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 :. | William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River | Home Scene | The Fairman Rogers Four in Hand | The Portrait of Letita Wison Jordan | Portrait of Professor Benjamin H Rand |
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Ippolito Caffi
Italian Painter, 1809-1866
Aleksander Lesser
(May 13, 1814 - March 13, 1884) was a Polish painter and art critic of Jewish descent. Lesser specialized in Polish historic and contemporary themes. He was a member of Krakew Academy of Learning and co-founder of Warsaw's Zachęta, the Society for Encouragement of the Fine Arts. Lesser studied painting at Warsaw University's department of fine arts, as well as at art schools in Dresden and Munich. He was a founder of the history-painting movement in Poland, which is considered a part of the "archeological trend" that existed before Jan Matejko. The trend's purpose was to portray the entire history of Poland in works of art.
Jules Tavernier
1844-1889 Jules Tavernier was born in Paris in 1844. He studied with the French painter, F??lix Joseph Barrias (1822-1907), but left France in the 1870s, never to return. Tavernier was employed as an illustrator by Harper's Magazine, which sent him on assignment to California in the 1870s. Eventually he continued westward to Hawaii, where he made a name for himself as a landscape and portrait painter. He was captivated by Hawaii??s erupting volcanoes??a subject that was to pre-occupy him for the rest of his life, which was spent in Hawaii, Canada and the western United States. He is considered the most important artist of Hawaii??s Volcano School. Tavernier died in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1889. His students included David Howard Hitchcock (1861-1943), Am??d??e Joullin (1862-1917), Charles Rollo Peters (1862-1917) and Manuel Valencia (1856-1935). The Honolulu Academy of Arts and the Stark Museum of Art (Orange, Texas) are among the public collections having paintings by Jules Tavernier.