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George Luks, “The Wrestlers”, 1905, Oil on Canvas, 48 x 66 Inches, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The 1905 oil painting “The Wrestlers”, depicting two nude men wrestling, is George Luks’ best known work. He painted it in order to shock the members of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts whom he thought were idiots. This painting was displayed at “The Eight”, the 1908 Ashcan School exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries on Fifth Avenue in New York.
Thomas Eakins, “Wrestlers”, 1899, Oil on Canvas, 123 x 153 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California
“Wrestlers” is a name shared by three closely related 1899 paintings by Thomas Eakins. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art owns the finished painting and the oil sketch of the same scene. The Philadelphia Museum of Art owns a slightly smaller unfinished version. All three works depict a pair of nealy naked men engaged in a wrestling match. The setting for the finished painting is the Quaker City Barge Club which once stood on Philadelphia’s Boathouse Row.
On May 22, 1899, Eakins had two wrestlers pose in his fourth-floor studio on Mount Vernon Street in Philadelphia. Sportswriter Clarence Cranmer was there to give advice about positioning the wrestlers. Eakins painted the works from the live models and from a nearly identical photograph, most likely taken that day.
Eakins painted the finished “Wrestlers” for the National Academy Museum in New York as his so-called diploma painting when he was inducted into membership in 1902. It was acquired as a gift by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2006.
Lysippus, “Wrestlers”, First Century BC, Marble, Height 89 cm, Uffizi Palace, Florence, Italy
Rarely did the architectural finds of the 16th century recover the large groups from ancient statuary in full, but the “Wrestlers” is an exception to this rule. The work was discovered, along with the famous group of Niobids, in 1583, in a vineyard owned by the Tommasini family near Porta San Giovanni in Rome. It represents a unique example, since no further copies are known.
In Roman times, this estate was part of the Horti Lamiani, sumptuous gardens on the top of the Esquiline Hill belonging to the residence of consul Lucius Aelius Lamia. Treasures such as the “Lancellotti Discobolus”, now at the National Museum of Rome) and the “Esquiline Venus”,now in the collection of the Capitoline Museums, were found in the same garden.
The “Wrestlers” depicts two men with pronounced muscular structure, engaged in a wrestling bout, rendered particularly realistic by the firm anatomies and good proportions of the subjects. The balance of the bodies is such that the outcome of the match is not revealed. The lost heads were added during restoration, ordered by Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici, who purchased the work.
Exhibited for around a century at Villa Medici in Rome, the sculpture was transported to Florence in 1677, where further restoration work certainly led to the recovery of the top wrestler’s right arm. The marble group, which dates to the 1st century B.C., is a Roman copy of a lost original in bronze from the 3rd century B.C.. The sculpture can be attributed to Lysippus, a sculptor renowned for many bronze and marble works and, in particular, for his portrait of Alexander the Great.