The Eakins Press Foundation is a not-for-profit educational and charitable private operating foundation whose purpose is the advancement of literature and art through excellence of presentation. The Foundation's program supports and encourages the craftsmanship and art of authors, artists, painters and photographers, both unknown and of established reputation, whose efforts forward or are relevant to the vision, integrity and teaching of Thomas Eakins, the American painter for whom the Foundation is named. Publications include neglected masterpieces of literature and art having contemporary pertinence, and classic and contemporary works that are commercially unfeasible and would otherwise not have been published with the quality of presentation the work deserves.
The works of the Eakins Press Foundation are selected from classic and contemporary literature and art relevant to values currently embattled. In content and form they defend human excellence. Together they suggest that advanced technology is a tool and not a substitute for intelligence, that modernity need not outmode humane capacity. The symbol of the Eakins Press Foundation is a leaf and a hand, signifying nature and the works of man as counterparts. Man is and remains a creature of nature capable of cultivation, and art is the measure of his life.— Leslie George Katz, Founder of the Eakins Press Foundation