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 :. | Seventy yeas ago | Portrait of Alice Kurtz | Portrait | Elizabeth Play the Piano | Taking the Count |
Related Artists:
Lucas Furtenagel
1505-1546
Jules Aviat
French b.1844
Mina Kolokolnikov
1708e-1775e) was a Russian painter and teacher. Kolokolnikov was born in the village of Kravotyn in Tver gubernia. He was a serf of the Pafnutievo-Borovsky Monastery, and learnt the art of portrait painting from Ivan Nikitich Nikitin and Louis Caravaque; he also studied icon painting with Vasily Vasilevsky. He is known to have assisted in the decoration of the palace at Tsarskoye Selo, and to have lived for a time in St. Petersburg, where one of his pupils was Trifon Anisimov. One of his portraits is in the Tver Regional Picture Gallery. He worked in the studio of Alexei Antropov; consequently, it is often difficult to tell Kolokolnikov's works from Antropov's, as both have very similar technique. Kolokolnikov's brothers Ivan and Fedot were also painters.