The Swimming Hole
The Swimming Hole is an 1884–85 painting by the American artist Thomas Eakins. Executed in oil on canvas, it depicts six men swimming naked in a lake. It is considered a masterpiece of American painting, and has been called a prime example of homoeroticism in American art.
About The Swimming Hole in brief
The Swimming Hole is an 1884–85 painting by the American artist Thomas Eakins. Executed in oil on canvas, it depicts six men swimming naked in a lake. It is considered a masterpiece of American painting, and has been called a prime example of homoeroticism in American art. The composition is pyramidal. The figure reclining at left leads the viewer’s eye to the seated figure, whose gesture in turn points to Godley at the apex of the compositional pyramid. The diving figure at right leads to the swimming form of Eakin, who painted himself into the scene. The painting is notable for both its adherence to academic tradition and its uniqueness in transposing the transposing of the reclining figure to an outdoor setting. The depiction of someone diving into the water was very rare in the history of Western art, and it was the first time a male nude had been depicted in such a setting. EakIns was also the first American artist to portray one of the few occasions in 19th-century life when nudity was on display. The title The Swimming hole dates from 1917, when the work was so described by the artist’s widow, Susan Macdowell Eak ins. Four years later, she titled the work The Old Swimminghole, in reference to the 1882 poem The Old Swimmin’-Hole; by James Whitcomb Riley. The Amon Carter Museum has since returned to Eak Ins’ original title, Swimming.
The work is now in the collection of the AmonCarter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, and is on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It has been described as: “a classic of American Painting. It shows a scene of healthy, manly, outdoor activity: a group of young fellows having stripped off for a dip. It is based on the swimming excursions that were enjoyed by the. artist and his students. The picture was an opportunity to display his mastery of the human form. It shows the men looking at the water, in the words of Martin A. Berger, “apparently lost in a contemplative moment’”. The composition has enabled scholars to identify all those depicted in the work. They are : Talcott Williams, Benjamin Fox, J. Laurie Wallace, Jesse Godley, Harry the dog, George Reynolds, and EakINS himself. The rocky promontory on which several of the men rest is the foundation of the Mill Creek mill, which was razed in 1873. No shoes, clothes, or bath houses are visible. The foliage in the background provides a dark background against which the swimmers’ skin tones contrast. In some cases it is uncertain as to whether the forms portrayed are male or female. Such themes had earlier been examined in his The Gross Clinic and William Rush, and would continue to be explored in his paintings of boxers and wrestlers.
You want to know more about The Swimming Hole?
This page is based on the article The Swimming Hole published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
