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 :. | Elizabeth at the Piano | Cattle farmer | The Chess Players | Landscape | The Portrait of Morris |
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Bryson Burroughs
1869-1934
Jose Ferraz de Almeida Junior
(8 May 1850 - 13 November 1899) was a Brazilian painter of the 19th century. He is widely regarded as the most important Brazilian realist painter of the 19th century, and a major inspiration for the modernist painters. While most Brazilian academic artists made their fame painting mythological or historical subjects, Almeida Junior would become popular for painting rural figures, especially farmers and the caipira violeiro , the countrymen that are a kind of a symbol of the rural areas of the São Paulo state. While most realist painters used farmers and countrymen as an allegory of workers, Almeida Junior would paint his caipiras mostly on leisure time. He would also produce touching images of upscale landowners. The Bandeirantes, the ruthless explorers of colonial Brazil, would be depicted in the A partida da monção, showing an expedition on the Tiete River. Almeida Junior was born in the city of Itu, then a small town in the state of São Paulo. After becoming a sensation in his town he would be invited to study in the Brazilian Imperial Fine Arts Academy of Rio de Janeiro, but in 1876 would study in France after being granted a scholarship by emperor Pedro II of Brazil in person in the city of Moji-Mirim. He would have Alexandre Cabanel as one of his masters. In 1877 he was already enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in Paris. He took part at the Salon de Paris with several works of art in 1879 (Retrato do Dr. Jose de Magalhães), 1880 (O Derrubador Brasileiro) and (Remorso de Judas), 1881 (Fuga para o Egito) and 1882 (Descanso do Modelo) He admired the French realist and naturalist painting (a major influence at his work), and, after returning to Brazil in 1882, became of the leading names in Brazilian realist painting. He was stabbed to death by the husband of his mistress on November 13, 1899 in Piracicaba.
Julian Falat
(30 July 1853 in Tuligłowy near Lwew - 9 July 1929 in Bystra Śląska) was one of the most prolific Polish painters of watercolor and one of the country's foremost landscape painters as well as one of the leading Polish impressionists. Fałat first studied under Władysław Łuszczkiewicz at the Krakew School of Fine Arts, and then at the Art Academy of Munich. After several trips throughout Europe and Asia in 1885, Fałat compiled a collection of studies from his voyages which would become useful later in the development of his artwork. Themes typical of Fałat's painting are Polish landscapes, hunting scenes, portraits, and studies from his voyages. In 1886, Fałat accepted an invitation from future German Emperor Wilhelm II to serve as court painter in Berlin. Fałat died in Bystra Śląska on July 9, 1929. A museum in Poland, called Fałatewka, is devoted to him. Out of his three children, Kazimierz (Togo) (1904-1981) continued to paint in watercolour. Some works, having been looted under German occupation, very occasionally reappear in sales-rooms. Later works, produced after he settled in England, are largely in the hands of his later family.