The poet Walt Whitman once wrote that his friend Thomas Eakins "is not a painter, he is a force."

In fact, Eakins was one of America's greatest painters — a realist who depicted taut-muscled American wrestlers and rowers and gut-wrenching surgical demonstrations while others were imitating sunny works by the impressionists overseas.

His first large oil painting, "Street Scene in Seville," was painted in Spain in 1870. One of a number of paintings bequeathed to his wife's relatives in Roanoke, it was exhibited here as recently as 1991. It has since been sold.

Eakins was born in a Philadelphia row house in 1844 and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before going abroad.

On his return, Eakins taught at the Pennsylvania Academy, where one of his students was Susan Macdowell, his future wife.

The Eakins' marriage may not have been the best — William Innes Homer, in his book "Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art," says of a picture Eakins painted about the time of his marriage: "It is telling that Eakins painted his dog with more warmth and sympathy than his bride."

Eakins found a picturesque subject in his wife's father, however, a bearded, free-thinking engraver from Philadelphia named William Macdowell.

Two of the four Eakins oils in the art museum's collection are of Macdowell. Eakins also painted Walter Macdowell, his wife's brother, who lived in Roanoke and retired as Norfolk and Western Railway's auditor of receipts in 1925. He seems the very image of cautious respectability in Eakins' portrait, with his starched collar, thinning hair and close-set eyes.