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 Portrait of Martin Cardinals | Cattle farmer | The Baby play on the floor | Taking the Count | Billy Smith |
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Johan Stalbom
Johan Stalbom (1712 - 1777)
Jozef Chelmonski
(November 7, 1849 -- April 6, 1914) was a Polish painter. Chełmonski was born in the village of Boczki near Łowicz in central Congress Poland, Russian Empire. His first drawing teacher was his father (a small leaseholder and administrator of Boczki village). After finishing high school in Warsaw, he studied in Warsaw Drawing Class (1867--1871) and took private lessons from Wojciech Gerson. From 1871 to 1874 Chełmonski lived in Munich. He worked with Polish painters assembled around Jozef Brandt and Maksymilian Gierymski. He also had studied for a few months at the academy of H. Anschutz and A. Strahuber. In 1872 and 1874 Chełmonski visited the Polish territories (Poland as a country did not exist then), Tatra Mountains and Ukraine. His first paintings were done under the influence of Gerson. The works that followed were landscapes and villages. In 1875 Chełmonski went to Paris, where he had many important exhibitions and became known to the art scene. With many orders, the artistic level of his paintings decreased. From 1878 to 1887 Chełmonski visited Poland, Vienna and Venice. In 1887 he returned to Poland and in 1889 settled in Kuklawka Zarzeczna village. Contact with his homeland and nature revealed quality in his artworks. From that time are the best liked Chełmonski's paintings such as Partridge on the Snow, The Storks or Before Thunderstorm. Chełmonski represented the trend in art called "Polish Patriotic Painting". He died in Kuklawka near Grodzisk Mazowiecki in 1914.
Christian Berentz
German, 1658-1722