinct communities, nations, and peoples. The Spencerian basis of these beliefs fortified a fundamentally hierarchical model of human difference that forbade the transmission of social phenomena from culture to culture and consigned non-Western peoples to a permanent state of premodernity. As historians of science have demonstrated for well over a generation, these theories—whose proponents ranged from the prominent (Matthew Arnold, Hippolyte Taine) to the less frequently cited (Daniel Brinton)—were readily pressed into service for both colonial imperialism and Jim Crow. Urban Americans like Eakins relied heavily on these ideas as they came into contact with an unprecedented array of diverse cultures thanks both to waves of immigration from the hinterlands of Europe and the plantations of the South, and to ethnographic displays at world’s fairs and the country’s earliest natural history museums.

The book’s introduction explores prevailing ideas of cultural hierarchy through a productive examination of Eakins’s Dancing Lesson (1878), a watercolor study of black folk music and dance. Initiating a long chronological progression that structures the remainder of the volume, the first chapter discusses Eakins’s representations of “exotic types” completed as an art student abroad: academic studies of “negresses” created during his training in Paris, and genre paintings of subjects encountered on the streets of Seville. These early paintings have largely been overlooked in the literature because, as Braddock shrewdly notes, they defy Eakins’s longstanding and problematic reputation as the quintessential American artist of the late nineteenth century.

In an impressive synthetic analysis of Eakins’s preference for outdoor scenes during the 1870s and early 1880s, Braddock demonstrates in the second chapter how the painter mapped social differences onto the diverse ecologies of greater Philadelphia. Eakins encodes the Fairmont Park of The Champion Single Sculls (1871) and the Main Line, Pennsylvania, of Swimming (1885), respectively, as urban and suburban spaces of leisure for an ascendant white bourgeoisie, while he relegates his working-class and African American subjects downstream to The Neck, the polluted outflow of “Filthy Dirty” industrial Philadelphia. In this chapter he also shows that this vogue for “local color” —found also in the work of authors like Mark Twain and William Dean Howells—was paradoxically part of an international trend and symptomatic of a modern cosmopolitan identity.

The final chapter begins with Eakins’s 1887 sojourn to the Badlands in the Dakota Territory for the so-called “camp cure” then popular among neurasthenic white-collar professionals, but devotes most of its attention to the artist’s suite of portraits from the 1880s and 1890s of noted anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania. This was the intellectual old guard against which Boas would establish his revolutionary theories. Braddock effectively reconstructs the original anthropological and museological contexts for these works, the most famous and anomalous of which is the full-length portrait (1895) of Frank Hamilton Cushing in Zuni attire, and persuasively labels them colonialist by implication if not in character. Here the author also makes an especially noteworthy effort to elucidate a Native American perspective on Cushing’s ethnic drag by interviewing current members of the Zuni tribal council.

There is much to praise about Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity, not least of which is Braddock’s ability to glean juicy kernels from a body of work harvested year after year by a growing roster of art historians: a highly selective list would include the strange equivalence of Quaker oarsmen and ducks in The Champion Single Sculls (1871), the Orientalist décor of The Chess Players (1876), and the uncanny black cat deposited on the desk in Professor Benjamin Howard Rand (1874). One of the most fruitful products of Braddock’s sharp-eyed analysis is his successful redemption and interpretation of the original frames Eakins designed for many of his late portraits. The author also displays a remarkable talent for convincingly assigning a broader significance to the technical nuances of Eakins’s oeuvre; here I am thinking about the artist’s selective employment of sketchier brushwork for “exotic” subjects like the Cushing’s portrait and Dancing Lesson, and the photomontage qualities of Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River (1881) that belie the industrialization of the local fishing trade.

More importantly, Braddock firmly situates Eakins within his culture by largely eschewing and often rejecting the conventional wisdom on the painter as an isolated genius, artistic outsider, and flaunter of Victorian mores. To the contrary, Braddock proves that Eakins was not “a kind of deus ex machina” (23) exempt from period discourse, and convincingly rebuts scholarly efforts to assign progressive racial attitudes to the painter. The book thus serves as a critical reminder that despite his many unconventional practices and beliefs Eakins was indelibly a product of his age. Here Braddock’s arguments are greatly aided and enriched by his far-ranging examples of period visual culture, from ethnographic displays to illustrations in Harper’s Weekly, that serve much more than a collateral function.

Moreover, by carefully following the contours of pre-Boasian notions of human difference, Braddock’s project is a provocative and illuminating juxtaposition of issues typically considered independently: discourses on race and ethnicity; tensions between local, national, and global; and ideas about the influences of environment on character. For a Gilded Age American like Eakins, these considerations were all variables in the same governing equation of humanity, and Braddock is right to include them together, although I might have liked to see a bit more attention to the differences between these distinct categories of cultural difference. After all, some kinds of difference, to adapt Stuart Hall, make more of a difference than others (Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” Social Justice 20 (1993): 101–114). I would also be interested to see how the author might extend his cogent analysis of these fascinating and complex discourses to address how Eakins made sense of his own cultures; investigation along these lines could further enrich the more established literature on the painter’s investment in his whiteness, masculinity, and professional class identity.

By and large, Braddock portrays Eakins as a profoundly conservative figure, at least in terms of the human sciences, but Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity at the same time insists that erasures, fissures, and omissions in Eakins’s oeuvre are clear signs that the painter occasionally chafed against these prevailing beliefs. In my view, the author succeeds admirably in the former task but is rather less persuasive in the latter. My quarrel rests largely on the question of evidence. At various moments, Braddock contends that Eakins’s canvases betray the artist’s recognition, however halting and impartial, of the diffusionary character of culture forms; for example, the painter “unwittingly contributed to the undoing of evolutionary assumptions” (66) and “harnessed the very forces of modern diffusion that would eventually necessitate the articulation of the anthropological culture concept” (111). This argument that these paintings somehow prefigure the eventual decoupling of culture and biology generally depends exclusively on subtle formal nuances within the artworks themselves. And at times, the visual evidence buckles under the weight of ideas attributed to them, particularly in chapter 1, whose analysis largely hinges on small details of works that for better or worse contemporaries would have considered minor: academic exercises in all likelihood mandated by his instructors. I am confident that many readers will not share my skepticism; those who are comfortable with letting the artworks themselves serve as the primary evidence of Eakins’s fitful resistance to pre-Boasian theory will be persuaded by Braddock’s arguments. But all told, I consider the author at his most convincing when he maintains that “Eakins filtered extremes from his versions of prevailing artistic stereotypes about human difference, while nonetheless operating within those stereotypes” (88).

My second and related concern with this exceptional work of scholarship and interpretation may be at once less fair and constructive since it effectively demands the author embark on a different academic project. Nonetheless, there is in Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity an underlying structural tension between the two halves of the book’s title. This volume is at once a novel survey and reconsideration of the painter’s oeuvre and an illuminating narrative about the gradual ascendancy of Boasian anthropology over its intellectual predecessors, but these twin aims occasionally work against one another. What Braddock gains through his patient mapping of the theories of culture that shaped the painter’s oeuvre also limits his ability to narrate a more diachronic account of this important history of ideas. Eakins himself seems to be one of the chief obstacles here. The careers of contemporaries like Winslow Homer (see pp. 15–16) or Henry Ossawa Tanner might be more useful metrics by which to measure changing conceptions about human difference, as the author himself has done elsewhere (Alan Braddock, “Painting the World’s Christ: Tanner, Hybridity, and the Blood of the Holy Land,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 3:2 [Autumn 2004]: http://19thc-artworldwide.org). But more fundamentally, the book’s biographical format compresses the scope and potential significance of this important research. Since Braddock repeatedly demonstrates how much we can learn about Eakins’s work by venturing beyond more conventional biographical concerns, I wonder why he adhered to the art-historical tradition of the single-artist monograph. The relative font sizes on the volume’s spine—large for the artist’s name, small for “the Cultures of Modernity”—thus work as a kind of truth in advertising. Ultimately, though, this is a limitation not of the author but of the conventions of the discipline.