The Artist's Wife and His Setter Dog
Thomas Eakins American
Not on view
Eakins began this portrait shortly after his marriage to his former student, Susan Hannah Macdowell (1851–1938), a talented painter and photographer. The setting is his studio in Philadelphia, where the couple—and their dog, Harry—lived from 1884 to 1886. In this haunting work, Eakins’s wife wears an Empire-style gown and sits in an eighteenth-century chair with a Japanese picture book on her lap—accessories that symbolize the artist’s Aesthetic ideals. Displayed in New York at the 1887 exhibition of the Society of American Artists, the painting was criticized for its "disastrous effects." Today, it is considered one of Eakins’s most important works.