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 :. | Portrait of Douglas Morgan Hall | Home Scene | The William is Carving his goddiness | John Biglin in a Single Scull | The Artist-s wife and his dog |
Related Artists:
Lucas van Uden
(18 October 1595 - 4 November 1672) was a Flemish Baroque painter specializing in landscapes. Lucas van Uden was born in Antwerp, where he entered the guild of St. Luke in 1626-27. Although he was never part of Peter Paul Rubens's studio, his works are partly indebted to that master. Van Uden even made copies of Rubens's works on several occasions. His technique, however, owes as much to earlier painters like Joos de Momper and Jan Brueghel the Elder. General characteristics are a tonally-green recessive view punctuated by slender trees and populated by incidental pastoral and peasant figures. Many of Van Uden's figures were either copied from Rubens or painted by David Teniers the Younger. He is often associated with fellow landscape painter Jan Wildens.
RIGAUD, Hyacinthe
French Baroque Era Painter, 1659-1743 .was a French baroque painter of Catalan origin whose career was based in Paris. He is renowned for his portrait paintings of Louis XIV, the royalty and nobility of Europe, and members of their courts. Rigaud was born Jacint Rigau i Ros -- though in many encyclopaedias is "re-christened" with the name of H??acint Francesc Honrat Mathias Pere Martyr Andreu Joan Rigau -- in Perpignan, which became part of France by the Treaty of the Pyrenees (7 November 1659) shortly after his birth. In 1682, he was awarded the Prix de Rome. He was the most important portrait painter during the reign of King Louis XIV. His instinct for impressive poses and grand presentations precisely suited the tastes of the royal personages, ambassadors, clerics, courtiers, and financiers who sat for him. Because Rigaud's paintings captured very exact likenesses along with the subject's costumes and background details, his paintings are considered precise records of contemporary fashions. Rigaud was a master of the Baroque style of art. Rigaud's best-known work is his 1701 painting of Louis XIV which today hangs in the Louvre in Paris, as well as the second copy also requested by Louis XIV that now hangs at the Palace of Versailles. In 1709, he was made a noble by his hometown of Perpignan. In 1727 he was made a knight of the Order of Saint Michael. Rigaud died in Paris in 1743 at the age of 84.
Constant Wauters
painted Actors Before a Performance in 1851