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 William | Biglen Brothers Racing | The Gross Clinic | The Study of Nude | The Gross Clinic |
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BEUCKELAER, Joachim
Flemish Northern Renaissance Painter, ca.1534-1574 A native of Antwerp, he studied under his uncle, Pieter Aertsen. Many of his paintings contain scenes of kitchen and markets, with religious allusions in the background. His Four Elements series (as of 2004[update], in the National Gallery, London) exemplifies this theme on a large scale. Water, for example, shows a fish market selling twelve kinds of fish, representing the twelve disciples of Jesus. Through an archway in the background we can see Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee after his resurrection, making fish appear miraculously in empty nets. Beuckelaer's work was influential on painters in Northern Italy, particularly Vincenzo Campi.
henry mayhew
English journalist and sociologist. He studied law but soon turned to journalism. In 1841 he founded the highly successful Punch. A vivid and voluminous writer, he is best known for London Labour and the London Poor (1851 C 62), an evocation of the sights and sounds of the working-class districts of London, which influenced Charles Dickens and other writers. He also wrote plays, farces, fairy tales, and novels, some in collaboration with his brother Augustus Septimus Mayhew
Jean de Beaumetz
Artois,active from 1361-Dijon 1396