Riter Fitzgerald

Thomas Eakins spent his working life in Philadelphia, painting the doctors, scientists, oarsmen and friends of his own city with an uncompromising attention to anatomy and character that had been formed in the Paris studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme and in the Spanish galleries he visited on his way home. Riter Fitzgerald was the art, music and literary critic of the Philadelphia Evening Item, one of the few writers who championed Eakins’s work and who publicly defended him when his teaching methods at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts were attacked. The two men were friends, and the painter set this likeness of the critic in the library that was the setting of his working life. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.