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 Professor Benjamin H Rand | The Oboe player | Cattle farmer | Dr Horatio Wood | Landscape |
Related Artists:
Daniel Mijtens
(Delft, c. 1590 - The Hague, 1647/48), known in England as Daniel Mytens the Elder, was a Dutch portrait painter who spent the central years of his career working in England. He was born in Delft into a family of artists and trained in The Hague, possibly in the studio of Van Mierevelt. He was the nephew of the painter Aert Mijtens, the older brother of the painter Isaac Mijtens, and the father of the painter Daniel Mijtens the Younger. No known work survives from his first Dutch period. By 1618, he had moved to London where his initial patron was the leading art collector Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel. Mijtens painted the Earl and his Countess, and was soon commissioned to paint King James I and his son Charles, Prince of Wales. In 1625 he became painter to Charles I. After the prince's accession to the throne as Charles I in 1625 Mijtens produced such a large number of full length portraits of Charles I and his courtiers, including duplicates, that it is assumed that he had workshop assistance. Two of his finest portraits are of the same man, James Hamilton later 1st Duke of Hamilton, whom he painted as a seventeen year old in 1623 and again in 1629. Mijtens made visits to the Netherlands in 1626 and 1630, perhaps to study the latest developments in his field, more particularly the works of Rubens and Van Dyck. Mijtens introduced a new naturalism into the English court portrait, but after the arrival in England of the far more distinguished Anthony Van Dyck in 1632 he was superseded as the leading court portraitist, and around 1634 he appears to have returned to the Netherlands permanently. He subsequently worked primarily as an art dealer in The Hague, acquiring works for the Earl of Arundel among others. Only four paintings survive from this final period. Some of Mijtens' works are still owned by the Royal Family. Mitjens also made copies of old portraits of royal sitters including; James IV of Scotland, his wife Margaret Tudor, and Mary, Queen of Scots.
HOBBEMA, Meyndert
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1638-1709
John J Enneking
1841-1916