A life in pictures

CAMBRIDGE -- With Thomas Eakins's portraits, as with Rembrandt's, you look at the enigmatic faces and can't but wonder what is going on behind those weary eyes. It is as true of Eakins himself, as William S. McFeely discovered in writing his new book, "Portrait: A Life of Thomas Eakins."

Behind the silences and opacities of the Philadelphia master, who lived from 1844 to 1916, is the unknown whole truth about his inner self, especially his sexuality. Like the corona around a solar eclipse, all that shows is the outline, the indirect evidence. But whatever his exact identity, it colored his art and life profoundly.

McFeely, 76, is professor of history emeritus at the University of Georgia and biographer of Frederick Douglass, Ulysses S. Grant (which won a Pulitzer Prize), and Reconstruction leader Oliver O. Howard. Currently a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, he lives in Wellfleet and Cambridge with his wife, Mary Drake McFeely, who is also a historian.

McFeely has written other books outside the field of Civil War and Reconstruction (notably the 1999 "Proximity to Death," about a group of Georgia lawyers fighting the death penalty) but never so far outside as the life of a painter. Eakins had interested him ever since he had taught a course at Georgia called "American Lives." "I always thought we should not let the wordsmiths have the corner on thinking about America," he said. "I had a musician, Charles Ives. For the artist, I had Eakins."

The idea of paintings as chapters in a biographical narrative may seem curious, but McFeely had little else to go on. Not much but the outer facets of Eakins's life are known, and even those have gaps. For example, the Civil War is a blank, except that in July 1864 Eakins paid a $25 bounty to avoid the draft. "For an American historian," said McFeely, "the idea that nothing happened between 1861 and 1866 is bizarre. Philadelphia was only a couple of counties away from where the war was being fought. But we have no record of what he thought."

He attended elite Central High School -- equivalent to Boston Latin School -- and took courses at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. With support from his father, a mysteriously affluent calligrapher and writing-master, he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris for four years, beginning in 1866. He traveled around Europe and was particularly influenced by Velá zquez.

Back in Philadelphia, Eakins began his active painting career, and became a celebrated teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy. He married painter Susan Macdowell, who lived until 1938, a tireless and loyal champion of her husband's work, and made two great portraits of her. As painter and teacher he was prickly and insistent on his own way of seeing things. Sometimes his impatience with restraints on nudity in the studio upset female students -- and their mothers. Unlike John Singer Sargent, he prettified nobody. Most of his portrait subjects, especially women, disliked the results.

In 1886, Eakins was abruptly fired from the academy. No public reason was given, but it happened after a delegation of five of Eakins's students, including his own brother-in-law, made an allegation to the directors. "Abuse of authority" was mentioned. A group of outraged students organized in his defense, but Eakins did not fight back. McFeely infers a homosexual relationship, perhaps with a student. Eakins was deeply depressed for a while but eventually resumed painting.

McFeely writes that it's hard to explain much of what is known about Eakins without concluding that he was gay or bisexual. He said, "I think it's probable; it makes all sorts of sense that his sexual interests were toward men and not women." Some have faulted him for not unequivocally declaring Eakins a gay man. But McFeely did not feel compelled to set Eakins free from the chains of his time; rather, he understood leaving the unsaid alone to be part of representing the age. "I didn't want to bring anachronistic rhetoric into it," he said. In doing it that way, he granted the painter his individuality as a sexual being, ambiguity included.

Take, for example, Eakins's famous 1884 painting, "Swimming," a wonderfully kinetic composition and a masterpiece of anatomy. It depicts six naked men lolling on, diving off, and swimming around a stone pier at the edge of a lake. One of the men in the water is clearly the painter, with his Irish setter . In its day, the painting caused enormous discomfort, and today is often taken as the conclusive emblem of Eakins's homosexuality.

But McFeely sees something more nuanced. "I've come to think that 'Swimming' is a break from social constraints," he said. "Not just the absence of clothes but the absence of categorization. He didn't want any of those men to be known as gay -- they wouldn't have known the word -- but would have wanted them to be known as breaking loose from constraints. It's a first-person narrative. He is in the picture himself, and is saying, 'If I am free to look at these young men, you the viewer are free to look at them, too.' " (It's also, by the way, a remarkable rendering of stone, light, and water.)

Given the paucity of documents -- "he was not a letter-writer," McFeely said, "and very few of his students wrote to him or about him" -- many historians would have shunned this project. But McFeely believed "it was the paintings that mattered." As with "Swimming," he draws upon the greatest works: the portraits of Edith Mahon, Susan Eakins, Henry Rowland, and Walt Whitman, and an eminent surgeon at work in "The Gross Clinic," which he also painted himself into. ("The Gross Clinic" was purchased last month for $68 million by two Philadelphia museums, jointly outbidding an heir to the Wal-Mart fortune.)

"Historians have been trying to expand the whole notion of what constitutes evidence," said Yale historian John Demos, author of many books on colonial America, and also a Radcliffe fellow this year, "to look at materials of all sorts -- artifacts, furniture -- that is a burgeoning new front in historic research. Paintings are and should be a part of that process."

In essence, McFeely said, any biography is one writer's vision, not unlike a painter's vision. "If Eakins painted you, it would not be you," he said. "It would be a portrait of you. The book title [ 'Portrait '] came to me early, which has never happened to me before. My book is only McFeely's story of Eakins."

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.