1883-1885

Young Boy, Nude

This photograph was likely taken in a studio belonging to the Realist painter Thomas Eakins, but the identities of both photographer and sitter are unknown. As an art instructor, Eakins championed the camera’s capacity to enhance understanding of human anatomy and the natural world, and many of the students and fellow artists in his circle also took up photography. The use of nude models, however, was controversial in Eakins’s lifetime. Considered particularly indecorous were nude photographs of adult female sitters, though some male students also expressed discomfort at being asked to model nude. The nudity of children in Eakins’s and his peers’ photographs appears to have been less provocative for 1880s Philadelphians. Eakins’s brother-in-law Will Crowell prohibited Eakins from photographing his children, but this seems to have been an isolated occurrence. Many of these images, including the one shown here, were owned by another brother-in-law, Frank Stephens.