Mrs. Mary Arthur

This bust-length portrait depicts the seventy-six-year-old mother of Eakins’s artist-friend Robert Arthur. As a representation of an elderly model absorbed in an old-fashioned task, the work recalls Eakins’s The Writing Master, a portrait of his father, hanging nearby. Here, as in the earlier painting, the artist used strong contrasts of light and dark to define forms and highlight the hands and face, suggesting both manual dexterity and the wisdom of age. Its austere palette and quiet eloquence also reveal Eakins’s study of works by the seventeenth-century masters Rembrandt, Ribera, and Velázquez.