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 :. | Miss Amelia Van Buren | Home Scene | Max Schmitt im Einerboot | Sailboats Racing on the Delaware | The Portrait of Physicists Roland |
Related Artists:
Aurelio de Figueiredo
painted Girl at the piano in 1892
jean metzinger
Jean Metzinger (June 24, 1883 Nantes, France?C November 3, 1956) was a French painter. Initially he was influenced by Fauvism and Impressionism, but from 1908 he was associated with Cubism. Metzinger was a member of the Section d'Or group of artists. Certain pieces such as At the Cycle-Race track suggest speed and movement, ideas which are linked to the futurist movement. Together with Albert Gleizes, Metzinger created the first major treatise on Cubism, Du Cubisme, in 1912. In the latter stages of his career, he moved away from cubism towards realism, while still retaining elements of cubist style.
Pietro Facchetti
Pietro Facchetti (1539 ?C 27 February 1613) was an Italian painter of the late-Renaissance, mainly active in Rome. Born to a poor family in Mantua. Facchetti initially trained with Lorenzo Costa the younger, but then moved to Rome and joined the studio of Scipione da Gaeta, where he gained fame as a portrait painter.