The Artist's Wife and His Setter Dog

The Artist's Wife and His Setter Dog

Thomas Eakins

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Eakins began this portrait shortly after his marriage in January 1884 to his former student, Susan Hannah Macdowell (1851–1938), a talented painter and photographer. The setting is his studio at 1330 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, where the couple—and their dog, Harry—lived from 1884 to 1886. A photogravure of the painting from 1886 reveals a more robust woman, suggesting that Eakins reworked the portrait, amplifying the effect of the skylight’s illumination. The alterations may have reflected Eakins’s anguish over his controversial dismissal from the school of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, partly for removing the loincloth from a male model in a co-ed class.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Artist's Wife and His Setter DogThe Artist's Wife and His Setter DogThe Artist's Wife and His Setter DogThe Artist's Wife and His Setter DogThe Artist's Wife and His Setter Dog

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.