Turning the Stake

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916)

The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake, 1873
oil on canvas, 101.3cm x 151.4cm 

Cleveland Museum of Art

Today I met my friend Megan at the YMCA for a post-Thanksgiving workout.  We have decided to join Concept 2’s “Holiday Challenge” and erg at least 100,000 meters between November 24 and December 24.  The company will donate two cents for each kilometer once we reach our goal. I’ve chosen my donation be directed to Vermont Disaster Relief Fund.  The state is still struggling to recover from the devastating floods in late August and I have many friends whose homes and livelihoods were affected.    I made a small dent in my 100K – I have 97.5 to go!

One of my favorite American artists is Thomas Eakins.  Since I started rowing two years ago I’ve looked more closely at his paintings of scullers on the Schuylkill River.  A Philadephia native, Eakins was an amateur rower, a sport enjoyed by the students at University of Pennsylvania as well as the social elite of Philadelphia. At the time rowing was fairly new, but also the most popular spectator sport in America .  Thousands of dollars were often wagered on race outcomes.  Eakins’ favorite subjects were the most famous professional rowers of their time, the Biglin brothers.  Today perhaps not the best, but the most notorious rowers are the Winklevoss twins, Harvard rowers and Mark Zuckerberg foes, who have been immortalized in this scene from The Social Network (with the gorgeous Army Hammer playing both roles).  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwIPDpRuyNk&feature=related

Eakins had a nearly scientific approach to painting.  After art school and the requisite “grand tour” of Europe, he took anatomy and physiology classes at Jefferson Medical College to help him more accurately depict the human form.  In addition, he was an early adopter of the camera as a tool to aid his painting and he experimented with techniques to help capture humans and animals in motion.  It was Eakins who brought the photographer Eadweard Muybridge to the University of Pennsylvania  to make thousands of photographs recording people and animals in “locomotion.”  To read more about Muybridge and these groundbreaking studies at Penn go here:  http://www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/features/muybridge/muybridge.html.  

Thomas Eakins,  

Motion Study: George Reynolds nude, pole-vaulting to left, 1885, 

Dry-plate negative, 3 7/8 x 4 5/8"

Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art

It makes sense that Eakins would be fascinated with trying to capture the movement of both the athlete and his boat as it moves so swiftly across the water.  Scullers are ever conscious of the position and relationship of each part of their body as they repeat and perfect the stroke cycle, of where their oar enters and leaves the water and of the pattern of “puddles” they leave.  Eakins was clearly aware of all of this as a rower himself, and one can see his attention to these details in the eleven paintings he made of the brothers.  In this painting, we see the midpoint of the first American pairs race, a five mile ordeal against rowers from Pittsburgh (we can see them in the background struggling to reach their turn).  The brothers won by more than a minute and were declared World Champions.  Megan and I plan on rowing doubles next summer (we’ll each have two oars instead of the single oars of a pair).  We’ll be thinking about the Biglin brothers and Thomas Eakins as we work on our technique.