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 :. | The Portrait of Mary | Chess Player | Salutat | The Portrait of Martin Cardinals | Miss Amelia C. Van Buren |
Related Artists:
Simon Dequoy
Simon Dequoy (1655-1727)
Oliver Kemp
American, 1887-1934
Josef Danhauser
Josef Danhauser (August 19, 1805, Laimgrube (now a part of Mariahilf or Neubau) - May 4, 1845) was an Austrian painter, one of the main artists of Biedermeier period, together with Ferdinand Georg Waldmeller, Peter Fendi, among others. His works, not very appreciated in his days, dealt with very moralising subjects and they had a clear influence of William Hogarth. Joseph Danhauser was born in Vienna in 1805, the eldest son of sculptor and furniture manufacturer Joseph Ulrich Danhauser and his wife Johanna (nee Lambert). He took his first painting lessons with his father and he later assisted the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He studied with Johann Peter Krafft and made his first exhibition 1826. Invited by Johann Ladislaus Pyrker, patriarch of Venice, he visited the city of Doges, where he started to study the Italian masters. He came back to Vienna via Trieste in 1827, visiting Prague. That very year he painted Ludwig van Beethoven's death mask, roughly 12 hours after his death and a water-colour representing his deathbed. In 1828, he spent some time in Eger, with an invitation of this Hungarian city archbishop Pyrker. He solicited him for some pictures for the gallery of the Archdiocese. After his father's death in 1829, his brothers and he managed his furniture factory during the Biedermeier movement, being the precursors of modern design. That made him put his painting career aside. In 1833, he responded to a second invitation from Eger's archbishop and he painted The martyr of Saint John for a new basilica in the city and he received the Vienna Academy prize for his picture Die Verstobung der Hagar and he specialised in Genre works. In 1838, he was appointed vice-rector of the Academy and married Josephine Streit, who was the daughter of a physician and with whom he had three children, Josef, Marie and Julie, born in 1839, 1841 and 1843 respectively. Josef Danhauser was appointed professor of historical Painting at the Academy in 1841, but he left this occupation and he travelled around Germany and the Netherlands with the textile maker, art aficionado and art sponsor Rudolf von Arthaber. In this journey, he was very interested in the Dutch School and the format of his works was littler. He died of typhus in Vienna in 1845. They named a street with his name in Vienna in 1862.