Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) was a noted American realist painter, sculptor, teacher, and, from about 1880-1900, an avid and innovative photographer who dedicated himself to understanding and depicting the human figure. While he was not the only painter to incorporate photography into his practice, Eakins' technical mastery of the Albumen and platinum printing processes and his images' compelling, personal nature distinguished him among other 19th-century artists.

Eakins began his career assisting his father as a calligrapher in Philadelphia. His interest in draftsmanship led him to study drawing and anatomy at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) from 1862-66 and go to anatomy lectures at Jefferson Medical College before traveling abroad to attend the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1866-70). After returning to Philadelphia in 1870, Eakins began to paint portraits and sporting scenes to support himself. He joined the PAFA staff as an assistant instructor in 1876 and became director in 1882.

Although we do not know from whom or when Eakins learned photography, by 1880, he had purchased a wooden 4x5-inch camera and quickly incorporated the medium into his professional and personal life. As a teacher and painter, Eakins recognized photography as an essential tool that the modern artist could use to better understand the world around him or her and remained committed to its use in his courses and his studio. As such, most of the more than 800 photographs attributed to him are figure studies (both nude and clothed) and portraits of his pupils, family, and close friends. While some images directly relate to his paintings, Eakins primarily viewed photography as a means to gain a deeper understanding of the gestures, poses, and themes of his oils.

Taking a collaborative approach to the relatively new medium, Eakins often relied upon his wife, students, and family members to help take the picture or print the negatives, making the exact attribution of many images impossible.

In addition to his early pursuits, Eakins also briefly joined the photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) in his pioneering photographic studies of animal and human locomotion at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1884. Building upon Muybridge's stop motion experiments that took a separate image of each movement, Eakins invented a multiple-image camera lens that allowed him to accurately record the various stages of an action at exact intervals on a single negative.

While Eakins gained the admiration of many of his students at PAFA and is considered to be mostly responsible for elevating the school to a leading American art academy, his teaching methods were often at odds with Victorian morals. Several practices, including his insistence that both male and female students draw from nude models and inviting his students to participate in often-nude photographic studies, among other behavioral accusations, led the school's board to request his resignation in February 1886. Seeking an escape from this scandal, he left Philadelphia for the Dakota Territory in 1887, where he photographed and participated in ranch life. This trip proved restorative to Eakins' health, and upon his return, he resumed his portrait painting practice and began teaching private lessons, which he would continue until his death in 1916.

As Eakins made photographs for very personal and often private reasons, there are only two recorded instances of its exhibition during his lifetime: as part of the Philadelphia Photographic Society's annual show (1886) and at the New York Camera Club in 1899-1900. However, over the past 40 years, the role of photography in Eakins' practice has gained significance with increasing scholarship and several exhibitions devoted to this subject, beginning with the traveling exhibition Thomas Eakins as a Photographer, (1969-70) organized by PAFA. Today, his photographs are in many public collections, and significant holdings of this material can be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.