Pondering the closing of the National Academy of Design’s home on Fifth Avenue, Eakins’s vulnerable expression, caught between resistance and resignation, may well speak for many artists.

The Screaming Child

A drawing like this involves seeing, reacting, and remembering. With the pen in continual movement, the drawing embodies a seamless coordination of hand, eye, mind, and heart.
Themes that I’d find irredeemably cornball from any other artist are rescued both by Abbott Thayer’s prickly earnestness and his formal abilities as a draftsman and painter.
Arguably the greatest draftsman of his time, there was nothing fastidious in his thinking. Degas couldn’t wait to find new ways to get his hands dirty.