Thomas Eakins : “The Chess Players” (1876)

Though his is hardly a household name, Thomas Eakins is widely credited as one of the most important figures in American art history. His principal source of inspiration was his own middle-class social environment. He was, in the words of art critic John Canaday, “a supreme realist” who seems to “have recorded his fellow Americans with a perception that was often as tender as it was vigorous, and to have preserved for us the essence of an American life which, indeed, he did not idealize — because it seemed to him beautiful beyond the necessity of idealization.”

Set in a Renaissance Revival parlor in Philadelphia, The Chess Players pays homage to two of the artist’s mentors. His father is the central figure observing the chess game, which is played on a table bearing the inscription “Benjamin Eakins’s son painted this in ’76.” Hanging above the mantle is a reproduction of a painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme. Eakins’s principal instructor in France, the inclusion of his work in a painting of the artist’s father pays tribute to him as the father-figure in his own right; the father of his artistic and professional life.