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 Susan | Chess Player | The Gross Clinic | Portrait of Mary Adeline Williams | portrait de Louis N.Kenton |
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TRAVERSI, Gaspare
Italian Painter, ca.1722-1770 Italian painter. He was apprenticed to the elderly Francesco Solimena, whose late style, a reinterpretation of the Baroque art of Mattia Preti, influenced his earliest works. At the same time he studied the naturalist painters of the 17th century: Preti himself, Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, Jusepe de Ribera, Filippo Vitale and Francesco Fracanzano. Classical art also attracted him, and in the 1740s he began to make journeys to Rome to study the influential works of Bolognese and Roman classicism: paintings by Guido Reni, Guercino and the Carracci family, and by Carlo Maratti. During one of these visits he copied two pictures by Maratti, then in S Isidoro, Rome: the Flagellation and a Crucifixion . In the following year he was in Naples; three canvases of scenes from the Life of the Virgin (Naples, S Maria dell'Aiuto), one of which is signed and dated 1749
Boccaccio Boccaccino
(c. 1467 - c. 1525) was a painter of the early Italian Renaissance, belonging to the Emilian school. He is profiled in Vasari's Le Vite delle pie eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori (or, in English, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects). He was born in Ferrara and studied there, probably under Domenico Panetti. Few facts of his life are known. His principal artistic activity was in Venice, Ferrara, and especially in Cremona, where he founded a school in which Garofalo was a pupil. His most celebrated achievement is the frescoes in the Cathedral of Cremona (1506-1519) representing the Birth of the Virgin and some subjects from her life. His position there was taken over by Altobello Melone. His remaining works, which include the Marriage of Saint Catherine (Accademia), the Virgin and Child with Four Saints (Venice, San Giuliano), the Virgin and Two Saints (Cremona, San Quirilo), and the Holy Family (Paris, Louvre), are considered by Lanzi remarkable for richness of drapery, variety of color, spirit and grace of attitude, and harmony of landscape. Several works formerly attributed to Pietro Perugino, Pinturicchio, and Garofalo are now ascribed to Boccaccino. His son and pupil Camillo Boccaccino (1501-46) was a painter at Cremona.
William Mulready
(1 April 1786 - 7 July 1863) was an Irish genre painter living in London. He is best known for his romanticizing depictions of rural scenes, and for creating Mulready stationery letter sheets, issued at the same time as the Penny Black postage stamp. William Mulready was born in Ennis, County Clare. Early in his life, in 1792, the family moved to London, where he was able to get an education and was taught painting well enough so that he was accepted at the Royal Academy School at the age of fourteen. Choosing the Wedding Gown illustrating ch 1 of Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver GoldsmithIn 1802, he married Elizabeth Varley (1784-1864), a landscape painter. Their three children, Paul Augustus (1805-1864), William (1805-1878), and Michael (1807-1889) also became artists. His relationship with his wife however deteriorated gradually over the years, which is detailed in papers stored at the library of the Victoria and Albert Museum. His strong Catholic beliefs prevented any chance of a divorce but they separated. He accused her of "bad conduct" but shied from providing details. In a letter to him in 1827 she blamed him entirely for the collapse of their marriage, suggesting cruelty, pederastic activities and adultery were the reasons. His son, William Mulready Junior (1805-1878), lived in London and maintained a career of a portrait painter and picture restorer. He had five children (Ellen, Mary, Augustus Edwin, Henry William, and John).They also were trained as artists, but not all of them pursued the artistic career: Henry William and John described themselves as 'house painters'. Augustus Edwin Mulready (1844-1904) was the most successful of them and became known as a member of the Cranbrook Colony of artists.