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 Study of Baseball | The Portrait of Physicists Roland | Home Scene | The Chess Players | Retrospection |
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Theodor Esbern Philipsen
1840-1920 Danish painter, sculptor and draughtsman. He studied at the Kongelige Akademi for de Skenne Kunster, Copenhagen, in 1862-3 and 1865-9, and in Paris under Leon Bonnat in 1875-6. He was an important figure in the development and renewal of Danish naturalism, linking the Danish Golden Age tradition with new French ideas. Conscious of the importance of plein-air painting, he was first a great admirer of the Barbizon school; later he was influenced by the Impressionists, becoming the only truly Danish Impressionist. Frequent visits abroad helped him develop his outlook; he eagerly studied the Old Masters, and the strong light of the south
Mitchell, Thomas
English, 1735-90
Felix Nussbaum
1904-44 Nussbaum was born in Osnabreck, Province of Hanover, as the son of Rahel and Phillip Nussbaum. Phillip was a World War I veteran and German patriot before the rise of the Nazis. He was an amateur painter when he was younger, but was forced to pursue other means of work for financial reasons. He therefore encouraged his son's artwork passionately. Nussbaum was a lifelong student, beginning his formal studies in 1920 in Hamburg and Berlin and continuing as long as the current political situation allowed him. In his earlier works, Felix was heavily influenced by Vincent Van Gogh and Henri Rousseau and he eventually pays homage to Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carre as well. Carl Hofer's expressionist paineng influenced Felix's careful approach color. In 1933, Nussbaum was studying on scholarship in Rome at the Berlin Academy of the Arts when the Nazis gained control of Germany.