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 :. | Biglen Brothers, Turning the Stake | Characteristic of Performance | The Study of Nude | Fishing | The Artist and His Father Hunting Reed Birds |
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Henri De Braekeleer
Belgian Painter, 1840-1888 Belgian painter, was born at Antwerp. He was trained by his father, a genre painter, and his uncle, Baron Henri Leys, and devoted himself to scenes of everyday Antwerp life. The first pictures he exhibited, The Laundry (Van Cutsem collection, Brussels), and The Coppersmith's Workshop (Vleeshouwer collection, Antwerp), were shown. at the Antwerp exhibition in 1861. He received the gold medal at Brussels in 1872 for The Geographer and The Lesson (both in the Brussels gallery); the gold medal at Vienna in 1873 for The Painter's Studio and Grandmother's Birthday ; and the medal of honor at the Exposition Universelle at Amsterdam for The Pilot House. Among his more notable works are A Shoemaker (1862), A Tailor's Workroom (1863), A Gardener (1864, Antwerp gallery), Interior of a Church (1866), Interior, Flanders (1867), Woman Spinning (1869), Man Reading (1871), Theruedu Serment, Antwerp (1875), A Copperplate Printer, The Sailor's Return, The Man at the Window (Couteaux collection, Brussels), The Horn-blower (Couteaux collection), Man Retouching a Picture (Couteaux collection), The Potters (Marlier collection, Brussels), Staircase in the Hydraulic House at Antwerp (Marlier collection), and The Brewer's House at Antwerp (Marlier collection). The last, better known as A Man Sitting, is generally regarded as his masterpiece. As a lithographer and etcher, his work resembles that of Henri Leys.
Jan lievens
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1607-1674 Dutch painter, draughtsman and printmaker. His work has often suffered by comparison with that of Rembrandt, with whom he was closely associated from 1625 to 1631. Yet Lievens's early work is equal to that of Rembrandt, although in later years he turned more towards a somewhat facile rendering of the international Baroque style favoured by his noble patrons, thus never fully realizing his early promise.
Julian Scott
American, 1846-1901 ,was born in Johnson, Vermont and was a Union Army drummer during the American Civil War who received America highest military decoration the Medal of Honor for his actions at the Battle of Lee Mills, he was also an American painter and a Civil War artist. Scott received his youthful education at the Lamoille Academy, known today as Johnson State College where the main gallery is named in his memory. Scott continued his studies graduating from the National Academy of Design in New York and subsequently studied under Emmanuel Leutze until 1868. During the Civil War, Scott enlisted in the 3rd Vermont Infantry on June 1, 1861, at the age of 15 as a fifer and in February 1865, was awarded the Medal of Honor for rescuing wounded under enemy fire during the Battle at Lee Mills, Virginia. When the war was over he traveled to Paris and Stuttgart to continue his education. Scott 1872 masterwork, the Battle of Cedar Creek, is located at the Vermont State House. The painting illustrates the contributions of his home state of Vermont in the American Civil War In 1890, and is significant for its absence of glorification of war and instead shows the suffering and human sacrifice associated with war making. Scott traveled west as part of a census party, painting Native Americans in New Mexico, Arizona and Oklahoma. Many of his works from this expedition now hang in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Art. Scott was interred in Hillside Cemetery located in Scotch Plains, New Jersey