Thomas Eakins
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 :. | Portrait | William and his Model | Advances | Der Denker | Portrait Einer Dame mit Setter | Related Artists: Pawel Andrejewitsch Fedotowpainted Junge Witwe in 1851 Joshua Johnson (c.1763-c.1824) was an American biracial painter from the Baltimore area. Johnson, often viewed as the first person of color to make a living as a painter in the United States, is known for his naïve paintings of prominent Maryland residents.
It was not until 1939 that the identity of the painter of elite 19th century Baltimoreans was shed to light by art historian and genealogist J. Hall Pleasants, who believed that thirteen portraits were painted by one Joshua Johnson. Pleasants attempted to put the puzzle of Johnson's life together, however, questions on Johnson's race, life dates and even his last name (Johnson or Johnston) remained. These questions remained up until the mid-1990s, when the Maryland Historical Society released newly found manuscripts regarding Johnson's life Hippolyte camille delpyFrench, 1842-1910
was a painter. Delpy came from a moderately wealthy family from Joigny, in the Burgundy region of France. He was a student of Charles Francois Daubigny.
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