Miss Amelia Van Buren

Amelia Van Buren came to Philadelphia in the 1880s to study painting with Thomas Eakins, who called her one of his most gifted pupils. She later turned to photography. Around 1891 Eakins painted her seated and turned slightly away, her head resting on one hand, a fan loose in her lap, her face caught in the middle of a thought. He gives almost nothing in the way of a setting. A shaft of light from the left models her face and hands, and everything else falls back into shadow. Van Buren was often unwell and had been diagnosed with what doctors then called neurasthenia, a kind of nervous exhaustion, and something of that weariness seems to settle into her distant, sidelong gaze.