Abstract
By illuminating Benjamin Howard Rand’s heretofore unexamined activities as an author and a public scientist, this article offers a new interpretation of Thomas Eakins’s portrait of Rand that draws from Rand’s Elements of Medical Chemistry (1867) and accounts of his scientific performances involving color and light in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. It then addresses the implications of this interpretation for our understanding of Eakins’s realist project. In Rand’s portrait, color contends with anxieties about artifice and illusion—which Eakins gendered as feminine—in realist painting. To conclude, the article dissects the ways in which Eakins’s portraits of Rand and Dr. Samuel Gross conveyed divergent views on the role of women in medical science.