Picture The Ariadne by American painter Wyatt Eaton

Mrs. Eaton in her brief sketch of her husband Wyatt Eaton's life says that "one of his most cherished desires was to become a painter of the nude," and it may be added that his later years were pretty much devoted to the effort to realize this ambition. His works of the kind are few, but for purity and grace they are hardly to be excelled in American painting. Painting The Ariadne in the Evans Collection at the National Gallery is one of our three greatest paintings of the nude. Felicitous and natural in pose, rich and harmonious in color, sweet and pure in feeling, it intrigues one with all sorts of happy suggestions of the idyllic charm, the tender and exquisite poetry of youth dreaming, as it were, in the safety of a paradise on earth. The Ariadne of John Vanderlyn is more famous because it is better known, but it is hardly so fine. Perhaps those who are partial to the painting of the period think it a finer work, but their reason for so doing can have nothing to do with any attribute of perfection save that which finds expression in the work of Bouguereau. The Vanderlyn-Bouguereau type of nude has relatively little of the suggestion of life to recommend it, however perfect it may be in drawing and in modeling. In color it tends to sugariness and in line approaches the fixity of a "cast." The fleeting flushes of color that give charm to Eaton's nudes, the suppleness of line that imbues them with the semblance of life, the earlier artists neither neither understood nor attempted. The remaining nude of Eaton's, though unfinished, hardly less lovely than the Ariadne. To the painter and the serious student of painting it is peculiarly interesting, entirely because it is unfinished, as therefore it is possible to trace through various passages in it his manner of painting.

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