Picture

Boy butts #5

Thomas Eakins
The Swimming Hole

Thomas Eakins was an American painter, photographer and sculptor (1844 – 1916). His realism and uncompromising celebration of nude figures was controversial in Victorian Philadelphia, and cost him professionally but garnered the approval of many, including the poet Walt Whitman.

The very formal, triangular composition focuses on, well, the point of interest. It all looks - especially the background - like it's derived from Renaissance influences from Leonardo da Vinci. But I've read that that's not so much chiaroscuro as dirty varnish. Still, the foreground is exuberant American realism.

The painting was based on photographs of Eakins and his (ahem) students at a creek near Philadelphia.

Unfortunately, there's not a good, high-resolution image of this anywhere on the web. The painting is in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

Thomas Eakins at Wikipedia here.
An essay about The Swimming Hole at Traditional Fine Arts Organization.
The Amon Carter Museum.