Its animals are tantalizing in their trompe l'oeil reality, rendered with disarming aplomb, and she sets them in fierce and unstoppable motion without a blink to give away her game. The test is the sentence.
Power is the word that comes to mind.
It's the relentless electric charge of the fiction. The test is the sentence. In Eakins, there is an integrity, an authority, everywhere at all times present and accounting. They are as precisely detailed as a surgeon's, as ripely sensual as a courtesan's. It is a kind of imaginative bestiary for our times, but a bestiary in the same sense that Borges's Ficciones is a collection of myths or that Calvino's Cosmicomics is a scientific treatise.