About this work
The painting opens onto the dark brown interior of an exercise room, where two young men dominate the foreground, locked together on the floor in a crotch hold.
The figure on top has wrapped his body around the man beneath him, pulling him close while pinning his right arm down with considerable force.
The wrestler on top is Joseph McCann, a champion boxer, posed here holding his opponent in a half nelson and crotch hold — close, it seems, to winning.
In the background at left, a third athlete works a rowing machine; at right, shown from the waist down, another athlete stands beside a suited coach who points toward the wrestlers, apparently in instruction.
The abrupt cropping of those background figures — their torsos and heads cut cleanly by the picture frame — is one of the painting's quietly modern gestures.
The wrestlers themselves are not presented as particularly heroic; their bodies press together so intensely they create the optical illusion of a single conjoined form, while careful contrasts of clothed and unclothed, wrinkled and taut flesh lend the scene a studied, almost analytical artificiality.
In 1898, Eakins had turned to a new group of interior sporting subjects — boxing and wrestling — and *Wrestlers* stands as the culmination of that series.
On May 22, 1899, he had two athletes wrestle in his fourth-floor studio at 1729 Mount Vernon Street in Philadelphia.
He worked from both the live models and a near-identical photograph taken the same day — characteristic of his method of combining rigorous observation with the modern tool of the camera. The result is *Wrestlers*: Eakins's last completed genre painting, his last treatment of the male nude, and his last sporting picture.
Considered across the full arc of his career — from the rowing pictures of the 1870s through his monumental portraits of professional men — it stands as a summation of the most significant themes of his life's work.
It is his last completed statement on embodiment and representation, and in that sense reads also as a spiritual self-portrait of a frustrated artist nearing the end of his career.
As wall art, *Wrestlers* belongs in spaces that can hold serious looking — a study, a library, a room furnished with conviction rather than décor. Its palette of warm ochre, shadow brown, and pale flesh is self-contained and absorbing without demanding a particular wall color. Eakins compels the viewer to look and think again and again about what is presented — which makes this a painting for the genuinely
