How does this artwork elucidate its Background?
Largely due to controversies surrounding his work, Eakins was not invited to become a member of the National Academy of Design until 1902, well after many of his contemporaries. It was only in the late 1890s that his reputation benefited from a positive reassessment by his colleagues, as well as a rediscovery by a younger generation of artists and writers. Unanimously approved as an Associate-elect of the National Academy on 12 March 1902, Eakins quickly painted this self-portrait and submitted it to the Academy on 5 May, and was accepted as a full Academician at the annual meeting on 14 May; he remains the only artist in the Academy's history to be made an Associate and full Academician in the same year.Previously Eakins had included himself in several early sporting pictures, as well as The Swimming Hole, and in his large group portraits The Agnew Clinic and The Gross Clinic, and later he would paint himself in side view for William Rush and His Model. However, the two paintings of 1902 were his only independent self-portraits.
It is possible that the smaller oil was intended as an anatomical study or an experiment in emotional tone that Eakins decided not to submit to the Academy. The small size, 20 by 16 inches (510 mm × 410 mm), was used by Eakins for only two other portraits. Of frontal format, it is more directly confrontational than the Academy's painting, and appears to have been left unfinished. The artist may have been wearing a gray sweater seen previously in an 1895 photograph. Eakins' student Charles Bregler recalled that the painting was made in one sitting.
The Swimming Hole William Rush and His Model left The Gross Clinic The Agnew Clinic National Academy of Design