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Women Artists
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Collection Info
Art by American women constitutes eight percent of the Terra's collection and includes oil and watercolor paintings, pastels, and various types of prints. (updated 2/2019, following deaccessions)
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Susan Macdowell Eakins
Date: 1932
Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Art Acquisition Endowment Fund
Object number: 2000.1
Text Entries: Recognition for Susan Macdowell Eakins' work has long been intertwined with recognition of her gender. Eakins' first success as a promising student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts was the Mary Smith Prize for a woman artist from Philadelphia, awarded in 1879. Her marriage shortly afterward to her teacher Thomas Eakins brought her own painting nearly to a halt, as she devoted herself to assisting with his career. Only after her husband's death in 1916 did Eakins seriously take up her brush again. Her portrait of Italian sculptor and painter Luigi Maratti, himself an alumnus of the Pennsylvania Academy, is typical of the kind of psychological portraiture grounded in a warm, earth-toned palette that Eakins and her husband developed.