Quote:
It's the roundness of artists like Sargent and Hals that separate their work from someone like T. Eakins who loved the one-eyed camera.
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I'm late to the vocation and not altogether familiar with Eakins' failings, but in researching another matter I was reminded that the Art Students League's famous instructor, Robert Beverly Hale, chose some of Eakins' work to illustrate his master class figure drawing lessons, which suffer from no dearth of roundness or form.
It was a highlight of my young and I suppose pruriently energized introduction to art, to read Hale's commentary, a sidebar to Eakins' drawing, on "The Breast -- Front View":
"[Y]ou should always place the breasts so that they look this way and that way. This one is looking up at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and this one is looking to the police precinct on 58th Street. That's the way they ought to be placed -- church and state. Do not let them look straight ahead."