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 Amelia van Buren | Crucify | Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand | Elizabeth at the Piano | The Lawn |
Related Artists:
natalia goncharova
natalia goncharova(1881 to 1962),Russian painter, stage designer, printmaker and illustrator. She was a leading artist of the Russian avant-garde in the early 20th century but became a celebrity in the West through her work for SERGE DIAGHILEV and the BALLETS RUSSES. During the 1920s she played a significant role within the Ecole de Paris and continued to live and work in France until her death.
Jan Veth
(18 May 1864 Dordrecht - 1 July 1925 Amsterdam), was a Dutch painter, poet, art critic and university lecturer. Jan Veth was the son of Gerradus Huibert Veth, a Dordrecht iron merchant and liberal politician, and Anna Cornelia Giltay. On his mother's side he descended from the Dordrecht painter family of Van Strij (his mother was a granddaughter of Jacob van Strij). He married Anna Dorothea Dirks on 10 August 1888, from which marriage came five children. Veth received his art education at the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. With several of his fellow students he founded the St. Luke group. From 1885 he worked with the painter Anton Mauve in Laren. After his marriage in 1888 he settled in Bussum. Jan Veth is especially noted as a portrait painter. Amongst his sitters were Max Liebermann, Lambertus Zijl, Frank van der Goes, Antoon Derkinderen and other contemporaries including various fellow painters. In addition he was a well-known poet, belonging to the Eighties movement and publishing work in the De Nieuwe Gids. He designed the cover for "De Kleine Johannes", a book written by his friend, Frederik van Eeden, contributing to the development of book-art in Holland. As Professor Extraordinary in History of Art and Aesthetics, he was associated with the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam.
Alfred Bastien
(16 September 1873e7 June 1955) was a Belgian artist, academic and soldier. He attended the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Ghent, where he studied with Jean Delvin. He then enrolled in the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where he studied with Jean-François Portaels. He won the Prix Godecharle there in 1897. He traveled to Paris, where he enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was in Paris when hostilities broke out in what would become the First World War.