Wyatt Eaton
1849–1896
Painter and co-founder, with Helena de Kay Gilder, of the Society of American Artists.
Born in Philipsburg, Quebec, Wyatt Eaton trained at the National Academy of Design in New York and then in Paris, where he worked under Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts and spent formative summers at Barbizon in the company of Jean-François Millet, whose tender realism marked Eaton's work for the rest of his life.
Returning to New York in the 1870s, he became one of the most admired portrait painters of his generation, with sitters that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Cullen Bryant, and Timothy Cole. His portraits of Helena de Kay Gilder and of the young Gilder children are among the most affecting domestic likenesses of the American Gilded Age.
In 1877 Eaton joined Helena de Kay Gilder, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John La Farge, and a handful of other young artists in founding the Society of American Artists, the breakaway exhibition society that opened American painting and sculpture to the new European currents. He was a constant figure at the Gilder studio on East 15th Street and a frequent visitor to their Tyringham summers — a quiet, beloved presence at the heart of the circle.