About Susan Eakins:
Known for: early career in photography
Occupation: photographer, painter
Dates: September 21, 1851 - December 27, 1938
Also known as: Susan Macdowell, Susan Macdowell Eakins
Background, Family:
- Siblings: seven siblings; her sister Elizabeth Macdowell also became an artist
Education:
- Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
Marriage, Children:
- husband: Thomas Eakins (married 1884; instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and artist)
- children: none
More About Susan Eakins:
Susan Eakins was born Susan Macdowell in 1851 in Philadelphia. She met her husband when she was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied for six years, and married him in 1884, after graduating.
Susan Eakins was mostly a support for her husband in his career as a teacher, until his death in 1916, though she had a studio in their home separate from his home studio. She did some painting and took some photographs. Nude photos that he took of her and she took of him were among their projects.
Susan Eakins displayed some of her own paintings in a show she helped to organize in 1920 in Philadelphia, a show which also featured her husband and her sister Elizabeth.
Susan Eakins began painting more afer her husband's death. She died in 1938, and it took until 1973 before her first one-woman art exhibition, held at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where she had studied.
