Redefining Richard Cory's Legacy

"Richard Cory"

The Eakins portrait is an appropriate

image for poet E. A. Robinson's tragic figure 

in his poem "Richard Cory." 

The Thinker: Portrait of Louis N. Kenton, 1900
Thomas Eakins (1844–1916)
Oil on canvas; 82 x 42 in. (208.3 x 106.7 cm)
John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1917 (17.172)

Whenever I Read
Richard Cory 

James Hart 

Whenever I read Richard Cory,
I see my grandfather stroll down town
long years before I knew his story,
and all eyes envied his haughty frown.

Dressed head to heel in dapper grays,
he tipped his hat like a lord for ladies
and made good day a grand regal phrase
that fluttered pulses to shy rhapsodies.

“Beau Brummel of Carrollton, 1910”
he dared inscribe on a sly self-portrait
where he casts his gaze beyond his ken
like a landless squire who beggars fate.

So it comes as no grim surprise to me
that he fired only words in his head,
and daily deadened his sad gravity
in shots of whiskey downed like lead.

(Poem from an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead)

Louis N. Kenton (1865–1947) was Eakins's brother-in-law, having married

Elizabeth Macdowell (1858–1953), sister of Eakins's wife Susan, in 1889. 

Elizabeth studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia,

exhibited professionally, and traveled widely. Her marriage to Kenton was stormy

and apparently brief, and very little is known of it, or of Kenton. The title associated

with this portrait, "The Thinker," was at one time based upon an inscription on

the reverse that apparently was placed there by Susan Eakins. Beginning in 1900,

the portrait was widely exhibited and much admired. An oil study for the portrait

is in the Farnsworth Library and Art Museum in Rockland, Maine.