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 :. | The Fairman Rogers Four in Hand | Prizefights | Portrait of Susan Macdowell Eakins | Miss Amelia C. Van Buren | fairman rogers fyrspann |
Related Artists:
Moses, Grandma
1948 Oil on pressed wood.
Mauritz F H Haas
Dutch (Resident in US) 1832-1895
anna dorothea therbusch
1721-82 German painter of Polish descent. She was taught by her father, the portrait painter Georg Lisiewski (1674-1751), and received further training from Antoine Pesne in Paris. She worked for Charles-Eugene, Count of W?rttemberg, in Stuttgart from 1761 to 1762, and for Charles Theodore Wittelsbach, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, in Mannheim from 1763 to 1764. In 1765 she returned, via Stuttgart and Hohenzollern-Hechingen, to Paris, where in 1767 she became a member of the Academie Royale. She met Denis Diderot and Philipp Hackert, both of whom she painted, and Charles-Nicolas Cochin , but, despite consistent support from Prince Galitsyn, she was unable to establish herself in Paris. In 1769 she returned to Berlin where she received commissions for mythological paintings (e.g. Diana and her Nymphs, 1771; Potsdam, Neues Pal.) from Frederick II, King of Prussia. She painted portraits of members of the Prussian court, and the Berlin bourgeoisie, and in 1773 was commissioned by Catherine II, Empress of Russia, to paint a portrait of the Prussian royal family.