Nuotata

Eakins painted this in 1885, and it cost him his job. Six men swim naked at a lake outside Philadelphia, and they were not anonymous models. They were Eakins himself, in the water at lower right, together with his own students and friends, all recognisable. Eakins ran the Pennsylvania Academy and insisted his pupils study the nude from life, the way he believed the Greeks had. The man who commissioned this refused to take it, and within a year Eakins was pushed out of the academy over exactly that teaching. In 1925 the people of Fort Worth bought the painting from his widow for 750 dollars, and when the city later tried to sell it the outcry kept it in Texas, where the Amon Carter museum holds it now.