The Artist's Wife and His Setter Dog

Artist:: Thomas Eakins (American, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1844–1916 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

Date:: ca. 1884–89

Medium:: Oil on canvas

Dimensions:: 30 x 23 in. (76.2 x 58.4 cm)

Classification:: Paintings

Credit Line:: Fletcher Fund, 1923

Accession Number:: 23.139

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 764

Eakins began this portrait shortly after his marriage in January 1884 to his former student, Susan Hannah Macdowell (1851–1938), a talented painter and photographer. The setting is his studio at 1330 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, where the couple—and their dog, Harry—lived from 1884 to 1886. A photogravure of the painting from 1886 reveals a more robust woman, suggesting that Eakins reworked the portrait, amplifying the effect of the skylight’s illumination. The alterations may have reflected Eakins’s anguish over his controversial dismissal from the school of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, partly for removing the loincloth from a male model in a co-ed class.

the sitter's father, William H. Macdowell, Philadelphia, 1887–died 1906; the sitter, Mrs. Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia, 1906–1923; with Joseph Brummer, New York, as agent, 1923

Essays
Thomas Eakins (1844–1916): Painting

Timelines
The United States and Canada, 1800–1900 A.D.

American Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 2, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born between 1816 and 1845
The American Wing: A Guide
In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement
Masterpieces of American Painting in The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Masterpiece Paintings
Thomas Eakins and The Metropolitan Museum of Art
[adapted from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 52, no. 3 (Winter, 1994–1995)]
A Walk Through The American Wing