The girl’s pose is so natural that you wouldn’t call it a pose. She is seated on the floor, reaching one hand toward a black poodle, signaling her attentive companion to remain still, while a biscuit balances on the dog’s nose. She has extended a single finger toward her canine playmate, her expression intense, as if a look could will the poodle to maintain its precarious upright pose indefinitely. It’s a moment of charm and intimacy, rendered with formal brilliance in Thomas Eakins’s painting “Elizabeth Crowell With a Dog.”
It was completed in the early 1870s, during a highly productive decade for the artist. The works he made during the 1870s would establish him as one of the greatest American painters. His only equal among American realists of that era was Winslow Homer, whose pictures possessed greater charm perhaps, while Eakins offered a more intense engagement with those he painted.
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