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 :. | Prizefights | The Study of Nude | John Biglin in a Single Scull | The Portrait of Martin Cardinals | fairman rogers fyrspann |
Related Artists:
Juan de Espinosa
Spanish Baroque Era Painter, ca.1590-1641 Spanish painter. Details of his life are scarce. He is documented in Madrid and Toledo between 1612 and 1626, and while he is recorded as having painted religious pictures and portraits (untraced), he is only known today for his still-life paintings. Documents relating to another artist of the same name, known as Juan de Espinosa, dating from 1645 to 1677, concern a different painter.
HOOCH, Pieter de
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1629-1684 Dutch painter. He was one of the most accomplished 17th-century Dutch genre painters, excelling in the depiction of highly ordered interiors with domestic themes and merry companies and pioneering the depiction of genre scenes set in a sunlit courtyard. The hallmarks of his art are an unequalled responsiveness to subtle effects of daylight, and views to adjoining spaces, either through a doorway or a window,
Robert Dampier
(1799 - 1874) was a British artist and clergyman. Dampier was born in 1799 at the village of Codford St Peter in Wiltshire, England He was baptised on the 20th of Dec. 1799 (LDS IGI record batch # C014402). He was one of 13 children of Codford St Peter's rector Reverend John Dampier (1763-1839) and his wife Jane. In 1819 he went to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil as a clerk. In 1825, he was picked up in Rio to be the expedition artist on the English ship HMS Blonde under the command of Captain George Anson Byron. The ship was returning the bodies of King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamemalu to the Hawaiian islands (known by the British as "Sandwich Islands"), after both died from measles during a visit to England. Robert Dampier spent 11 weeks in Hawaii painting portraits in oil paint and making pencil drawings of landscapes. After returning to England, he studied law at Cambridge University and then was ordained in the Church of England. He married Sophia Francis Roberts in 1828. In 1837 he became rector of Langton Matravers church. Circa 1843 they had a daughter Juliana Sophia, His wife Sophia died in 1864, and he married again in 1872. He had a daughter Frederika from the second marriage. Although employed a rector, he continued to sketch until his death in 1874. Major works by Robert Dampier are held by the Honolulu Academy of Arts and Washington Place, also in Honolulu, Hawaii.