Art without Culture

Thomas Eakins lived most of his life in Philadelphia. But he spent his early twenties in Paris, studying under Jean-Leon Gerome at the Ecole des beaux arts. In 1866, soon after his arrival, he wrote his father a letter describing his reception at the hands of his new peers, raucous art students: “Where do you come from? England? My God no, gentlemen I’m an American. (I feel sure that raised me a peg in their estimation!) Oh the American! What a savage. I wonder if he’s a Huron or an Alonquin [sic].”1 Eakins clearly takes a little delight in experiencing himself as an object of this satiric ethnological attention, in which various and not necessarily compatible registers of human classifi cation—linguistic, national, primitivist, tribal—jostle elbows. In Europe, Eakins wrote to his father, he felt himself to be “a stranger.”2 At the same time, walking around strapped with a Smith & Wesson, he “represented a familiar national type within a popular French taxonomy of human difference,” writes Alan C. Braddock in Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity (TE, 57). Braddock’s study holds interest not only for art historians and Americanists but, more broadly, for