“A massive new study of Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins, 14 years in the writing, nearly 600 pages in length, is deemed ‘provocative’ and ‘controversial’ by its publisher — which may, for once, be an understatement in marketing,” says Karen Heller. In a report for The Philadelphia Inquirer, she says the Oxford University Press book Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist, by Henry Adams , “accuses the painter of incest, bestiality, flagrant exhibitionism, sadism, molestation and sexual opportunism, contributing to the suicide of his disturbed niece.” Author Adams admits “I had always felt some kind of block on Eakins, something disturbing in the work.” But one critic, art historian Michael J. Lewis, says of the book, “Strangely, for an art history, the art is not there.” And Philadelphia Museum of Art curator Kathleen Foster, whose writing about Eakins Adams criticizes, says, “Henry’s taken the same sources as I did and read them very darkly with the worst-case possibilities.” Meanwhile Adams, a descendent of the Henry Adams who wrote The Education of Henry Adams, says he is “sympathetic to Eakins,” calling him “a complicated man who had to overcome a lot.” In Adams portrait, Heller notes, what the “severely troubled” Eakins had to overcome was “a catalog of psychoses, including a castration complex, sexual inadequacy and trauma, and a propensity to drink more milk than perhaps is healthy.”