The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts: An Ideal and a Symbol

By 1805, the year the Pennsylvania Acad­emy of the Fine Arts was founded, Phila­delphia had achieved a large measure of political, social and economic stability. It had been the nation’s capital and contin­ued to thrive as a center of banking and commerce. The largest city in the United States at the opening of the nineteenth century, it was arguably the center of culture, with Boston its...
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Bookshelf

Thomas Eakins edited by John Wilmerding Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994 (212 pages, cloth, $49.95) “Frank,” “brutal,” “raw,” “uncompro­mising,” “diabolically realistic,” and “manly” were terms once used to describe the work of Philadelphian Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), one of the greatest American painters of the...
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