Susan Macdowell Eakins Susan Macdowell Eakins Susan Hannah Macdowell Eakins (September 21, 1851 – December 27, 1938) was an American painter and photographer. Her works were first shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she was a student. She won the Mary Smith Prize there in 1879 and Charles Toppan prize in 1882. One of her teachers was artist Thomas Eakins, who later became her husband. She made portrait and still life paintings. She was also known of her photography. After her husband died in 1916, Eakins became a prolific painter. Her works were exhibited in group exhibitions in her lifetime,
Thomas Eakins in which he had seen her at a party. She is a substantial presence, a vision quite different from the era's fashionable portraiture. So, too, his "Portrait of Maud Cook" (1895), where the obvious beauty of the subject is noted with "a stark objectivity". The portrait of "Miss Amelia Van Buren" (c. 1890), a friend and former pupil, suggests the melancholy of a complex personality, and has been called "the finest of all American portraits". Even Susan Macdowell Eakins, a strong painter and former student who married Eakins in 1884, was not sentimentalized: despite its richness of color, "The Artist's