Picture of a painter

William S. McFeely of Cambridge and Wellfleet, professor of history emeritus at the University of Georgia and Pulitzer prize-winning biographer of Ulysses S. Grant, has written "Portrait: The Life of Thomas Eakins" (W.W. Norton), a short biography of the Philadelphia realist painter.

Thomas Eakins at age 35

Eakins is about as far from Grant (or Frederick Douglass, the subject of another McFeely biography) as a man could be, but in either case, McFeely's reflective style and acute sense of character has a bracing effect on the reader. Without making an overall judgment on the book (officially published Nov. 20), which I've only dipped into, I was struck by this passage about a young friend of the Eakins family who took her own life:

"Then came Ella's death. A life was lost and a whirlpool of grieving engulfed the two families. Suicide is a lonely path. Those who embrace it refuse any companions. To silence the demons the world has let loose on them, the determined travelers go their inexorable way to their terrible sanctuary."