Eakins as Functionalist

Abstract

In nineteenth-century America the concept of function was appealed to as a significant criterion in many areas of cultural activity. The story of American proficiency in designing tools and machinery has become legendary: in all the major trade fairs European visitors acknowledged the functional excellence of native products. For Louis Sullivan, as is almost too familiar to bear restating, function became the next thing to an ultimate value: “It is the pervading law of all things organic, and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.”1