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 :. | Rancher at the desolate field | Landscape | Elizabeth and the Dog | Study for William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River | The Portrait of Physicists Roland |
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riesener

Lippo Memmi
active in Tuscany 1317-1347
William Berczy
(December 10, 1744, Wallerstein near Noerdlingen, Germany - February 5, 1813, New York City, USA) was a German pioneer and painter. Born in Swabia, Germany as a son of the Wirklicher Hofrat Albrecht Theodor Moll and Johanna Josepha Walpurga Moll nee Hefele, he was originally named Johann Albrecht Ulrich Moll, but later changed his name. He studied at the Akademie der bildenden Kenste in Vienna and at the University of Jena in Saxony. His early career was spent in several European countries, including Italy (meeting with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Florence) and England, where he exhibited at the Royal Academy. In 1792 he sailed for the Americas, setting up a business in York (now - since 1834 - Toronto) a couple of years later. He also worked in Quebec. Although best known for his portraits, he also carried out religious paintings and architectural work, including plans for Christ Church Cathedral in Montreal in 1803, and was a surveyor.