Thomas Eakins\u27 exploration of the mechanism and laws of human expression and understanding in themes of mental effort and creative activity

Although Thomas Eakins has been regarded as an artist interested in accurately transcribing objects and visible experiences, recent scholarship has begun to explore the iconographic complexity of his work. Still almost no consideration has been given to Eakins\u27 concern to communicate how evidence of visual experience and consciousness in general is conditioned by the mind and the order of nature. The purpose of this study is to examine the development and significance of Thomas Eakins\u27 interest in those principles and processes that structure man\u27s mental life and underlay his expressive movements. Using as focal points Thomas Eakins\u27 writings, working method, and paintings, this study examines his early preoccupation with the subjective aspects of the individual\u27s experience and his concern for how organisms habitually function as mechanisms in anatomical and physiological terms. A later stress on the manner in which the mind reduces phenomena to that which is immediately present to consciousness appears in his works dating from the eighties. At this point, Eakins\u27 conception of the nature and function of the perceptual process is based on his growing awareness of the primacy of sensations and mental entities over material realities. He shifts his focus of attention in the late portraits from a concentration on some underlying condition of the subject\u27s mind that molds and characterizes the vital tendencies of his external activity to the subject\u27s continuous bodily experience. Sensations of the self are graphically registered in motions of the face and gestures of the body. Eakins\u27 conceptions of reality are examined as they relate to nineteenth-century notions of reality as that of a developmental psychic process in which the individual achieves self-consciousness through immediate personal experience and as they speak to the relation of the individual\u27s perception of things to their real nature

Thomas Eakins\u27 exploration of the mechanism and laws of human expression and understanding in themes of mental effort and creative activity

Although Thomas Eakins has been regarded as an artist interested in accurately transcribing objects and visible experiences, recent scholarship has begun to explore the iconographic complexity of his work. Still almost no consideration has been given to Eakins\u27 concern to communicate how evidence of visual experience and consciousness in general is conditioned by the mind and the order of nature. The purpose of this study is to examine the development and significance of Thomas Eakins\u27 interest in those principles and processes that structure man\u27s mental life and underlay his expressive movements. Using as focal points Thomas Eakins\u27 writings, working method, and paintings, this study examines his early preoccupation with the subjective aspects of the individual\u27s experience and his concern for how organisms habitually function as mechanisms in anatomical and physiological terms. A later stress on the manner in which the mind reduces phenomena to that which is immediately present to consciousness appears in his works dating from the eighties. At this point, Eakins\u27 conception of the nature and function of the perceptual process is based on his growing awareness of the primacy of sensations and mental entities over material realities. He shifts his focus of attention in the late portraits from a concentration on some underlying condition of the subject\u27s mind that molds and characterizes the vital tendencies of his external activity to the subject\u27s continuous bodily experience. Sensations of the self are graphically registered in motions of the face and gestures of the body. Eakins\u27 conceptions of reality are examined as they relate to nineteenth-century notions of reality as that of a developmental psychic process in which the individual achieves self-consciousness through immediate personal experience and as they speak to the relation of the individual\u27s perception of things to their real nature