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 Artist-s wife and his dog | Portrait of Maud Cook | Home Scene | Portrait | Home Ranch 1888 |
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martinus rorbye

Carl Hessmert
1869-1928
Karl von Piloty
Karl Theodor von Piloty (1 October 1826 - 21 July 1886) was a German painter. Von Piloty was born in Munich. His father, Ferdinand Piloty (d. 1844), enjoyed a great reputation as a lithographer. In 1840, Karl was admitted as a student of the Munich Academy, under the artists Karl Schorn and Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld. After a journey to Belgium, France and England, he commenced work as a painter of genre pictures, and in 1853 produced a work, Die Amme (The Wet Nurse), which, on account of its originality of style, caused a considerable sensation in Germany at the time. But he soon forsook this branch of painting in favour of historical subjects, and produced in 1854 for King Maximilian II The Accession of Maximilian I to the Catholic League in 1609. It was succeeded by Seni at the Dead Body of Wallenstein (1855), which gained for the young painter the membership of the Munich Academy, where he succeeded Schorn (his brother-in-law) as professor. Among other well-known works by Piloty are the Battle of the White Mountain near Prague, Nero Dancing upon the Ruins of Rome (1861), Godfrey of Bouillon on a Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1861), Galileo in Prison (1864) and The Death of Alexander the Great (unfinished), his last great work. He also executed a number of mural paintings for the royal palace in Munich. For Baron von Schach, he painted the famous Discovery of America. In 1874, he was appointed keeper of the Munich Academy, being afterwards ennobled by the king of Bavaria. Piloty was the foremost representative of the realistic school in Germany. He was a successful teacher, and among his more famous pupils were Hans Makart, Franz von Lenbach, Franz Defregger, Gabriel von Max, Georgios Jakobides and Eduard von Gretzner.