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female and male students as models was considered unorthodox if not downright radical.
Understandably, most of the photographic studies Eakins produced depicted young naked men. By
1886, his nude photographs resulted in a public scandal which forced him to resign from the
institution. In addition the controversy resulted in a major setback for his career and a lifelong rift
with his in-laws, the MacDowells.
Eakins’ female nudes are rare, which historian and specialist Lloyd Goodrich has attributed to “the
prudery of Eakins’ period and environment.” In a published letter that appears in the Sotheby’s Park
Bernet auction catalog of November 10, 1977, in which twenty-one photographs from the Collection
of Joseph Seraphin (a co-owner of the Olympia Gallery) were offered, Goodrich adds,“In view of
Eakins’ great interest in the nude, it has been puzzling that only four or five photographs of female
models have been published, by contrast with many of male nudes. One suspected that the female
figure played a larger role in his photography than the few surviving works would indicate.”
The uncredited author of an essay in the catalog identified a possible reason for the scarcity of Eakins’
female nude studies as follows, “. . . extant examples of female nudes were destroyed after Susan
MacDowell Eakins’ death by a friend who, apparently, was sensitive to how these images had
compromised Eakins’ reputation.”