Walt Whitman

Talcott Williams, a Philadelphia newspaper editor, took Eakins across the Delaware River to Camden, New Jersey, to meet Walt Whitman. The poet was in his late sixties and partly paralysed since a stroke in 1873, and he agreed to sit. This panel, about 14 centimetres square, is a small oil sketch toward the portrait Eakins worked on into 1888, which now hangs at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. It holds little more than the head. Whitman came to like that portrait better than any other likeness of himself, and he said Eakins was the one artist he knew who could resist painting what he thought ought to be instead of what is.

The sketch stayed in the studio. After Eakins died in 1916 it went to his widow, Susan, and then to Samuel Murray, a sculptor who had been his pupil. On the morning after Whitman's death in March 1892, Murray and Eakins had gone together to the poet's house to make his death mask. The museum bought the panel in 1930.