Eakins, Thomas, American (1844 – 1916)
Mrs. Edith Mahon, 1904
Oil on canvas
Narrative Inscription on verso: To My Friend Edith Mahon / Thomas Eakins 1904
Purchased with the Drayton Hillyer Fund
[on view]
Edith Mahon, an accomplished pianist, emigrated from England to Philadelphia at the turn of the century. She played numerous times at the Eakinses’s home, and the artist inscribed this portrait “To my friend Edith Mahon” on the back of the canvas. She sits in a barely visible chair and looks directly at us with an expression that reveals as much as it conceals, creating a melancholy atmosphere.
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916), on the other hand, was a realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. For the length of his professional career, from the early 1870s until his health began to fail some forty years later, Eakins worked exactingly from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia. He painted portraits, usually of friends, family members, or prominent people in the arts, sciences, medicine, and clergy. Mrs. Edith Mahon was widely considered one of Thomas Eakins’ finest portraits and also constituted the first work by Eakins in any public art collection.
Mrs. Mahon was forty when Eakins was hired to paint her, but she looks older. The artist’s widow recalled her as having suffered from “great unkindness,” and it is possible that her sense of fundamental sadness was captured by the artist. Mrs. Mahon appears lost in thought with her gaze unfocused, her skin also seems pale. Although she did not elaborate, Mrs. Mahon later stated that she did not like the portrait, but had sat for it and accepted it as a favor to the artist. Her reaction to Eakins’s work was one shared by many who sat for him, as he never wavered in his attempts to mirror the character of his sitters—respectfully, if not always charitably—in their outward appearance.
The SCMA bought this painting in 1932 and it was lent to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for the exhibition A New World: Masterpieces of American Painting, 1760-1910, from September 7 – November 13, 1983.
A piece of insider news also came across that the great, great, granddaughter of Mrs. Mahon visited the museum in 2018 and got on FaceTime to show it to her grandmother while she was at the museum.
How do you see this painting helpful for other fields of study?
Read more about the painting here.
Borrow the catalog for A New World: Masterpieces of American Painting, 1760-1910 here.
Read more about Thomas Eakins art and life here and here.
Read about an interesting comparison between Edvard Munch’s Woman in Black and Mrs. Edith Mahon on the scmainsider here.