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 :. | Biglin Brother-s Match | Portrait | Portrait of Henry Ossawa Tanner | Elizabeth at the Piano | Retrospection |
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John Currey Marin
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Jean Pillement
French Rococo Era Painter , 1728-1808 was a painter and designer, known for his exquisite and delicate landscapes, but whose importance lies primarily in the engravings done after his drawings and their influence in spreading the Rococo style, and particularly the taste for chinoiserie, throughout Europe. Pillement, born in Lyon, had an unusually cosmopolitan career. He moved from Paris, working for the Gobelin factory to Lisbon, where the need to rebuild after the disastrous 1755 earthquake had created many opportunities. There he was working in Queluz (Sintra) and for the Dutch consul, the known art collector Jan Gildemeester. Pillement spend eight years in England, fully exploiting the English taste for landscapes. There the paintings by Nicolaes Berchem inspired him. Pillement came acquainted with David Garrick, a famous actor, and his Austrian wife Eva Maria Weigel, collectors of his work in England. Pillement went to Vienna and in 1765 he went to Warsaw, decorating the Royal Castle in Warsaw and the Ujazdowski Castle, his largest project, commissioned by Stanisaw August Poniatowski. He also worked in Saint Petersburg, the Piedmont, Milan, Rome, Venice. Pillement travelled to Paris to work for Marie Antoinette in the Petit Trianon.