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 Gross Clinic | The Artist's Wife and his Setter Dog | Portrait of Professor Benjamin H Rand | Sketch of figure, from two-sided sketch for swimming | Portrait Einer Dame mit Setter |
Related Artists:
BONE, Henry
British, 1755-1834,Cornish enamel painter, was born at Truro. He was much employed by London jewellers for small designs in enamel, before his merits as an artist were well known to the public. In 1800 the beauty of his pieces attracted the notice of the Royal Academy, of which he was then admitted as an associate; in 1811 he was made an academician. Up to 1831 he executed many beautiful miniature pieces of much larger size than had been attempted before in England; among these his eighty-five portraits of the time of Queen Elizabeth, of different sizes, from 5 by 4 to 13 by 8 in. are most admired. They were disposed of by public sale after his death. His Bacchus and Ariadne, after Titian, painted on a plate, brought the great price of 2200 guineas. He had 2 sons, who were also notable enamallists: Henry Pierce Bone & Robert Trewick Bone.
RAMSAY, Allan
Scottish Rococo Era Painter, 1713-1784 Portrait painter, born in Edinburgh, son of the poet Allan Ramsay. He studied in Edinburgh, London, Rome, and Naples, settling in London in 1739 and quickly establishing himself as the leading portraitist of the capital. He was particularly successful in painting women. His career as a portrait painter ended in 1773
Henri-Horace Roland de La Porte
Paris 1724-1793 French painter. He was a pupil of Jean-Baptiste Oudry and was approved by the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1761 as a 'painter of animals and fruit'. He presented his morceau de reception, the ambitious Vase of Lapis, Ornamented with Bronze and Placed near a Globe (Paris, Louvre), in 1763. This large painting is reminiscent of Oudry's work and depicts a collection of sumptuous objects against a simple cloth backdrop. Roland de la Porte's later works are much more intimate in scale and approach and depict simple rustic objects in a restrained yet realistic fashion in a manner akin to Chardin, for whose works his own have been mistaken. The Still-life with Bread and Fruit (Rotterdam, Boymans-van Beuningen) is bathed in a warm light; the composition is unusual in that the bread, plums and preserve pot are represented at the viewer's eye level, obscuring the top of the table. The Little Orange Tree (Karlsruhe, Staatl. Ksthalle) uses several devices similar to those used by Chardin: a light source comes from the upper left-hand side, throwing some of the surfaces into relief and highlighting them against the indistinct background; a single straw is brought into focus and seems to protrude out of the picture