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 | Seventy yeas ago | Landscape | Portrait of Henry Ossawa Tanner | The Portrait of Morris |
Related Artists:
Joseph Bidauld
Carpentras(Vaucluse)1758-Montmorency (Val d'Oise)1846 French painter. He was apprenticed in Lyon for six years with his brother Jean-Pierre-Xavier Bidauld (1745-1813), a landscape and still-life painter. Subsequently, they left Lyon to travel together in Switzerland and Provence. In 1783 he moved to Paris, where he met Joseph Vernet (from whom he received valuable advice), Joseph-Siffred Duplessis and Jean-Honor? Fragonard. In 1785 he went to Rome with the assistance of Cardinal de Bernis and his patron, the dealer and perfumer Dulac. He stayed there for five years, travelling through Tuscany, Umbria and Campania and painting such works as Roman Landscape (1788; Basle, Kstmus.). Bidauld was closely involved with the circle of French Neo-classical painters in Rome in the 1780s. He was friendly with Louis Gauffier, Nicolas-Antoine Taunay and especially with Guillaume Lethiere, who became his brother-in-law and with whom he occasionally collaborated. On his return to Paris in 1790 he travelled extensively in France,
Meckel, Adolf von
German, 1856-1893
Vasilii Polenov
1844-1927