The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake

Two men in blue headscarves have just swung their boat around the turning post, marked by that blue flag on a pole rising out of the water. Thomas Eakins painted the scene in 1873, recording a real race held on Philadelphia's Schuylkill River the year before. The rowers are John and Barney Biglin, brothers from New York who rowed for money and drew big crowds, and the boat glimpsed in the distance at right belongs to their rivals, the Ward brothers of Pittsburgh. The Biglins won. You can spot spectators packed along the far bank and a train puffing smoke behind the trees, the kind of detail Eakins loved because it was simply there.

Eakins was a realist with an engineer's mind. Before painting his rowing pictures he made careful perspective drawings, plotting the boats, oars and reflections on a grid as if drafting a machine. That precision is why the two shells sit so convincingly on the water and why the ripples fan out just so. He also had a lifelong fondness for hiding himself in these scenes, and in other rowing paintings he put his own face in a boat. The light here is late-afternoon and a bit hazy, which flattens the far shore into a band of green and makes the crisp red hull and blue flag pop forward. For a painter who cared so much about muscle and motion, it is interesting that he chose the pause in the race rather than the sprint.