Portrait of Luigi Maratti

Susan Macdowell Eakins’s Portrait of Luigi Maratti portrays a Philadelphia artist and friend of the painter in an intimate view. In the bust portrait Maratti is turned toward the left, his face almost in silhouette with the right side lost in deep shadow. Aside from the sitter’s red tie, his bright white shirt collar, and the touches of red in his ear, the painting is an almost monochrome image in browns and black. Maratti’s closed eyes suggest a state of deep contemplation, as if he is unaware of the close-up scrutiny of the artist and, by extension, the viewer.

Maratti’s tousled black hair and strong features are complemented by Eakins’s vigorous brushwork, which lends an air of spontaneity, an effect enhanced by the dripped paint on the sitter’s sleeve at lower right. However, letters to her friend Seymour Adelman testify to the painter’s slow, painstaking work on the portrait, which was completed over a five-month period. Eakins’s respect for careful technique, her focus on subjects from her own immediate world, and the dark tones of this closely observed likeness all demonstrate the influence of her mentor and husband, painter Thomas Eakins. Indeed, the composition, the figure’s pose, and even his dark complexion and goatee beard recall Thomas Eakins’s portrait of another artist, Henry O. Tanner (1902, The Hyde Collection). The Tanner portrait remained in the Eakins’s home after his death, and was sold by Susan Eakins soon after she painted her portrait of Maratti.

Susan Eakins subordinated her own work to her partner’s career throughout their marriage, but after his death she returned with fresh interest to the portraiture and figure painting with which she had begun her career in the mid-1870s. Like her husband, she painted people she knew, many of them fellow artists of Philadelphia. Luigi Maratti (or Maraffi, 1891–?) was a sculptor and craftsman who was born in Aversa, Italy, and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Charles Grafly (1862–1929), a student of Thomas Eakins. Susan Eakins was introduced to Maratti by Samuel Salko (1888–1968),  a mutual friend and fellow artist. The closely studied result is a sympathetic representation in which the sitter’s closed expression does not shut out viewers but invites them into the inner world of the artist.

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