Study for William Rush Carving

This is a painted study for Thomas Eakins’ painting “William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River” (1908) in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. The completed painting features a historically reimagined representation of Philadelphia sculptor William Rush carving a wooden statue of a nymph, which was installed in the city’s Centre Square in 1809. The most complete and recognizable figure in this sketch is the female model who stands in the center of the final painted composition. Eakins was arguably the most renowned American Realist artist in the late nineteenth century and an influential instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Despite his regular study of the nude figure due to his devotion to realism and an accurate understanding human anatomy, he rarely painted nudes. This study therefore is a rare work featuring the female nude.