Washington. National Portrait Gallery. THOMAS EAKINS. Edited by John Wilmerding. 212 pp. with 161 illustrations, 55 in color. Large 4to, cloth. Washington, DC, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.
A splendid survey of the work of this foremost American painter of the nineteenth century, a realist whose unsentimental (and often unpopular) style was in marked contrast to the pre-Civil War romanticism of the Hudson River School. Thirty scholars currently working on Eakins assess his work in a series of essays, offering an important new resource for understanding his life and career.