Archbishop William Henry Elder

Archbishop William Henry Elder of Cincinnati was one of the more formally prominent subjects of Eakins's late portrait work — a Prince of the Catholic Church, the highest-ranking Catholic official in the American Midwest at the time of the 1903 sitting. The portrait, now in the Cincinnati Art Museum, is unusual in Eakins's oeuvre for its ecclesiastical subject — he more typically depicted secular figures from Philadelphia's professional class. Elder's red vestments would have offered Eakins a dramatic chromatic challenge very different from the dark suits of his usual male subjects, and the Archbishop's office demanded a particular kind of formal gravity.

The Archbishop's red cassock and vestments create a dominant warm colour field very different from Eakins's typical dark-ground portraits. Eakins would have managed the relationship between the brilliant red and the face's more complex tones — ensuring the vestments supported rather than overwhelmed the psychological focus on the subject's face.