Thomas Eakins
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 :. | Weda Cook | Portrait of Mary Adeline Williams | Landscape | Samuel Gros-s Operation of Clinical | Bathing | Related Artists: Michau, TheobaldFlemish Painter, 1676-1765 Eva Gonzales French Impressionist Painter, 1849-1883.was a French Impressionist painter. Like her teacher, Edouard Manet, she never exhibited with the Impressionist painters in their controversial exhibitions in Paris, but she is considered part of the group because of her painting style. She was Manets only formal student and modeled frequently for several members of the Impressionist school. She married Henri Guerard and used him and her sister Jeanne Gonzales as the subjects for many of her paintings. Her career was cut short when she died in childbirth at the age of thirty-four, exactly six days after the death of her teacher, Manet. The painting she is completing in Manets Portrait of Eva Gonzales demonstrates the mastery she had achieved at that age. However, it should be noted that this depiction of Gonzales is less than flattering in that her dress, her posture and technique are not actually not those of a professional to painting. The work that Gonzales is working on is in actuallity not her own, but actually one of Manets paintings MASTER of HohenfurthBohemian painter
active 1350-70 in Prague
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