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 :. | Wagon | Billy Smith | The clinic of dr. Majorities | Sailboats Racing on the Delaware | Portrait of Maud Cook |
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Albin Egger Lienz
Albin Egger-Lienz (29 January 1868 - 4 November 1926) was an Austrian painter. He was born in Dölsach-Stribach near Lienz, in what was the county of Tyrol. As an artist, he had a special preference for rustic genre and historical paintings; under the influence of Ferdinand Hodler, Egger-Lienz abstracted his formal language into monumental expressiveness. He trained first under his father (a church painter), later he studied at the Academy in Munich where he was influenced by Franz Defregger and French painter Jean-François Millet. In 1899 he moved to Vienna. During 1911 and 1912 he was professor at the Weimar School of Fine Arts and he served as war painter during World War I. In 1918, he turned down a professorship at the Vienna Academy and settled in South Tyrol. Egger-Lienz died on 4 November 1926 in St. Justina-Rentsch, Bolzano, Italy.
Delaunay, Robert
French Cubist Painter, 1885-1941 French painter, printmaker and writer. Taking Cubism as one of his points of departure, he first developed a vocabulary of colour planes only distantly dependent on observed motifs, and by the 1930s he had arrived at a purely self-sufficient language of geometric forms. He remained active as a theoretician until the end of his life,
Gustav Graef
(December 14, 1821 in Königsberg - January 6, 1895 in Berlin) was a German painter, primarily of portraits and historical subjects. He studied with Theodor Hildebrandt and Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow at the Kunstakademie Desseldorf. His son Botho Graef became an art historian of some note, and his daughter was the painter Sabine Lepsius.