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 :. | Billy Smith | William Rush and His Model | Max Schmitt a l'aviron | The Portrait of Asbury W-Lee | Pushing for Rail |
Related Artists:
fanny ekbom
male model on a barrel 1882
Henry Otto Wix
Henry Otto Wix (1866 - 1922), also known as Otto Wix, was a German-born landscape and portrait painter who emigrated to the United States in the late 1890s. He studied in New York, but visited Hawaii in 1907 and 1908-9. About 1910, he moved to San Francisco, but visited Hawaii again in 1912. He also made several sketching trips to Mexico. Wixes marriage ended in divorce, resulting in depression and alcoholism. He died by his own hand in Santa Barbara, California on March 13, 1922. Wix is best known for his landscapes in watercolor. The Honolulu Academy of Arts and the Smithsonian American Art Museum are among the public collections holding paintings by Henry Otto Wix
Zygmunt Waliszewski
(1897-1936) was a Polish painter, a member of the Kapist movement. Waliszewski was born in Saint Petersburg to the Polish family of an engineer. In 1907 his parents moved to Tbilisi where Waliszewski spent his childhood. In Tbilisi began his studies at a prestigious art school. In 1908 he had his first exhibition and participated in the life of artistic avant-garde. During World War I he fought with the Russian army, returning to Tbilisi in 1917. He visited Moscow several times and became inspired by the Russian Futurists. He, later, became a member of a Futurist group. In the early 1920s, he departed for Poland, and settled in Krakew. Between 1921 and 1924 he studied at Academy of Fine Arts in Krakew in the studios of Wojciech Weiss and Jezef Pankiewicz. In 1924 he went to Paris with his avante-garde group and continued his studies in painting there under the guidance of Pankiewicz. He was a participant in the Capists' plein-air painting workshops in Cagnes, Valence, Cap Martin, and Avignon. At the Louvre, he painted copies and travesties of the works of old masters like Titian, Veronese, Velezquez, Vermeer, Goya, and Delacroix. He was also fascinated by the art of Cezanne, van Gogh, and Matisse. In 1931 he returned to Poland, residing in Warsaw, Krzeszowice, and Krakew. During this time Waliszewski designed scenery and posters, created book illustrations, drew and painted caricatures and grotesque scenes. In Krakew he befriended the Polish Formists. Waliszewski painted primarily portraits and figural compositions and landscapes of the rural countryside. He died suddenly in 1936.