Friedrich --

Eakins' "Four-in-Hand": Photoshopped?

Charles Paul Freund of Reason magazine has been doing some venturesome thinking and writing about art. He's much more freewheeling and openminded (and also direct and to-the-point) than the art world's own writers are. Freund writes about Eakins, Vermeer, Hockney and technological helping hands here.

Sample passage:

What Eakins did with the photos was a laborious version of what many digital artists are doing today. Eakins didn’t merely create painted versions of photographs. Using a "magic lantern" to project a series of disparate images on a single canvas, he made composites. The final painterly conception is entirely his own, and is apparently what drove his creation of the photos in the first place.

Best,

Michael