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 of William Merritt Chase | Swimming | Das Agnew praktikum | The Artist and His Father Hunting Reed Birds | Elizabeth Crowell with a Dog |
Related Artists:
Walter Ufer
American Painter, 1876-1936,was an American artist based in Taos, New Mexico. His most notable work focuses on scenes of Native American life, particularly of the Pueblo Indians. Walter was born of German immigrant parents and raised in Kentucky. After an apprenticeship as a lithographer, he went to Europe where he was a traveling journeyman. When he returned to America, he worked as a printer in Chicago and taught school, and later took classes in fine arts. After a brief time in Chicago, he returned to Europe for further study as an artist.
Jeanne-Philiberte Ledoux
painted Portrait of a lady, said to be the Duchesse de Choiseul in 18th century
Penleigh boyd
Australia artist 1890-1923 was an Australian artist. Penleigh Boyd was a member of the Boyd artistic dynasty: his parents Arthur Merric Boyd (1862-1940) and Emma Minnie Boyd (n??e ?? Beckett) were well-known artists of the day, and his brothers included Merric Boyd the ceramacist (1888-1959) and the novelist Martin Boyd (1893-1972). His son Robin Boyd (1919-1971) was a noted writer and architectural critic, and his nephews Arthur Boyd and David Boyd became prominent artists. Born in England at Penleigh House, Westbury, Wiltshire, Boyd received his artistic training from his parents and at the National Gallery Art School. He had his first exhibition at the Victorian Artists' Society at 18, and exhibited at the Royal Academy in London at 21. He won second prize in the Australian Federal Government's competition for a painting of the site of the new national capital, Canberra. He won the Wynne Prize in 1914 with Landscape. He served in the AIF (Australian Infantry Forces) in France in World War I, and was invalided out after being badly gassed at the battle of Ypres in 1917. His career was cut short when he was killed in a car accident near Warragul, Victoria in 1923. Penleigh Boyd is best known as a landscapist with an accomplished handling of evanescent effects of light. A notable influence was artist E. Phillips Fox, who introduced him to plein air techniques when they were neighbours in Paris in 1912-1913.