True Blue

Photographer and painter Thomas Anshutz was born today in 1851.

As early as 1880, Anshutz was using his photographs as preparatory studies for paintings. Like Thomas Eakins, his teacher and colleague at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Anshutz made photographs that served as compositional experiments or reminders of details of landscape or figures. As a painter committed to direct observation, Anshutz was intrigued by Eadweard Muybridge's sequential photographs of moving human figures and occasionally assisted him at the Academy.

Anshutz posed his models to capture body movements and gestures and provide outdoor compositional arrangements. The figures from another cyanotype, Bathers, as well as figures and compositional motifs from other photo sketches, were used for Anshutz's 1896 painting Steamboat on the Ohio.

Introduced in the 1840s and easy to process, cyanotypes were originally used by mapmakers and scientists. In the late nineteenth century the cyanotype found renewed interest among artists and amateur photographers.

Source: Merry A. Foresta. American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996).

Pictured: Thomas Anshutz, 1851–1912, Boys with a Boat, Ohio River, near Wheeling, West Virginia, 1880, cyanotype on paper, 5 3/4 x 8 3/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.