In the 1880s, Philadelphia painter and photographer Thomas Eakins did extensive work with the male nude, including a series of photographs of a probably eighteen-year-old Billy Duckett, who was intimately involved, and lived for five years, with Walt Whitman. (Eakins also took formal photographs of Whitman, including a traditional “wedding portrait” of Whitman and Duckett.)17 The Swimming Hole, Eakins’s famous 1885 painting of five youths bathing nude on a lake, echoes Whitman’s images of an eroticized pastoral scene from “Song of Myself”:
