1. In his book Thomas Eakins: His Life and Work (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1933), p. 189Google Scholar, Lloyd Goodrich states that the Arena is the setting for Between Rounds, probably because it is named in the fight poster in that painting. In all likelihood the Arena is also the setting for the other two paintings, since the backgrounds of all three canvases are so similar and the theater posters in Between Rounds also appear in Taking the Count. According to Joseph Jackson, the Arena, which no longer exists, was first known as the Cyclorama Building, so called after the circular historical paintings that were displayed inside it. During the 1890s it was used as a boxing stadium, but in May 1899 it was reconverted to house a cyclorama of “The Battle of Manila Bay,” which celebrated the triumph of Admiral Dewey. For more on the Arena, see Jackson, 's Encyclopedia of Philadelphia (Harrisburg, Pa.: The National Historical Association, 1931), II, 535–36.Google Scholar

2. There are two sketches of the three figures in Taking the Count (9¾″ × 9¾″)—Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.; and 18″ × 16″—Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.), one study for the referee (20″ × 16″—Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden), and one study for Salutat (20″ × 16″—Collection of Mr. and Mrs. James H. Beal). There are one sketch for Between Rounds (5″ × 4″—Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden), two studies of the seated boxer (20″ × 16″—Philadelphia Museum of Art; and 21″ × 17″—Wichita Art Museum), and a study of the timer (21″ × 17″—Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Rubin).

3. See Goodrich, , Thomas Eakins, p. 188Google Scholar. Correspondence in the American Arts Collection of the Yale University Art Gallery indicates some uncertainty about the identity of the boxers, but Schlicter is definitely the referee. According to the late boxing expert Nat Fleischer (letter to John Marshall Phillips, October 3, 1950), McKeever was “one of the great fighters of his day.” Fleischer also states that Mack (who, like McKeever, was a welterweight) was better known as a trainer and manager than as a fighter, and that Schlicter was a newspaperman who covered boxing. Schlicter also has been credited with having broken the story of the Black Sox scandal in the World Series of 1919. See Rosenzweig, Phyllis D., The Thomas Eakins Collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977), p. 162.Google Scholar

4. In The Life and Work of Thomas Eakins (New York: Grossman, 1974), p. 318Google Scholar, Gordon Hendricks argues that the handler with his hand on the ropes is Joe Mack, painted a second time.

5. Hendricks, , Life and Work, p. 317Google Scholar. Goodrich (Thomas Eakins, pp. 188–89Google Scholar), asserts that the man on the extreme right in the first row of the lower stands is John N. Fort, music and art critic, who posed for an Eakins portrait in 1898. John Wilmerding, who has worked on the portrait of Fort, informs me that the identification is questionable.

6. Advertisements for both shows appeared in the Philadelphia Public Ledger, 04 23, 1898Google Scholar, indicating that the content and, in all likelihood, the format of the two posters are authentic.

7. Smith, a featherweight, was good enough to challenge the noted champion Terrible Terry McGovern in November 1899 but was knocked out in the third round. For records of this and many other fights, I am indebted to Nat Fleischer's All-Time Ring Record Book (Norwalk, Conn.: O'Brien Suburban Press, 1943)Google Scholar. According to Hendricks (Life and Work, p. 241Google Scholar), Smith later became an evangelist on the order of Billy Sunday. In a charming letter written for the Walker Art Galleries when they sold the study of Smith's head and upper torso now in the Wichita Art Museum, the ex-fighter explained that Eakins came to a boxing club and asked him to pose first for Between Rounds, then Salutat (although the dates on the paintings indicate the reverse order). Concerning Eakins' technique, Smith recollects the artist's devotion to authentic detail: “In his work he would not add or subtract. I recall, while painting the portrate [sic] you just sold, I noticed a dark smear across my upper lip, I asked Mr. Eakins what it was, he said it was my mustache; I wanted it of [sic]; He said it was there and there it stayed.” For the entire letter, see “Feather-Weight Billy Smith,” Journal of the Archives of American Art, 4 (07 1964), 15–16Google Scholar. Hendricks (Life and Work, p. 328Google Scholar) identifies the man clapping in the extreme right as Samuel Murray, the figure above Murray's left shoulder as Benjamin Eakins, the spectator above the second carrying the bucket as Clarence Cranmer (see subsequent discussion of Cranmer in the text and in note 9), and the man to his left as Eakins' student David Wilson Jordan, whose portrait Eakins painted in 1899.

8. McCarney, according to Fleischer (letter to Carl S. Smith, August 24, 1971, and Ring Record Book, p. 304Google Scholar), was a fight manager and club owner. He later handled Luther McCarty, one of the most promising of the “white hopes” who were expected to dethrone the controversial black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. (McCarty died of freak brain damage in 1913, before he could ever meet Johnson.) McCarney also worked the Dempsey-Willard title fight in Toledo, July 4, 1919, in which Dempsey won the championship. I have found in the Ring Record Book a number of fights involving McCloskey, including a no-decision bout with McGovern in 1900. McCloskey was a boiler-maker who accidentally lost an eye in 1889. He fought with one eye until 1902, when he lost the other, and then he ran a saloon and cigar store. He brought out a pamphlet, The Blind Pugilist, and His Pupil James McCarty: Starting an Exhibition of Boxing (Philadelphia[?]: n.d.), in which he reviewed his career and explained the fine points of self-defense. He claims in this pamphlet to have taught Charlie McKeever how to box.

9. After Eakins' death, Cranmer served as agent for Mrs. Eakins in the sale of her husband's pictures (Hendricks, , Life and Work, pp. 238, 284–85Google Scholar). A letter of November 13, 1930, from the E. C. Babcock Galleries to Francis B. Garvan, who gave Taking the Count to Yale, refers to the existence of an actual fight program listing Cranmer as timekeeper and Schlicter as referee (Curatorial Files, American Arts Collection, Yale University Art Gallery).

10. Smith lost to Tim Callahan in six rounds. I do not know who won McCloskey's fight with Harry Berger. See Fleischer, , Ring Record Book, p. 115Google Scholar, and Hendricks, , Life and Work, p. 239Google Scholar. Hendricks (p. 346) says that the Smith-Callahan fight is depicted in Between Rounds.

11. For photographs of these sculptures, see Hendricks, , Life and Work, p. 248Google Scholar, and Cox, William D., ed., Boxing in Art and Literature (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1935), facing p. 208.Google Scholar

12. Goodrich, , Thomas Eakins, pp. 92, 103Google Scholar; Hendricks, , Life and Work, pp. 236, 239Google Scholar; and McKinney, Roland, Thomas Eakins (New York: Crown, 1942), p. 18.Google Scholar

13. Near the end of his life, Goodrich adds (Thomas Eakins, pp. 103, 140Google Scholar), Eakins liked to talk with Murray about the prizefights.

14. For more on the history of sport, with particular reference to the status of boxing in nineteenth-century America, see Betts, John R., America's Sporting Heritage: 1850–1950 (Reading, Pa.: Addison Wesley, 1974)Google Scholar; Dulles, Foster R., A History of Recreation: America Learns to Play (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1965), pp. 114–46, 226–28Google Scholar; Edwards, Duncan, “Life at the Athletic Club,” Scribner's, 18 (07 1895), 4–23Google Scholar; Holliman, Jennie, American Sports: 1785–1835 (Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1975), pp. 138–47Google Scholar; Krout, John A., Annals of American Sport (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1929), pp. 28, 206, 227–39Google Scholar; Paxson, Frederic L., “The Rise of Sport,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 4 (09 1917), 143–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Johnston, Alexander, Ten—and Out!: The Complete History of the Prize Ring in America (New York: Ives Washburn, 1947).Google Scholar

15. Quoted in Goodrich, , Thomas Eakins, p. 13.Google Scholar

16. In regard to Eakins' interest in anatomy and his teaching methods, see Goodrich, , Thomas Eakins, pp. 9–10, 41, 65–84Google Scholar; Hendricks, , Life and Work, pp. 125–35, 211–17Google Scholar; and McHenry, Margaret, Thomas Eakins Who Painted (privately printed, 1946), pp. 44, 126Google Scholar. In the 1870s and 1880s, Eakins also used nude athletes in his ground-breaking work in the photographic study of the movement of men and animals. For reproductions of several of these photographs, see Hendricks, Gordon, The Photographs of Thomas Eakins (New York: Grossman, 1972), Nos. 87–121, 127–32.Google Scholar

17. Hendricks, , Photographs, Nos. 122–26Google Scholar. See also McCoy, Garnett. “Some Recently Discovered Thomas Eakins Photographs,” Archives of American Art Journal, 12, No. 4 (1972), 17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. In both sketches for Taking the Count the boxers are nude, indicating that they posed that way.

19. Quoted in Goodrich, , Thomas Eakins, p. 20.Google Scholar

20. Note, in particular, Eakins' dislike for the work of Rubens, which he saw in Spain in 1869: “Rubens is the nastiest most vulgar noisy painter that ever lived. His men are twisted to pieces. His modelling is always crooked and dropsical and no marking is ever in its right place or anything like what he sees in nature, his people never have bones, his color is dashing and flashy, his people must all be in the most violent action must use the strength of Hercules if a little watch is to be wound up, the wind must be blowing great guns even in a chamber or dining room, everything must be making a noise and tumbling about there must be monsters too for his men were not monstrous enough for him” (quoted in McHenry, , Thomas Eakins Who Painted, pp. 17–18).Google Scholar

21. In regard to Eakins' special interest in Rush's supposed use of a nude female model in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia, see Hendricks, Gordon, “Eakins' William Rush Carving His Allegorical Statue of the Schuylkill,” The Art Quarterly, 31 (Winter 1968), 382–404Google Scholar, and Goodrich, , Thomas Eakins, pp. 57–60Google Scholar. Hendricks and Goodrich agree that Eakins, hurt by the critical treatment of The Gross Clinic at the Centennial in 1876 and feeling restricted by conventions concerning the nude, sensed a kinship with Rush.

The natural poses or situations of most of Eakins' nudes, and of the Rush pictures in particular, underline the whole issue of the slow acceptance of the nude as a subject. When Eakins observed that he could “conceive of few circumstances wherein [he] would have to paint a woman naked,” he probably used the words “have to” as much or more in the sense of opportunity than obligation. That is, he was aware that he would have few chances to paint the nude besides the sketches of the figure classes. Recall his resignation as professor of drawing and painting at the Academy in 1886 largely as a result of the dispute over his insistence on using live models of both sexes in both male and female classes. David Sellin discusses the history of the nude in Philadelphia in “Howard Roberts, Thomas Eakins, and a Century of Philadelphia Nudes,” in The First Pose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), pp. 19–72.Google Scholar

22. The central painting is The Wrestlers (1899—Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts). There are also two studies, one in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the other in the Los Angeles County Museum.

23. Hendricks, , Photographs, No. 229. See also Nos. 230–31.Google Scholar

24. Charles H. Morgan discusses Bellows and the ring in George Bellows: Painter of America (New York: Reynal, 1965), pp. 69, 98, 263–64Google Scholar. Jules David Prown compares Eakins' and Bellows' boxers in American Painting: From Its Beginnings to the Armory Show (Geneva, Switzerland: Skira, 1969), pp. 130–31.Google Scholar

25. Eakins carved on the original frame of this painting and wrote on the back of the Hirshhorn study for it the longer title “Dextra victrice conclamantes salutat” (“He salutes the cheering crowd with his victorious right hand”). For more on Eakins and Gérôme, see Ackerman, Gerald, “Thomas Eakins and His Parisian Masters Gérôme and Bonnat,” Gazette des Beaux Arts, 73 (04 1969), 235–56Google Scholar, and Hendricks, , Life and Work, pp. 41–56.Google Scholar

26. Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Dr. Marian Davis.

27. Ibid.

28. Thomas Eakins to Frances Eakins, July 8, 1869, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Dr. Marian Davis.

29. According to Goodrich, Eakins also inscribed the studies of Billy Smith and Cranmer to his subjects. The portrait of Mrs. McKeever is lost. See Goodrich, , Thomas Eakins, pp. 104, 188–89, 208Google Scholar, and Hendricks, , Life and Work, p. 241.Google Scholar

30. Schendler, Sylvan, Eakins (Boston: Little Brown, 1967), pp. 152–55.Google Scholar

31. Hendricks, , Life and Work, pp. 239, 243–44, 276.Google Scholar

32. In the Yale sketch for Taking the Count, the referee appears to be wearing a light-colored hat with a black band. Eakins changed his costume in the final painting, perhaps either because referees at the Arena actually did dress formally (whereas Schlicter posed in more casual clothes in Eakins' studio) or because he wanted to emphasize the gravity of the bout.

33. “The posters hung up on the gallery, simple documentary elements of the scene, colorful reminders of the late nineties, are parodies of the painting's meaning, light-hearted commentaries upon its serious purpose” (Schendler, , Eakins, p. 152Google Scholar). In choosing to include these posters, Eakins was perhaps reminded of another Gerome painting, The Duel After the Masquerade (1857–59—Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, Md.). The setting of this narrative work is early morning in a snowy wooded area, and we are witnessing the aftermath of a fatal duel that presumably was prompted by some affront at a masquerade ball. A man dressed as Pierrot (recalling the clown in the Ballet Girl poster) slumps—fatally stabbed—in the arms of his distraught seconds, who are also in costume, as his opponent (who wears the garb of an American Indian) and the opponent's supporters leave the field. Although, as in the case of Hail Caesar! and Salutat, (Gérôme's painting is much more melodramatic than Eakins', the ironic juxtaposition of comic gaiety and grim conflict is notably similar.

34. In my discussion of the “strenuous life” and its connection to sport and art in America, I am indebted to Cady, Edwin H., “‘The Strenuous Life’ as a Theme in American Cultural History,” New Voices in American Studies, ed. Browne, Ray B. et al. (Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue Univ. Studies, 1966), pp. 59–66Google Scholar; Harris, Neil, “Introduction,” The Land of Contrasts, 1880–1901 (New York: George Braziller, 1970), pp. 1–28Google Scholar; and Higham, John, “The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890's,” Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press), pp. 73–102.Google Scholar

35. Roosevelt, Theodore, “The Strenuous Life,” in The Strenuous Life (New York: The Review of Reviews Company, 1910), p. 3Google Scholar. Roosevelt discusses his personal experience with boxing and prizefighting in his An Autobiography (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921), pp. 28, 40–44Google Scholar. Roosevelt was friendly with several professional fighters, including heavyweight champion Robert Fitzsimmons, and he worked out with Mike Donovan, one-time middleweight champion and boxing master at the New York Athletic Club. See Donovan, 's The Roosevelt That I Know: Ten Years of Boxing with the President (New York, 1909), pp. 3–20Google Scholar. For a defense of boxing in terms of the “strenuous life,” see Osborne, Duffield, “A Defense of Pugilism,” North American Review, 146 (04 1888), 430–35.Google Scholar

36. F. O. Matthiessen compares Eakins and Whitman in American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), pp. 604–10.Google Scholar

37. See, for example, W. J. Glackens' wash drawing The Boxing Match (1906–Collection of Arthur G. Altschul) and the catalogue of the exhibition “Boxing and Wrestling in Art,” Bulletin of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 1 (09 1943), pp. 43–45Google Scholar. See also Cox, , Boxing in Art and LiteratureGoogle Scholar. One of the most recent of many works that examine the American prize ring and its cultural milieu is the 1976 Academy Award-winning film Rocky, in which the hero is, coincidentally, a Philadelphia fighter who does his roadwork on the mountain of steps in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

38. Lindsay, Vachel, Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1955), pp. 93–95Google Scholar. Lindsay dedicated the poem to Louis Untermeyer and Robert Frost, and, according to Untermeyer in From Another World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), pp. 139–44Google Scholar, tried to get Harriet Monroe to bring out a John L. Sullivan number of Poetry.

39. There are some precedents of paintings and drawings of boxers in the United States, but I have found none by any painter of note. Currier and Ives issued a popular print of the 1860 heavyweight championship fight in England between American John Heenan and Englishman Tom Sayers, as well as portraits of Heenan, Sayers, and later Sullivan and Corbett. See also George A. Hayes's charming primitive Bare Knuckles (about 1860), in 101 Masterpieces of American Primitive Painting from the Collection of William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, New Edition (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1962)Google Scholar, plate 91. There is, of course, a tradition of boxing in arts and letters that dates back to ancient times, and it was particularly strong in England from the Georgian through the Romantic period. See Cox, Boxing in Art and Literature, and Lynch, Bohun, The Prize Ring (London: Country Life Ltd., 1925)Google Scholar. The literate heavyweight champion Gene Tunney brought out his own survey of boxing literature, called ingeniously “The Ring and the Book: A Champion Surveys the Literary Champions Who Have Written of the Glories of the Fight,” Golden Book Magazine, 19 (04 1934), 406–12.Google Scholar