Arcádia

In the early 1880s Eakins ran the school at the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia, and he was pushing an idea the city found scandalous, that serious art starts with the naked body, studied from life. Arcadia is that conviction dressed as a Greek daydream. Three figures rest in a golden meadow, one piping in a land with no work and no time. Yet Eakins built this ancient calm with his newest tool. He photographed his models outdoors, among them his future wife Susan Macdowell and his young nephew, then projected the pictures onto the canvas with a magic lantern and cut faint guide marks into the wet paint. The instrument the standing youth plays is a set of panpipes, the shepherd's pipe of that imagined world.