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 :. | Characteristic of Performance | Portrait | The Portrait of Mary | The Artist-s wife and his dog | Dr. Brinton |
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Antoine Sebastien Plamondon
1804-1895 Canadian Antoine Sebastien Plamondon Gallery
BRUYN, Barthel
German painter (b. 1493, Cologne, d. 1555, Cologne). German Renaissance painter, active in Cologne from 1515. Known especially for his portraits, which combine Northern realism with Italian-inspired monumentality and breadth, Bruyn also painted religious works such as the high altar at Essen Cathedral (1522). A portrait of a man and three religious works are in the Philadelphia Museum; many of his works are in Germany.
Lev Feliksovich Lagorio
(Russian: 1828-1905) was a Russian painter, known for his paintings of seascapes. Lagorio was born in Feodosia, Crimea (now Ukraine) and later studied in the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. His teachers were Maxim Vorobiev and B. P. Villeval'de. While he lived in Feodosia, he was influenced by the painter Ivan Aivazovsky. In 1845 Lagorio went on a sea voyage on the warship Groziashchy to study the arrangement of the ship. Lagorio spent eight years in Italy. The paintings he created there brought him to the status of professor on his return home to Russia. In his later years, he painted the coastal views of Finland and Norway. He also painted motives of the Russian-Turkish war.