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 :. | Max Schmitt in a single scull | Salutat | Self-Portrait | Portrait | Die Konzertsangerin |
Related Artists:
Samuel King
1748-1819 Samuel King Gallery American painter, carver and nautical instrument maker. He was the son of Benjamin King, a mathematical and nautical instrument maker of Newport, RI. Samuel King's early portrait of the Rev. Ezra Stiles (New Haven, CT, Yale U. A.G.) is undoubtedly his masterpiece and a tour de force of symbolism. The portrait was begun in 1770 and completed on 1 August 1771. It shows the interest of the instrument maker in detail and exactitude of delineation. King's other known portraits show no such originality and in the main reflect compositions taken from portraits known to have been hanging in Newport at the time or from English prints. Since Samuel King and Charles Bird King (unrelated) were neighbours on Clarke Street in Newport, he probably influenced Charles Bird King. Washington Allston and Ann Hall (1792-1863) were both Samuel King's pupils.
Luis jimenez aranda
Spanish Impressionist Painter, 1845-1928
WRIGHT, Joseph
English painter (b. 1734, Derby, d. 1797, Derby). Painter, known as Wright of Derby, where he was born and spent most of his life. He earned a living as a portrait painter, while he experimented with the effects of light and industrial and scientific subjects, reflecting the interests of his day. Two of his best-known works come from this period, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (1766, Derby) and An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768, Tate).