It was not until the early 1900s that Eakins began to attract significant public interest. In 1902, when he was in his late 50s, he was finally invited to join the National Academy of Design. He painted a bust-length self-portrait as a “diploma picture” to mark the occasion. A preparatory oil sketch, which Eakins completed in a single session, shows him head-on, half swallowed by shadows. Everything below the neck is lost in a scumbled darkness. The artist’s face is full of weary sadness, resigned but unconquered. In the finished portrait, Eakins brought himself forward into a warm, invigorating light and accoutered himself in coat and tie. His head is cocked to the right, his gaze is even, sure, assessing. The sadness is still there, but so is a dignified humanity.
It is instructive to contrast Eakins’s portraits with those of such 20th-century stars as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. In a curious way such painters have become the Sargents of today: facile purveyors of expected images to the chic and well-connected. The difference of course is that establishment taste is now cheerfully “anti-establishment.” While Sargent idealized his subjects, painters like Bacon and Freud diminish them. Bacon systematically smudged and distorted the faces of his sitters; Freud saddles them with a ghastly dermatological emergency. The announced intention of these procedures is greater honesty and psychological depth; they are supposed to be keys to authenticity, revealing humanity in all its wretchedness if not, indeed, its depravity. But the result is a dehumanizing art that depends for its effect on a handful of visual clichés.\
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