Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins

Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins celebrates LACMA's 2007 acquisition of Eakins's great sporting painting, Wrestlers, 1899. The exhibition will examine the work in a broad thematic context, providing a rare opportunity to consider the history of sporting images in the oeuvre of... Read more

Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins celebrates LACMA’s 2007 acquisition of Eakins’s great sporting painting, Wrestlers, 1899. The exhibition will examine the work in a broad thematic context, providing a rare opportunity to consider the history of sporting images in the oeuvre of this icon of American nineteenth-century art. While his rowing paintings and swimming images were each the focus of special exhibitions, no show has ever been devoted to the varied array of sporting images Eakins depicted. Moreover, while Eakins exhibitions have been increasingly frequent on the East Coast, they have been rare at West Coast venues. Manly Pursuits will trace Los Angeles’s long but little known association with Eakins’s art. The exhibition is curated by Ilene Susan Fort, The Gail & John Liebes Curator of American Art at LACMA.