In 1885, Thomas Eakins transformed an ordinary scene of nude swimming into a painting about masculinity, modernity, and the changing boundaries of the American body.
Fig. 1. Thomas Eakins, The Swimming Hole, 1884–85, oil on canvas, 70 × 92 cm. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas.
In the summer heat outside Philadelphia, six men gather around the edge of a quiet swimming hole. One reclines against the rocks, another sits with his back turned, and at the center, a man stands above the others preparing to dive while two more slip partially beneath the water. None of them are wearing clothes.
To a modern viewer, Thomas Eakins’ The Swimming Hole can seem immediately provocative. Yet when Eakins completed the painting in 1885, the nudity itself was not necessarily what made the scene unusual. In secluded swimming holes across nineteenth-century America, men commonly swam naked together; what was far more unconventional was Eakins’ decision to take this ordinary, private moment and present it with the seriousness traditionally reserved for history, mythology, and classical art.
The six swimmers were not Greek gods, mythological heroes, or imaginary figures, but recognizable men from Eakins’ own life: Talcott Williams, Benjamin Fox, J. Laurie Wallace, Jesse Godley, George Reynolds, and Eakins himself. Nevertheless, he arranged their bodies with the grandeur and balance of ancient sculpture, creating a scene that exists somewhere between the classical and the modern, the idealized and the imperfect, and the public and the private. Behind these contradictions was an America whose relationship with the body was rapidly changing.
Building the American Body
By the late nineteenth century, industrialization was transforming American life as factories expanded, cities grew, and increasing numbers of Americans lived and worked in environments far removed from nature. While these developments represented technological and economic progress, some reformers worried that modern urban life was physically weakening Americans and separating them from the natural world. Exercise became one proposed solution, and organized sports, gymnasiums, and outdoor recreation grew alongside a broader physical culture movement that connected the development of the body with the development of character.
These ideas often looked backward toward ancient Greece. Physical fitness advocates presented the Greeks as an example of a society in which intellectual achievement, moral character, and physical strength could coexist, while the rise of Muscular Christianity similarly treated the maintenance of a healthy body as almost a moral responsibility. Swimming fit naturally within this culture because it provided physical exercise while also offering an escape from the increasingly industrialized city and a return to nature.
Walt Whitman captured this attraction particularly well when he wrote:
“Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature! … Is not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently.”
For Whitman, outdoor nudity could represent a form of freedom from the restrictions of civilization, and he even described nude swimming as having made “a new man” of him. Eakins’ swimmers inhabit a similar world. Their healthy, athletic bodies exist within a natural landscape removed from the rules of urban life, presenting physical activity and nudity as harmonious with nature rather than opposed to it. Yet the freedom represented by the swimming hole was already beginning to disappear.
When Swimming Became Public
Swimming in nineteenth-century America was not always the organized sport we recognize today. Among rural and working-class communities, men and boys often swam informally in rivers, lakes, and swimming holes that could be isolated, unsupervised, and predominantly male. In such environments, swimming naked did not necessarily carry the same moral associations it later would, while swimming itself offered opportunities for companionship, competition, and friendship between men.
Urbanization gradually transformed these practices. As cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston expanded, rivers and waterfronts became increasingly crowded spaces of commerce, transportation, and recreation, making swimmers who might once have remained hidden from public view increasingly visible to strangers. Recreational spaces were changing as well: public beaches, parks, and bathing facilities brought men and women into closer proximity, leading reformers to demand greater modesty and authorities to increasingly encourage gender segregation and bathing suits.
The issue, therefore, was no longer simply the naked body, but who was permitted to see it and under what circumstances. The Swimming Hole can consequently be understood as something close to a snapshot of a disappearing world, preserving a form of informal male recreation at precisely the moment American society was beginning to regulate where and how the naked body could appear. This tension extended beyond swimming and into another space where nudity was carefully controlled: the art world.
Turning Ordinary Men Into Greek Heroes
A naked body in a nineteenth-century painting was not automatically scandalous. Academic art had long permitted nudity when it was distanced from everyday life through mythology, religion, or ancient history, meaning that a naked Greek god could be considered perfectly respectable. The highest forms of art were expected to address elevated subjects carrying moral, intellectual, historical, or patriotic significance rather than the ordinary experiences of contemporary life.
Eakins did almost the opposite. He painted ordinary people he actually knew, engaged in an activity they actually practiced, yet treated them with the seriousness traditionally reserved for classical subjects. The ancient world nevertheless remains visible throughout the composition: the swimmers form a pyramidal arrangement with the standing diver at its apex, the reclining figure on the left has been compared to the famous ancient sculpture known as the Dying Gaul, and the group as a whole resembles a Greek sculptural frieze.
Yet Eakins’ swimmers are not perfect Greek statues. Each possesses a distinct body, pose, age, and build, while Eakins himself appears partially submerged in the lower right, physically separated from his younger models. His less idealized, middle-aged body exists alongside their more conventionally athletic forms, emphasizing the contrast between the perfected body inherited from classical art and the individual body observed in modern life.
By bringing these traditions together, Eakins was effectively asking why the bodies of contemporary Americans should be any less worthy of serious artistic attention than those of the ancient Greeks. Rather than simply abandoning classical art, he transformed its visual language to accommodate the people and experiences of his own time.
An Ancient Ideal Made With Modern Technology
Even Eakins’ process for creating The Swimming Hole crossed the boundary between past and present. Fascinated by the relatively new technology of photography, he photographed his students around Dove Lake, including images of them wrestling naked, and used those photographs to study difficult problems involving movement, balance, foreshortening, and natural poses.
His reliance on photography was controversial because the technology raised fundamental questions about the role of the artist. If a machine could record reality with greater immediacy and precision, some critics wondered what remained for the painter to contribute, while others feared that photography offered artists a shortcut that weakened the importance of direct observation and imagination. Eakins nevertheless incorporated it into his artistic process, using one of the newest technologies available to construct a painting that deliberately recalled artistic traditions thousands of years old.
This contradiction was central to Eakins’ larger project. Photography allowed him to observe the modern body with greater precision, while classical composition allowed him to place those bodies within a much older tradition of artistic beauty. Rather than choosing between the ancient and the modern, Eakins attempted to reconcile them, using contemporary methods to make older artistic ideals relevant to American life.
His commitment to direct observation repeatedly brought him into conflict with the artistic establishment. As a teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Eakins insisted that students study the complete human body, and his removal of a male model’s loincloth during a mixed class contributed to the controversy that eventually forced him from the institution. For Eakins, however, artistic truth depended upon looking directly at the body, and The Swimming Hole asks its audience to participate in precisely that act of observation.
Who Gets to Be Looked At?
Western art had long positioned the female nude as an object to be viewed and admired, but in The Swimming Hole, Eakins reverses this relationship by making men the objects of sustained observation. There is barely a conventional narrative to distract the viewer: no great historical event is taking place, nor is there a mythological story that explains why the figures are naked. Instead, attention is directed toward the bodies themselves, including their backs, shoulders, legs, muscles, poses, and movements.
Some of these poses resemble conventions traditionally associated with female nude painting, yet Eakins’ swimmers remain athletic and physically confident rather than passive. This unusual attention to the male body has contributed to one of the most debated aspects of The Swimming Hole: its homoeroticism. The intimacy of the scene is difficult to ignore, as young men swim naked together while their bodies are placed in close proximity and deliberately presented for observation. Some modern commentators have gone further, attempting to interpret the painting as evidence of Eakins’ own sexuality, but doing so creates a historical problem.
The categories now used to describe sexual identity were themselves developing during the late nineteenth century. Same-sex attraction and intimacy existed long before modern labels, but these experiences were not necessarily understood as evidence of a fixed personal identity in the same way they later became. Simply imposing a modern category onto Eakins or his subjects therefore risks reducing the historical complexity of the relationships and forms of intimacy represented in the painting.
“Homoeroticism” offers a more useful framework because it allows the painting’s intense attention to youthful male bodies, musculature, physical closeness, and beauty to be examined without claiming to know the sexual identities of the people Eakins depicted. Desire does not have to exclude friendship, athleticism, classical beauty, or male companionship; instead, these possibilities can exist alongside one another within the same image. Eakins never resolves that ambiguity, leaving the relationship between masculinity, intimacy, and physical beauty open to interpretation.
Beneath the Surface
What appears at first to be a simple afternoon swim ultimately contains many of the tensions that shaped late nineteenth-century America. Eakins painted the male body at a moment when Americans increasingly celebrated physical strength while simultaneously regulating bodily exposure, depicted a restorative return to nature during an age of rapid industrialization, and borrowed from ancient Greece while experimenting with the modern technology of photography. Most importantly, he gave ordinary contemporary men the seriousness that academic art had traditionally reserved for heroes, gods, and historical figures.
In doing so, Eakins contributed to a broader transformation in American art. Later American Realists increasingly turned toward the world immediately around them, making city streets, workers, athletes, immigrants, bars, and ordinary bodies worthy subjects for painting. George Bellows’ Forty-two Kids (1907) offers a particularly striking continuation of Eakins’ subject, once again presenting nude male swimmers as worthy of serious artistic attention while moving them from Eakins’ quiet, almost classical natural environment into the crowded energy of working-class New York.
Eakins helped demonstrate that American artists did not need Greek gods or distant historical events to create meaningful art because contemporary American life could itself provide subjects worthy of close observation. More than a century later, The Swimming Hole remains difficult to classify precisely because it occupies so many categories at once: it is classical and modern, intimate and ordinary, idealized and unmistakably real.
Beneath the surface of a seemingly simple swimming scene, then, lies a much larger set of questions that remain relevant to the way we look at bodies and art today: Who gets to be seen, how does a body become acceptable or unacceptable, and what happens when ordinary American life is treated as something worthy of art?
Written by Jiasen Zheng
