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 Professor | Hayes Agnew Operation Clinical | Taking the Count | The Chess Players | Max Schmitt a l'aviron |
Related Artists:
Thomas Mann Baynes
(1794 ?C 1876) was a London born English artist known for his drawings and watercolours of landscapes, buildings and outdoor events. Many of his subjects were engraved and published, generally in London, and these include a notable panorama of the River Thames, which was drawn from nature and engraved on stone. He was the son of James Baynes, a noted watercolour artist. Baynes also produced views of Liverpool and Ireland, and appears to have made a successful living as a printer prior to his death in 1854. His son Fredrick Thomas Baynes (1824-1874) was also a noted watercolour artist.
MASTER THOMAS de Coloswar
first half of 15th century
Willard Metcalf
Willard Leroy Metcalf (July 1, 1858 - March 9, 1925) was an American artist born in Lowell, Massachusetts. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and later attended Academie Julian, Paris. After early figure-painting and illustration, he became prominent as a landscape painter. He was one of the Ten American Painters who in 1897 seceded from the Society of American Artists. For some years he was an instructor in the Womans Art School, Cooper Union, New York, and in the Art Students League, New York. In 1893 he became a member of the American Watercolor Society, New York. Generally associated with American Impressionism, he is also remembered for his New England landscapes and involvement with the artists' colony at Old Lyme, Connecticut. Born into a working-class family, Metcalf began painting in 1874. In 1876 he opened a studio in Boston, and received a scholarship at the Boston Museum school, where he studied until 1878. In 1882 he held an exhibition at the J. Eastman Chase Gallery in Boston, the sales from which financed a study trip abroad.[1] Metcalf left for Europe in September 1883, and did not return to the United States until late 1888. During that time he traveled and painted, studying first in Paris with Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, subsequently going to England and Pont-Aven, Brittany. In the winter of 1884 he apparently met John Twachtman in Paris, and painted at Grez-sur-Loing alongside other American artists, including Theodore Robinson. His landscapes at this time were traditional renditions of peasant scenes, in the manner of Jean Millet.[2] By 1886 Metcalf was painting in Giverny, evidently the first American painter to visit there.[2] Soon thereafter he traveled to Algeria and Tunisia, returning to Giverny in the summers of 1887 and 1888, in the company of other American painters.