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 :. | Samuel Gros-s Operation of Clinical | Portrait | Portrait of Maud Cook | Coral Jewelry | Two Person Dinghy |
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BONSIGNORI, Francesco
Italian painter, Veronese school (b. 1455, Verona, d. 1519, Caldiero) Italian painter. His father, Albertus Bonsignori, was reputedly an amateur painter; and besides Francesco, the oldest and most talented of his children, three other sons, including Bernardino (c. 1476-c. 1520) and Girolamo (b c. 1479), are also recorded as painters. Barely 20 paintings and fewer than a dozen drawings have been attributed to Francesco Bonsignori.
Pryanishnikov Illarion
1840-1894,Russian painter. He studied from 1856 to 1866 at the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Moscow and subsequently taught there (1873-94). Among his pupils were Sergey Ivanov and Sergey Korovin. Pryanishnikov was among the fifteen founder-members of the Peredvizhniki (WANDERERS) and contributed two works to their first exhibition. His narrative pictures of the 1860s embodied the critical trend in early Russian Realism and focused on the trials and sorrows of the lower classes; his Jokers (1865; Moscow, Tret yakov Gal.) shows a petty clerk performing stunts for the amusement of some wealthy merchants. The Convoy of Empty Sleds (1871; Kharkiv, Mus. F.A.) conveys a fine sense of the bleak winter landscape. His later work added northern scenery and genre scenes to his repertory as in Saviour Day in the North (1887; Moscow, Tret yakov Gal.) and Return from the Fair (1883; St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.). Pryanishnikov is also known for his hunting scenes. In 1893 he became a member of the St Petersburg Academy of Arts.
JOUVENET, Jean-Baptiste
French painter (b. 1644, Rouen, d. 1717, Paris). French painter, one of a family of painters. He worked in Paris in the studio of Charles Le Brun, whose manner he acquired and whose favor at court he shared. He is best known for his religious paintings; the most important are the series of four canvases for St. Martin des Champs, including the Miraculous Draught of Fishes