Portrait of Lieutenant Jean-Julien Lemordant
Artist
Susan Hannah MacDowell Eakins
(American, 1851 - 1938)
CultureAmerican
Date1917
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions30 1/8 × 25 in. (76.5 × 63.5 cm)
Signedsigned twice S.M. Eakins and dated 1917, lower right
Credit LineMasterpiece Society Purchase Fund
Object number2018.39
Collections
On View
On viewLabel TextSusan Macdowell Eakins American, 1851-1938 Portrait of Lieutenant Jean-Julien Lemordant, 1917 Oil on canvas With his head wrapped in bandages, a young soldier reaches out for comfort from a canine companion. The subject of this portrait is Jean-Julien Lemordant, a French painter who was wounded during combat in World War I and tragically blinded. Susan Macdowell Eakins based this painting on a photograph of Lemordant that appeared in the French magazine L’Illustration. Eakins often used photographs as aids in her work. Shedeveloped a highly realist style of painting in response to her early training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins, who she married in 1884. Gift of the Masterpiece Society 2018.39ProvenanceThe artist; The French Benevolent Society, Philadelphia, gift of the artist, 1917; Private collection, New York; purchased by the Masterpiece Society as a gift for the Chrysler Museum of Art, 2018.Exhibition HistoryPhiladelphia, Thomas Jefferson University, long-term loan, 1982-1994 Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson University, The Eakins Gallery, 1994-2013 New York, Debra Force Fine Art, Capturing Personality Faces from the 18th – 20th Centuries, January 28 – February 26, 2016, illus. in color Philadelphia, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, World War I and American Art, November 4, 2016 – April 9, 2017, p. 261, plate 127, illus. (this exhibition travelled to New York, New-York Historical Society, May 26 – September 3, 2017, and Nashville, Tennessee, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, October 6, 2017 – January 21, 2018)
