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 :. | Sailboats Racing on the Delaware | Portrait | The Landscape ofSeville | Portrait | The Professor |
Related Artists:
William Henry Pyne
English Painter, 1769-1843 English painter, illustrator and writer. He trained at the drawing academy of Henry Pars (c. 1733-1806) in London and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1790. His drawings were almost always pen, ink and colour wash (e.g. Gossip at the Cottage Door, 1794; London, BM). His most characteristic works are the illustrations for the books Microcosm (1803-8) and The Costume of Great Britain (1808) in which he successfully placed groups of well-observed characters in picturesque settings. Pyne had been a founder of the Old Water-Colour Society in 1804 but resigned in 1809 when it refused to increase its membership to greater than 24 artists.
Christian Krohg
1852-1925 Norwegian Christian Krohg Gallery Krohg was educated in Germany at the Baden School of Art in Karlsruhe under Hans Gude[1], and later worked in Paris from 1881 to 1882. Inspired by the thoughts of the realists he chose motives primarily from everyday life ?C often its darker or socially inferior sides. Particularly well known are his pictures of prostitutes, and his novel Albertine from 1886 is about this theme. The book caused a scandal when first published, and was confiscated by the police. Krogh??s powerful and straightforward style made him one of the leading figures in the transition from romanticism to naturalism, characteristic of Norwegian art in this period. Through his periodic residence at Skagen, where he arrived for the first time in 1879, he had great influence on Anna and Michael Ancher, and provided early support to Edvard Munch. Krohg was a journalist in the Oslo newspaper Verdens Gang 1890-1910, where he wrote remarkable portrait interviews. Later he became a professor director at Statens Kunstakademi (The Norwegian Academy of Arts) 1909-1925. He was married to Oda Krohg.
john henry henshall,RWS
1856-1928