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 Frank Hamilton Cushing | Dr. Brinton-s Wife | William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River | Biglen Brothers, Turning the Stake |
Related Artists:
Arnold Boonen
Arnold van Boonen was a Dutch eminent portrait painter, was born at Dordrecht, in the Dutch Republic in 1669. He was first a scholar of Arnold Verbius, and was later instructed by Godefried Schalken. He painted genre pictures in the style of the latter, representing subjects by candlelight, but met with such encouragement in portrait painting that he devoted himself almost wholly to that branch of art. His style was well adapted to succeed in it. An excellent oolourist, a faithful designer of his model, and highly skilled, he was soon distinguished as one of the ablest artists of his day. He painted a great number of portraits of the most distinguished people of his time, among whom were Peter the Great, the Elector of Mentz, the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, the Prince and Princess of Orange, the great Duke of Marlborough, and several others. He painted some large pictures for the halls of the different companies at Amsterdam and Dordrecht. He died in 1729. The Dresden Gallery has seven works by him, and the 'Woman Singing' in the Lille Gallery is also attributed to him. His son, Kasper van Boonen, also painted portraits, but in no way proved himself equal to his father.
Francois-Rene Moreaux
painted Announcement of Independence in 1844
GENTILESCHI, Orazio
Italian Baroque Era Painter, ca.1563-1639 Although he was eight years older than Caravaggio, he is nevertheless regarded as a Caravaggesque artist, so deeply was his mature style affected by his knowledge of the younger painter's art. His response to Caravaggio was intensely poetic, and none of Caravaggio's many gifted followers produced more beautiful pictures.