Written prior to a 1985 episode of the PBS series Smithsonian World, this essay profiles American painter Thomas Eakins. The qualities defining Eakins’s subjects—self-discipline, purposeful effort, and genuine achievement through hard work—also describe the people McCullough has written about, and arguably himself as well.

Eakins spent his career in near-total obscurity. His only solo exhibition came at age 52; he sold only 20 paintings in his lifetime; and no magazine article about him appeared while he lived. His celebrated rowing portrait, Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871), went unsold until the Metropolitan Museum acquired it in 1934. Today his reputation is enormous. The Gross Clinic is widely considered the foremost American painting of the 19th century, and Abram Lerner, founding director of the Hirshhorn Museum, ranks Eakins’s small portrait of his wife, Susan MacDowell Eakins, among the greatest psychological portraits ever made—the single work he would carry out in a fire.

McCullough argues that Eakins’s significance rests on his deliberate rejection of fashionable subjects. The modern culture of instant, disposable celebrity would have struck Eakins as repellent. Of his more than 200 portraits, only 25 were commissioned; the rest represented his own judgment about who deserved honor as a permanent historical record.