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 :. | Self-Portrait | Biglen Brothers Racing | Ideologist | The Concert Singer | Two Person Dinghy |
Related Artists:
Xanthus Russell Smith
Marine, landscape, portrait, and historical painter. American , 1839-1929 was an American artist best known for his illustrations of the American Civil War. Born in Philadelphia, Smith served in the United States Navy during the war and depicted naval battles with a variety of media, including pencil and oil paint. His best known work (right) recreates the 1864 battle between the CSS Alabama and USS Kearsarge off Cherbourg, France. Smith did not actually participate in most of the battles he illustrated; instead, he generally consulted those who were present at the engagements.
Anna Nordgren
painted Farmer Woman At The Beach in 1880
Mattew Ridley Corbet,ARA
1850-1902 was a Victorian neoclassical painter who attended classes at the Slade School of Art under Alexander Davis Cooper and later at the Royal Academy Schools under Frederic Leighton, President of the Academy. Corbet went to Italy in 1880 and met Giovanni Costa, one of Leighton's friends in Rome. For the next three years he stayed and painted with Costa, eventually becoming one of the leading figures of the Macchiaioli school. He concentrated on Italian landscapes and exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, the New Gallery, the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon.