Anatomist, Inchworm

Thomas Eakins was a realistic painter, Albert Pinkham Ryder a romantic one. But they had a good deal of history in common. Both were born about the time the U. S. fought Mexico, died just before it entered World War I. Neither was popular in his lifetime, though each had tiis small circle of admirers and was elected to the National Academy in his late 50s. Both were moderately well off. And posthumously both rank high in the select assembly of U. S. old masters. Two exhibitions of Eakins' work and one of Ryder's on view in Manhattan last week served to reassert their stature.

Last December Thomas Eakins' widow died, in the plain Philadelphia house to which she had gone as a bride in 1884. Fortnight ago the Eakins pictures she had left went on display in adjacent galleries. The first day's sale alone came to more than the $15,000 Eakins made from painting in his 72 years. Eakins' portraits were too explicit to please his indignant sitters, while his interest in the human figure led him, to paint nudes too explicit for his time. When he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts "the female models wore masks, thus hiding their identity and their shame from the world." When he taught there, he was dismissed for asking a young lady art student to substitute for an absent model.

A trained anatomist, Eakins painted figures from the skeleton out, tried to be just as searching in his portrayal of character. One of his few sitters who liked himself as Eakins saw him was Walt Whitman. "Eakins' picture grows on you," said sturdy Walt. "He is not a painter, he is a force." With sober force Eakins painted wrestlers, women knitting, river scenes, surgeons' clinics.

In his 70 years, Albert Ryder completed less than 200 pictures. A recluse who painted from imagination, he lived in a messy Manhattan studio. Working on several pictures at a time, he gave them lustre, depth and mystery through alternate layers of paint and glaze. After laboring 18 years on Macbeth and the Witches, one of the romantically sombre canvases in his present Manhattan show at Knoedler's, he remarked: "I think the sky is getting interesting." Critics agree that Ryder's skies are the most interesting in U. S. painting.

Ryder compared himself to an inchworm revolving at the end of a twig, but for all his groping indecision his moonlit fantasies are spacious and simple in design. They reflect his eccentricities (he once proposed marriage to a neighbor the first time he met her because he liked the tone of her violin), his essentially happy life, spent doing what he most wanted to do. "The artist," Ryder once said, "needs but a roof, a crust of bread and his easel, and all the rest God gives him in abundance."

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