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 | Cattle farmer | Portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing | The Artist and His Father Hunting Reed Birds | Wagon |
Related Artists:
Domenico Morelli
Italian, 1826-1901,Italian painter and teacher. Unique among his Italian colleagues in enjoying an international reputation in his lifetime, he was, with Filippo Palizzi (see PALIZZI, (2)), the leading exponent of the Neapolitan school of painting in the second half of the 19th century and a major figure in the artistic and cultural life of Italy. His realistic treatment of Romantic subjects revitalized academic painting,
Master of ST Ildefonso
Castile,end of the fifteenth century Spanish painter. He is named from St Ildefonso's Reception of a Chasuble from the Virgin Mary (Paris, Louvre), which is traditionally held to come from Valladolid; it may even have come from the chapel of S Ildefonso in the Colegiata there. The style, characterized by harmony of colour and intense expressions, resembles that of four panels of St Athanasius, St Louis of Toulouse, both enthroned, SS Peter and Paul and SS Andrew and James the Great, which probably came from the convent of La Merced, Valladolid. They have been attributed to the Master of vila, but Post considered them to be the work of the Master of St Ildefonso, a more sophisticated painter, although both artists modified the harshness of their Netherlandish models. There are also similarities with Jacomart's triptych of St Anne in the Colegiata, Jetiva, but these may be coincidental. Other works attributed to the Master include St Anne and St Anthony of Padua,
Luigi Premazzi
(Milan, 1814 - Istanbul, Turkey, 1891) was an Italian painter. Premazzi attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and then the private school run by Giovanni Migliara. His early watercolours, based on the works of his master, were produced for the lithographic industry. His oeuvre is characterised by a repertoire of urban views produced in accordance with the dictates of perspective painting. While most of these are set in Milan, other Italian cities were also featured in later years. His smooth, precise painting also shows the influence of his contemporary Luigi Bisi in its descriptive focus on architectural detail. He presented work regularly at the exhibitions of the Societe Promotrice di Belle Arti in Turin from 1842 to 1848 as well as those of the Brera Academy. Having moved to Saint Petersburg around 1850, he became a teacher at the Imperial School of Fine Arts there in 1861. Frequent stays in the Caucasus and the Middle East provided new subjects for his paintings, which he continued to send to Italian exhibitions, where they aroused wonder and curiosity.