Credit: Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
Only weeks after their first meeting in 1888, Eakins returned to Walt Whitman's house in Camden to paint his portrait. Whitman was delighted with the unembellished likeness. "I never knew of but one artist and that's Tom Eakins," he later wrote, "who could resist the temptation to see what they ought to be rather than what is." The two men, who shared an unapologetic interest in the human body, became good friends. When Whitman died in 1892, Eakins was an honorary pallbearer at his funeral.
