The Hyde Collection presents a remarkable Portrait of Walt Whitman (1887-1888) by Thomas Eakins (1844-1914).
Thomas Eakins, American (1844-1916), Walt Whitman (1819-1892), 1887-88, oil on canvas, 30 1/8 x 24 1/4 in., Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. General Fund, 1917.1
The Whitman portrait is considered one of Eakins’s finest paintings, and only rarely leaves Philadelphia, where it is a featured work in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA). This evocative image of one of America’s most influential poets, by one of the nation’s greatest artists, will be in Glens Falls for six months, as a second exchange for the year-long loan of The Hyde Collection’s Portrait of Henry Ossawa Tanner (ca. 1897) by Eakins.
Tanner was one of Thomas Eakins’s students at the Pennsylvania Academy and the portrait has been lent to PAFA for their exhibition Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit. This is a major retrospective celebrating Tanner’s position in American art as a pioneering African-American, as well as establishing him as one of our most significant expatriate artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Portrait of Walt Whitman will be exhibited in Hyde House where visitors can also see In the Studio (1884), another work by Eakins in the Museum’s collection.
Before returning to The Hyde, the Tanner portrait will have been exhibited in three national venues: PAFA, January 27 – April 14, 2012; Cincinnati Art Museum, May 26 – September 9, 2012; and then traveling to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, October 14 – January 6, 2013.
The Hyde Collection
Art Museum & Historic House
161 Warren Street, Glens Falls, NY 12801
p. 518.792.1761
fx.518.792.9197
www.hydecollection.org