A ‘truly bad’ painting by Thomas Eakins now hangs in the PMA, and offers a glimpse into his complicated legacy

The 19th-century American galleries have gone dark at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, scheduled for a grand reopening early next year. In the meantime, works by that century’s brashest master, the painter Thomas Eakins, are shuffling around the museum.

Of the Art Museum’s nearly 100 paintings by Eakins, only one is currently on view — and it’s his weirdest. After four years in storage, The Crucifixion, an eight-foot-tall picture of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross, can be seen in Gallery 255 of the European wing.

You don’t have long to see it: By Wednesday, Jan. 29 it will come down again, to be replaced by The Gross Clinic (1875), the uncontested Eakins masterpiece.

Painted in 1880, The Crucifixion is startling in its simplicity: A lifeless figure fills a bleak landscape, face lost in shadow and torso torched in sun. How did this biblical scene come from the brush of Eakins, the hard-nosed spokesman of American realism? It’s a sore thumb in his oeuvre of everyday life: surgeons at work, racing shells on the Schuylkill, portraits of stone-faced Philadelphians.

This was no act of piety. Eakins grew up Protestant but grew out of it fast, labeling the faith “intolerant” and “against anything that is good.” He never explained why he painted The Crucifixion, but he called it “one of my very best” and displayed it for decades in the lobby of his home in Philadelphia’s Spring Garden neighborhood.

Yet the painting has been buried in the footnotes of Eakins lore. A 2001 New Yorker review even called it “his single truly bad painting.”

The Crucifixion is big, even in a room full of big pictures.

The PMA’s Salon Gallery shows work made in the tradition of Europe’s fine art academies, where proper painting often meant a grand canvas. Next to The Crucifixion stands a seven-footer by fellow American James McNeill Whistler (Arrangement in Black, c. 1883). Eakins and Whistler both studied painting in France, which is why we find them in this gallery.

Sailing for Paris in 1866, Eakins trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. His mentor, Jean-Léon Gérôme (Portal of the Green Mosque, c. 1870, in this gallery), was revered as a teacher-artist — a role Eakins would take up at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1876. He also spent a summer session with Léon Bonnat, who taught students to resist idealizing their subjects.

Is this why Eakins painted his Jesus with dirty feet and long toenails? We know he wanted us to look at them: They’re floating at our eye level.

Bonnat made his own grisly Crucifixion in 1874, which Eakins surely got wind of back in Philadelphia. Bonnat had even brought a corpse into his studio to use as a model. Eakins, a leading expert in anatomy, conceived of a Crucifixion that he had never seen before: one where the body really felt like it was hanging from the cross in open air.

Crucifixion paintings are hard to find in American art of the 19th century, a time when top painters rarely made religious art. (An exception: Eakins’ pupil Henry O. Tanner, whose glorious The Annunciation belongs to the PMA.) Mainstream American artists wouldn’t return to the death of Jesus until the 20th century.

But why do it? We can only assume it was art-historical ambition: For a highbrow oil painter, the challenge of a Crucifixion was a way to compete not only with your teacher, but with the old masters.

Eakins began The Crucifixion with a photo shoot in 1880. He brought a camera to the backwoods of southern New Jersey, where he tied one of his students, J.L. Wallace, to a cross and took pictures of him. (They had to pause their shoot and relocate after a confused group of hunters walked by.) The photographs are now lost, but we know that Eakins likely projected them onto his canvas to trace the landmarks of the figure — a painstaking quest for precision.

Wallace later visited the painter’s home studio at 1727 Mount Vernon St. (now home to Mural Arts), where he climbed onto the cross once again, this time on the third-floor roof. Eakins looked out at the scene from his fourth-floor studio.

True to that view on Mount Vernon, The Crucifixion’s Jesus hangs in broad daylight at noon, with no one else around. Darkness has not come over the land, as it did in the Gospels to announce the cosmic stakes of the moment. Eakins grants this Jesus no supportive mourners (no Virgin Mary or St. John), nor any soothing signs of divinity (no angels, no warm glow to his crown of thorns). Casting the head in darkness, Eakins denies him any glint of life or personality.

No surprise this didn’t sit right with Protestant America. Critics panned it. Crowds didn’t get it. Eakins charged on. He showed it at venues across the U.S., from St. Louis to San Francisco, but the canvas never made it to the Paris Salon.

Eakins pleaded with the Met to buy the painting in 1910, with no luck. Writing a list of his possessions late in life, he ended with: “…and a house full of pictures that no one wants.” The Crucifixion was one of them. His widow, the painter Susan Macdowell Eakins, gifted it to the PMA after his death.

Now billed as a brooding star of American art history, Eakins has raised eyebrows in recent years. A 2021 opinion piece in The Inquirer dubbed him “Philly’s revered sexual predator,” trumpeting calls to remove his name from public landmarks.

Eakins welcomed female students into his classroom but stated that they could never make great art. He pressured subjects to pose nude for him and even exposed himself to students when teaching anatomy. Some of this was Eakins playing the Paris bohemian, but other moments point to something darker.

The Crucifixion hovers above the broken mortal who made it, as timeless as he was transgressive. Eakins, who died in 1916, was far from Christlike, and it’s certainly no sin to brush him aside. But if you’re up for it, his work is still worth spending some time with — especially now that there’s a century standing between us and him.