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 :. | Baby at Play | Portrait of Amelia van Buren | The Professor | Elizabeth at the Piano | Advances |
Related Artists:
Ferdinand von Wright
1822-1906,Brother of Magnus von Wright and Wilhelm von Wright. He grew up under the influence of his brothers and became a skilled ornithological illustrator at a very young age. He remained in Sweden from 1837 until 1844 and worked as a draughtsman, helping his brother Wilhelm. After returning to Finland he set his sights on a career as a painter. During the second half of the 1840s he was still searching for his proper path, and he experimented with a number of subjects: birds, still-lifes, landscapes and portraits.
Dominique Vivant Denon
French, 1747-1825,French savant, he accompanied the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt (1798) as leader of the learned Commission on the Sciences and Arts that was to study Ancient Egyptian buildings and architecture and herald the birth of modern Egyptology. In 1802 he published his Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte pendant les campagnes du general Bonaparte (Journey in Lower and Upper Egypt during the campaigns of General Bonaparte). An accurate source-book of Ancient Egyptian architecture, it had an extraordinary impact, triggering the C19 Egyptian Revival that at first was correctly described as Egyptomania, and was a major influence on Neo-Classicism. Denon was Director-General of Museums, and was in charge of the Musee Napoleon (now the Louvre).
Juan Ribalta
b. 1597, Madrid, d. 1628, Valencia,was a Spanish painter of the Baroque period. Born and died in Valencia. His father, Francisco Ribalta, was a famous painter, active in the style of Caravaggio. Juan's works and style are similar to that of his father.