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After 1900 Eakins was, in a way, summing up his own life, his own late career, facing his own mortality. I think this coming to terms with the self is Eakins' great triumph. Some people would like to see the later career as rather pessimistic -- the dark palate, these anxious teary faces, this sense of morbidity. On the contrary, I think it's a sense of self-acceptance of, in a way, coming to terms with our vulnerabilities, our weaknesses, what we fail to do and also what we have achieved with reaching a kind of balance. So I don't see them as cynical, I don't see them as depressing; I see them as profoundly poignant, very moving.
JOHN WILMERDING
Art Historian, Princeton University
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Very few of his portraits were commissioned. Most of them were sitters that he approached and invited to sit for him. So they represent people he thought were beautiful or interesting, pictorially complicated in some way or people he admired very much.
ATHLEEN A. FOSTER, Ph.D.
Curator, Indiana University Art Museum
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