The Swimming Hole

The Swimming Hole is an 1884 to 1885 oil painting by the American realist Thomas Eakins, measuring about 70 by 92 centimeters and held in the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. It shows six nude men swimming and sunning themselves beside a lake, a scene Eakins was able to paint as fine art because Victorian convention, while discouraging nudity generally, tolerated male nude swimming as a legitimate exception. Eakins, who built life studies into his own teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, used the picture to display his command of the nude figure in outdoor light, and it has been called perhaps his most accomplished rendition of the nude and the most finely designed of his outdoor pictures. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/