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 :. | The Portrait of Morris | William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River | Home Scene | Two Person Dinghy | The Artist and His Father Hunting Reed Birds |
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John warwick smith
English Painter, 1749-1831 English painter. The son of a gardener to the Gilpin family, he studied under the animal painter Sawrey Gilpin. During a trip to Derbyshire with Gilpin he met George Greville, 2nd Earl of Warwick, who gave him financial support to go to Italy between 1776 and 1781. Smith spent 1778-9 in Naples and was otherwise based in Rome, where he explored the Campagna and made sketches with William Pars and Francis Towne. The strong greens and purples and crisp pen outlines of some of Smith's watercolours are strongly influenced by Towne's style. Smith and Towne travelled together across the Alps on their way back to England in 1781, after which Smith settled in Warwick. He contributed six views to Samuel Middiman's Select Views in Great Britain (1784-5) and between 1784 and 1806 toured Wales 13 times in search of Picturesque and Sublime scenery. He also visited the Lake District between 1789 and 1792, which resulted in the publication of Twenty Views of the Lake District (1791-5); he appears to have been in Devon and Worcestershire as well. Aquatints after Smith were used to illustrate William Sotheby's Tour through Parts of Wales (1794),
Herbert menzies marshall,r.w.s
1841-1913
John callcott horsley,R.A.
1817-1903 English painter. A nephew of the landscape painter Augustus Wall Callcott, and later Isambard Kingdom Brunel's brother-in-law, he was born into the artistic establishment. He was educated at Henry Sass's Academy and at the Royal Academy. Although he executed two frescoes for the Houses of Parliament (The Spirit of Religion, 1847; London, House of Lords; Satan Wounded by Ithuriel's Lance, 1848; London, Pal. Westminster), his career began with portraiture. Success later came with literary subjects,