- The clues could be as subtle as a tiny scratch made with
a needle. Sometimes they were more obvious like the smooth, unhesitating
lines that outlined a figure.
-
- Combined, Philadelphia Museum of Art curator Mark Tucker
believes it's clear that the great 19th-century American painter Thomas
Eakins had a secret technique for achieving the remarkable realism often
praised in his work: he traced from photographs.
-
- And recent science suggests he was not alone.
-
- According to the collaborative work of an artist and
surface scientist, artists dating as far back as 1430 traced their images
from optical projections of photographs or real life.
-
- "We want to unambiguously prove that artists used
lenses way back in 1430, so then every artist since then is suspect,"
explained Charles Falco, a surface scientist at the University of Arizona.
"People who have not seen the visual evidence are skeptical. But once
I show them, they are converted."
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- Bach With a Tape Recorder?
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- Some art historians have felt affronted by the claims.
They argue that a year or two of scientific analysis can't possibly topple
the decades of analysis by art scholars that barely mentions such tracing
techniques.
-
- "It's like saying Bach had a tape recorder and
recorded
noises from the forest for his music," said Walter Liedtke, curator
of European painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
"It's ridiculous."
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- To detect the use of tracing in Eakins' work, Tucker
and his colleague Nica Gutman used infrared reflectography to examine the
pencil drawings underneath the paint of Eakins' works. An infrared
reflectography
camera detects infrared light that's shined on a painting and reflected
by paint layers.
-
- Outlines of etchings used under a painting appear black
on the camera's screen since these materials absorb the light.
-
- When examining some works like Eakins' "Shad Fishing
at Gloucester on the Delaware River," (1881) Tucker and Gutman noticed
that the underdrawings were made up of "unhesitating" lines that
had "unmistakable traced qualities" to them.
-
- Furthermore, Eakins' smooth lines perfectly matched
photographs
the team recovered from Eakins' estate. Tucker believes the artist traced
the photographs by projecting the images onto his canvas using a primitive,
slide projector-like instrument called a magic lantern.
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- Connect-the-Dot
-
- In other works, such as "Sailboats Racing on the
Delaware" (1874), the Philadelphia team used a stereo microscope (a
microscope with two eyepieces) to detect very fine markings made in several
paint layers of the work.
-
- Tucker believes Eakins made the small marks from
projected
images to mark coordinates for his drawings. He then used the coordinates
to "connect the dots" and draw the scene.
-
- "These marks didn't just occur in the lower layers
of the paint," said Tucker. "We found them in low layers and
even in very late stages of the painting."
-
- Sometimes Eakins traced from one photograph, but more
commonly, Tucker believes, the artist act as an editor and traced images
from multiple photographs that he projected one by one onto his
paintings.
-
- Although artists openly use all kinds of projection
methods
today to create their art (Andy Warhol once championed such techniques
in his "Factory" studio), it appears Eakins may have wanted to
keep it under wraps.
-
- In one work, for example, the curators noticed Eakins
used a tiny spot of touch-up paint to hide a needle-thin scratch mark that
had likely served as a coordinate. And when asked if Eakins had used
photographs
as models, the artist's widow asserted her late husband preferred using
real life as his model, according to Tucker.
-
- "Critics were ambivalent about whether this was
a legitimate technique or not," said Tucker. "So I think there
was a lot of pressure on Eakins not to divulge."
-
- In fact, Eakins might have been doing what artists have
done for centuries.
-
-
- Tracing in the 15th
Century
-
- For the past few years, surface scientist Falco and
artist
David Hockney, have acted as art detectives looking for signs that artists
from as far back as the 1400s used projections to trace their work. Hockney
recently authored a book on the subject, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering
the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, in which he proposes the
introduction
of optical tools led to an increase in realism in art starting with the
15th century.
-
- Falco explains that images projected by a camera or more
primitive device (like a slide projector-like instrument called a camera
obscura or a concave mirror) have qualities that could never be observed
without the aid of an optical tool.
-
- Vanishing points, for example, are where parallel lines
appear to converge in an image (the way railroad tracks appear to join
in the distance, for example). Paintings with more than one vanishing
point,
says Falco, suggest they were modeled on more than one projected
image.
-
- Much like Eakins may have used projections of multiple
photographs in his work, earlier artists may have traced multiple images
on their canvases.
-
- Another clue is the depth of field in a painting. When
projected by a lens, objects in the background appear fuzzy, while those
in the foreground are clear. Falco says many early works have this quality,
which could never be seen by the naked eye of the artist.
-
- Still, Falco and others emphasize that even if artists
used tools to trace their work, their reputations as masters are hardly
diminished.
-
- "Optics might have helped certain artists achieve
certain results with greater facility, but it's still not easy," said
Gary Tinterow, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "You still
have to be an artist to conceive a composition and execute it. These
devices
don't do that for you, they're just tools."
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