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 | Portrait of Louis N Kenton | Frank Hamilton cushing | The Gross Clinic | The Portrait of Miller |
Related Artists:
Laszlo Paal
Laszlo Paal (1846-1879) was a Hungarian Realist landscape painter. He was a pupil of Mihaly Munkacsy. His pictures are representative of lyrical realism: his oeuvre is related to the tendencies of the Barbizon School.
Pavel Filonov
1883-1941 Pavel Filonov Locations Russian painter, graphic artist and poet. He came from a working-class background; orphaned in childhood, he moved to St Petersburg, where he earned money through embroidery, house painting, restoring buildings and icons, and other tasks such as retouching photographs and making posters and wrappers for goods (a practical apprenticeship he never forgot). His interest in drawing and painting developed through copying, making portraits and the close study of human and animal anatomy. He entered the Academy of Arts, St Petersburg (1908) with difficulty but he left without graduating; his only important teacher was L. E. Dmitriyev-Kavkazsky (1849-1916), with whom he studied privately. Largely self-taught, he was a man of considerable intellectual powers.
Johann Christian Reinhart
German , 1761-1847 He revealed an interest in art while still at school and, though he began to study theology in Leipzig in 1778, he soon transferred to the private art academy of Adam Friedrich Oeser (1717-99). Here he made copies of the work of his teacher and drew after plaster casts of antique statues. The Liber Veritatis, a collection of 200 drawings by Claude Lorrain, was also used as a model and had an important influence on him. In 1783 he went to Dresden where he was especially attracted to the Dutch landscape paintings in the Gem?ldegalerie. In 1785 Reinhart returned to Leipzig where he made the acquaintance of the German poet Friedrich Schiller, with whom he had a lifelong friendship, and to whom he later dedicated an etching of a heroic landscape (1800). From 1786 to 1789, while resident at the court of the Duke of Sachsen-Meiningen, he explored the Thuringian countryside on foot, making sketches as he went.