American Realist Painter, 1844-1916. Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (July 25, 1844 ?C June 25, 1916) was a realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important artists in American art history. For the length of his professional career, from the early 1870s until his health began to fail some forty years later, Eakins worked exactingly from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia. He painted several hundred portraits, usually of friends, family members, or prominent people in the arts, sciences, medicine, and clergy. Taken en masse, the portraits offer an overview of the intellectual life of Philadelphia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; individually, they are incisive depictions of thinking persons. As well, Eakins produced a number of large paintings which brought the portrait out of the drawing room and into the offices, streets, parks, rivers, arenas, and surgical amphitheaters of his city. These active outdoor venues allowed him to paint the subject which most inspired him: the nude or lightly clad figure in motion. In the process he could model the forms of the body in full sunlight, and create images of deep space utilizing his studies in perspective. No less important in Eakins' life was his work as a teacher. As an instructor he was a highly influential presence in American art. The difficulties which beset him as an artist seeking to paint the portrait and figure realistically were paralleled and even amplified in his career as an educator, where behavioral and sexual scandals truncated his success and damaged his reputation. Eakins also took a keen interest in the new technologies of motion photography, a field in which he is now seen as an innovator. Eakins was a controversial figure whose work received little by way of official recognition during his lifetime. Since his death, he has been celebrated by American art historians as "the strongest, most profound realist in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century American art".  Related Paintings of Thomas Eakins :. | Bathing | Self-Portrait | Portrait | fairman rogers fyrspann | Portrait of Louis N Kenton |
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Pietro Graziani
Active in Naples during the first half of the 18th Century
Wouterus Verschuur
(11 June 1812 - 4 July 1874) was a Dutch painter of animal subjects - mainly horses - and of landscapes. He is one of the later representatives of Romanticism in Dutch art. Born to an Amsterdam jeweller, Verschuur received his training from the landscape and cattle painters Pieter Gerardus van Os and Cornelis Steffelaar. As part of this education Verschuur had to copy works by the 17th century painter Philips Wouwerman, like Wouwerman Verschuures subjects consist mostly of stable scenes, landscapes with horses and coastal landscapes. Showing talent from an early age, at 15 Verschuur had a painting exhibited at the eExhibition of Living Masterse at Amsterdam in 1828. In 1832 and 1833 he won the gold medal at the annual exhibition at Felix Meritis. In 1833 he was appointed a member of the Royal Academy in Amsterdam. In 1839 he joined the artistse society, Arti et Amicitiae. His reputation was also considerable abroad. He was often featured in the annual exhibitions which travelled the large European cities at that time. In 1855 Napoleon III purchased one of his paintings at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. The popularity of his paintings provided him with sufficient funds to travel widely. He made frequent trips to Gelderland and Brabant and abroad to Switzerland and Germany. In 1874, on one of his trips to Gelderland, he died on July 4 in the town of Vorden. He left behind an oevre of about 400 paintings and over 2000 drawings. Amongst his students were his son, Wouterus Verschuur Jr. and Anton Mauve.
Joseph Wolf
(January 22, 1820 - April 20, 1899) was a German artist who specialized in natural history illustration. He moved to the British Museum in 1848 and became the choice of illustrator for numerous explorers and collectors. He depicted animals accurately in life-like postures and has been considered one of the great pioneers of wildlife art. Sir Edwin Landseer considered him ...without exception, the best all-round animal artist who ever lived. Wolf was the son of a farmer, and was born in Mörz near Menstermaifeld, not far from the river Moselle, in the Eifel region. In his boyhood he was an assiduous student of bird and animal life, and showed a remarkable capacity as a draughtsman of natural history subjects. At the age of sixteen he went to Koblenz to work for a firm of lithographers, and then in 1840 he moved to Frankfurt. Here he provided the illustrations for Eduard Reppell's Birds of Northeast Africa.