The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake (1873): Art, History and Details

The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake (1873) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Thomas Eakins (American, 1844–1916).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Eakins's painting celebrates athletic teamwork while commemorating an actual event, a famous rowing race that took place on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia during May 1872. Throngs of spectators line the riverbank and watch as Barney and John Biglin negotiate the tricky turn around a stake marking the halfway point in the contest. Their competitors, seen in the middle distance at the right, lag behind. The Biglin brothers won the race, cementing their status as the most celebrated oarsmen of the era. Trained in the United States and France, Eakins spent almost his entire artistic career in his hometown of Philadelphia. He is renowned for the unsentimental realism in his paintings, whose compositions he developed through painstakingly prepared figure and perspective drawings.

Object facts

• Title: The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake
• Date: 1873
• Creator attribution: Thomas Eakins (American, 1844–1916)
• Culture: America
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 117 x 167 x 6.5 cm (46 1/16 x 65 3/4 x 2 9/16 in.); Unframed: 101.3 x 151.4 cm (39 7/8 x 59 5/8 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1927.1984

A detail from the museum

Rowing was among the most popular spectator sports in the U.S. during the 1870s.

Collection credit

Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Koja, Stephan, Nicolai Cikovsky, and Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. America : The New World in 19th-Century Painting. Munich: Prestel, 1999.
• David Franklin, and C. Griffith Mann. Treasures of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH, London: Cleveland Museum of Art ; in association with Scala Publishers, 2012.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.