Max Schmitt in a Single Scull

The rower pausing mid-stroke is Max Schmitt, a Philadelphia lawyer who had just won the single sculls championship on the Schuylkill River in October 1870. He turns to look straight out at us, oars resting, the boat still gliding. Behind him, a second sculler bends to his work in a shell marked with the name "Eakins." That is the painter himself, slipped into his own picture, since Thomas Eakins rowed these waters regularly and had known Schmitt since boyhood. Two friends on the river, one of them showing off a little.

Eakins was twenty-six and freshly back from four years of art training in Paris when he made this in 1871. His approach was closer to engineering than to poetry: he worked out the perspective of the boats and the bridges with rulers and careful diagrams, plotting exactly how far each ripple should sit from the next. The reward is the water itself, where every reflection lands where it should, and the pale afternoon light catching the bare autumn trees along the bank. The iron railway bridge and the stone arches beyond were new construction at the time, a reminder that this stretch of river was city ground, not wilderness. American audiences were not quite sure what to make of a serious painting about a sporting event, and Eakins spent much of his career being misunderstood in similar ways.