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 :. | Portrait | Portrait | The Portrait of Helen | William Rush Carving his Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River | Gross doctor's clinical course |
Related Artists:
Franz Kops
painted Ir. konigl. Hoheit Prinz Georg, Herzog zu Sachsen im Jahre 1895 - Studie nach dem Leben in 1895
Cornelius Gijsbrechts
Flemish Baroque Era Painter, ca.1630-1675
Henry de Groux
Belgian 1867-1930 Henry de Groux (1866 in Brussels - 1930 in Marseilles) was a Belgian Symbolist painter, sculptor and lithographer. His 1889 painting Christ aux Outrages, widely described as his masterwork, depicted Jesus being attacked by a mob. Later in life, he produced many works depicting the horrors of the First World War. Ride of the Valkyries (ca. 1890) Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels, BelgiumDe Groux was a member of les XX, but was expelled when he refused to have his works displayed in the same gallery as Vincent van Gogh. He subsequently moved to Paris, where he befriended Emile Zola; during the social unrest resulting from the Dreyfus affair, de Groux acted as one of Zola's bodyguards. As well, de Groux was a fervent diarist; beginning in 1892, he produced 18 volumes detailing the life of a European artist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 2002, his descendants donated these volumes to the Institut national d'histoire de l'art; selected excerpts were published in 2007 Henry de Groux 1866-1930 - journal - Henry De Groux, Rodolphe Rapetti, Pierre Wat - Editions Kime.