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 :. | Repair fishnet | Der Denker | Self-Portrait | Retrospection | The Portrait of Walt Whitman |
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Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
(July 17, 1796 - February 22, 1875) was a French landscape painter and printmaker in etching. Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-nineteenth century. He is a pivotal figure in landscape painting and his vast output simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.
Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen
(c.1500-1559) was a Dutch Northern Renaissance painter. According to Karel van Mander he was born in Beverwijk in 1500 and was honored for his career in the service of Charles V. He was a friend of Jan van Scorel and his portrait was engraved by Jan Wierix for Dominicus Lampsonius. Vermeyen was a painter and tapestry designer, probably a pupil of Jan Mabuse. About 1525 he became Court Painter to Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands at Mechelen and in 1535 he accompanied the Emperor Charles V, at the Conquest of Tunis (1535). This journey supplied him with scenes for later works, including tapestries designed 1545/48 for the Regent, Mary of Hungary. He died in Brussels. Many portraits are ascribed to him on very little evidence, according to modern scholars.
James Northcote
RA (22 October 1746 - 13 July 1831), was an English painter was born at Plymouth, and was apprenticed to his father, a poor watchmaker. In his spare time, he drew and painted. In 1769 he left his father and set up as a portrait painter. Four years later he went to London and was admitted as a pupil into the studio and house of Sir Joshua Reynolds. At the same time he attended the Royal Academy schools. In 1775 he left Reynolds, and about two years later, having made some money by portrait painting back in Devon, he went to study in Italy. On his return to England, three years later, he revisited his native county, then settled in London, where John Opie and Henry Fuseli were his rivals. He was elected associate of the Academy in 1786, and full academician in the following spring. The "Young Princes murdered in the Tower," his first important work on a historical subject, dates from 1786, and it was followed by the "Burial of the Princes in the Tower". Both paintings, along with seven others, were intended for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. The "Death of Wat Tyler", now in the Guildhall, London, was exhibited in 1787; and shortly afterwards Northcote began a set of ten subjects, entitled "The Modest Girl and the Wanton", which were completed and engraved in 1796. Among the productions of Northcote's later years are the "Entombment" and the "Agony in the Garden," besides many portraits, and several animal subjects, such as "Leopards", "Dog and Heron", and "Lion".