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 :. | Hayes Agnew Operation Clinical | Between Rounds | Portrait of Alice Kurtz | Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand | The Dance Curriculum |
Related Artists:
Caillebotte, Gustave
French Impressionist Painter, 1848-1894 .French painter and collector. Caillebotte's parents, of Norman descent, were wealthy members of the Parisian upper middle class, and his paintings often evoke his family background. After studying classics at the Lyc?e Louis Le Grand, he obtained a law degree in 1870, and during the Franco-Prussian War he was drafted into the Seine Garde Mobile (1870-71). He joined L?on Bonnat's studio in 1872 and passed the entrance examination for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts on 18 March 1873. The records of the Ecole make no mention of his work there, and his attendance seems to have been short-lived. He was very soon attracted by the innovative experiments, against academic teaching, of the young rebels who were to become known as the Impressionists. In 1874 Edgar Degas, whom Caillebotte had met at the house of their mutual friend Giuseppe de Nittis, asked him to take part in the First Impressionist Exhibition at the Nadar Gallery in the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. However, it was only at the time of their second exhibition in April 1876 that, at Auguste Renoir's invitation, Caillebotte joined the Impressionist group. From then on he was one of the most regular participants in their exhibitions (1877, 1879, 1880, 1882). He organized the show of 1877 and made great efforts to restore the cohesion of the group by persuading Claude Monet to exhibit in 1879.
FRANCIA, Francesco
Italian High Renaissance Painter, 1450-1517 He turned to painting c. 1485, and his first works already testify to the considerable technical accomplishment and gentle religious sensibility that remained constants of his art. His major surviving paintings are altarpieces, mostly images of the Virgin and saints, initially done for Bologna and later for nearby centres, notably Parma, Modena, Ferrara and Lucca. He also painted many small-scale devotional works and a few portraits. The apochryphal anecdote reported by Vasari that Francia died on seeing Raphael's altarpiece of St Cecilia
Thomas Webster
(March 10, 1800 - September 23, 1886), was an English genre painter, who lived for many years at the artists' colony in Cranbrook. Webster was born in Ranelagh Street, Pimlico, London. His father was a member of the household of George III, and the son, having shown an aptitude for music, became a chorister, first at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle, then the Chapel Royal at St. James's Palace in London. He abandoned music for painting, however, and in 1821 was admitted as a student to the Royal Academy, exhibiting, in 1824, portraits of "Mrs Robinson and Family." In the following year he won first prize in the school of painting. In Sickness and Health (1843)In 1825, also, Webster exhibited 'Rebels shooting a Prisoner,' at the Suffolk Street Gallery - the first of a series of pictures of schoolboy life for which he subsequently became known - . In 1828 he exhibited 'The gunpowder Plot' at the Royal Academy, and in 1829 'The Prisoner' and 'A Foraging Party aroused' at the British Institution. These were followed by numerous other pictures of school and village life at both galleries. In 1840 Webster was elected an associate of the Royal Academy (ARA), and in 1846 a Royal Academician (RA) academician. He continued to be a frequent exhibitor till 1876, when he retired from the academy. He exhibited his own portrait in 1878, and 'Released from School,' his last picture, in 1879. In 1856 Webster was photographed at 'The Photographic Institute', London, by Robert Howlett, as part of a series of portraits of 'fine artists'. The picture was among a group exhibited at the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester in 1857. From 1835 to 1856 Webster resided at The Mall, Kensington, but the last thirty years of his life were spent at the artists' colony in Cranbrook, Kent, where he died on 23 Sept. 1886.