Sailing

A small sailboat drifts through barely a breath of wind, its white sail catching what little air there is while two young men slouch low in the hull. Thomas Eakins painted this scene on the Delaware River near Philadelphia around 1875, during a stretch of years when he was obsessed with boats, rowers and hunters on the water. The river here is a strange, muddy gold, more the color of weak tea than anything you would expect from water, and it fills nearly the whole canvas. Eakins pushed the boat far to the right, leaving a wide emptiness where the reflection of the sail wobbles across the surface.

Eakins trained in Paris and worked with the rigor of an engineer. For his boating pictures he made detailed perspective drawings on graph paper, plotting the exact angle of a hull, the length of a mast, even the spacing of ripples as they receded toward the horizon. That mathematical groundwork is hiding underneath all this apparent ease. Look at the thin dark line of the New Jersey shore across the top, so low and flat it almost disappears, and the way the boat sits slightly heeled over, weight shifted, sail just filling. Eakins rowed and sailed these waters himself, and he knew precisely what a boat in light air looks like. American critics of his day often found his work too plain and unglamorous, which was rather the point for him. He wanted the river as it actually was.