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 | Coral Jewelry | Rancher at the desolate field | Repair fishnet | The Portrait of Mary |
Related Artists:
Marescalco, Il
Italian, approx. 1470-1538
Niccolo Bambini
(1651-1736) was an Italian painter of the late-Renaissance and early-Baroque periods. He was born in Venice, and first studied under Giulio Mazzoni at Venice; but afterwards went to Rome, where he became a pupil of Carlo Maratti. He painted for the church of San Stefano soon after his return from Rome. He died in Venice. He had two sons who were painters, Giovanni and Stefano.
Johann Georg Meyer
Johann Georg Meyer (28 October 1813 Bremen, Germany - 4 December 1886 Berlin), commonly known as Meyer von Bremen, was a German painter who specialized in Biblical, peasant, and family scenes. In his 2lst year, he went to Desseldorf and began his studies at the Academy of Art there, which was led by Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow, the son of sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow. In 1841, Meyer opened a studio of his own, but moved to Berlin as his fame increased (1853). While scenes from the Bible were first the subjects of his brush, he later turned his attention to incidents from popular life, especially among the Hessian peasantry, and finally to the portrayal of family life in its pathetic aspect. Such pictures as eThe Jubilee of a Hessian Pastore (1843), hristmas Eve,e eBlindman's Buff,e eThe Soldier's Return,e eThe Inundatione (1846), eThe Repentant Daughtere (1852, in the gallery at Bremen), are full of intense sympathy with the esimple annals of the poor.e After taking up his residence at Berlin, he chose especially scenes from child life, which he rendered with spirited humor. Among his pictures of this kind are eThe Fairy Tale,ehildren Playing Blindman's Buff,e eGrandfather and Grandchild,e and others. A third group of his pictures includes those of young women, as single figures or in groups, such as eThe Tryste and eThe Love Letter.e An example of his work, eThe Lettere (1873), is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.