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 :. | Portrait of Douglas Morgan Hall | William-s Wife | Dirge | William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River | The Baby play on the floor |
Related Artists:
Thomas Daniell
1749-1840,was an English landscape painter. He was born at the Chertsey inn, kept by his father, in 1749, and apprenticed to an heraldic painter. Daniell, however, was animated with a love of the romantic and beautiful in architecture and nature. Up to 1784 he painted topographical subjects and flower pieces. By this time his two nephews had come under his influence, the younger, Samuel, being apprenticed to Medland the landscape engraver, and the elder, William, being under his own care. In this year (1784) he embarked for India accompanied by William Daniell, and found at Calcutta ample encouragement. Here he remained ten years, and on returning to London he published his largest work, Oriental Scenery, in six large volumes, not completed till 1808. From 1795 until 1828 he continued to exhibit Eastern subjects, temples, jungle hunts, &c., and at the same time continued the publication of illustrated works. These are Views of Calcutta; Oriental Scenery, 144 plates; Views in Egypt; Excavations at Ellora; Picturesque Voyage to China. These were for the most part executed in aquatint.
Herbert Coutts
d.1921
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.