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 | Coral Jewelry | The Study of Baseball | Chess Player | The Portrait of Martin Cardinals |
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Master of ST Ildefonso
Castile,end of the fifteenth century Spanish painter. He is named from St Ildefonso's Reception of a Chasuble from the Virgin Mary (Paris, Louvre), which is traditionally held to come from Valladolid; it may even have come from the chapel of S Ildefonso in the Colegiata there. The style, characterized by harmony of colour and intense expressions, resembles that of four panels of St Athanasius, St Louis of Toulouse, both enthroned, SS Peter and Paul and SS Andrew and James the Great, which probably came from the convent of La Merced, Valladolid. They have been attributed to the Master of vila, but Post considered them to be the work of the Master of St Ildefonso, a more sophisticated painter, although both artists modified the harshness of their Netherlandish models. There are also similarities with Jacomart's triptych of St Anne in the Colegiata, Jetiva, but these may be coincidental. Other works attributed to the Master include St Anne and St Anthony of Padua,
Ralph Earl
1751- 1801 Ralph Earl Galleries Ralph Earl was born in either Shrewsbury or Leicester, Massachusetts. By 1774, he was working in New Haven, Connecticut as a portrait painter. In the autumn of 1774, Earl returned to Leicester, Massachusetts to marry his cousin, Sarah Gates. A few months later, their daughter was born; however, Earl left them both with Sarah's parents and returned to New Haven. Like so many of the colonial craftsmen, Earl was self-taught, and for many years was an itinerant painter. In 1775, Earl visited Lexington and Concord, which were the sites of recent battles in the American Revolution. Together with engraver Amos Doolittle, he painted four of his most famous pictures, all battle scenes. Although his father was a colonel in the Revolutionary army, Ralph Earl himself was a Loyalist. In 1778, he left behind his wife and daughter and escaped to England by disguising himself as the servant of British army captain John Money.
Frances Hudson Storrs
1860-1945 Frances Hudson Storrs Gallery