Gordon Hendricks was an American art and film historian.
In 1961 Hendricks published The Edison Motion Picture Myth in which he showed that it was not Thomas Alva Edison who should be attributed with the invention of the first device for cinema screenings, but in fact William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. The publication of "Beginnings of the Biograph" followed shortly after in 1964. In 1966, Hendricks published, "The Kinetoscope". These books became milestones in the writing of film history. Hendricks was the first motion picture specialist to lecture in the Sunday series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was the first to show motion pictures in the Great Hall at Cooper Union.
In 1975 he authored a work, republished in 2001, about Eadweard Muybridge, in which he called Muybridge the father of the cinema.
He then began a series on books on painters and photographers. He published works about Winslow Homer and Albert Bierstadt. He also published "The Photographs of Thomas Eakins". Thomas Eakins. He has 16 volumes of his writings in the Library of Congress.
At the time of his death, he was engaged in writing a book about the art of Thomas Cole.
After his death Hendricks bequeathed two major collections to the Archives of American Art: one about Thomas Eakins, the other about film history. Wikipedia
Gordon Hendricks: "The Life And Work Of Thomas Eakins", Grossman Publishers : New York 1974, ISBN 0-670-42795-0, p. 160
The photographs were studies for Eakins' painting Swimming, Hendricks was the first to connect Eakins with homosexuality.
