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 :. | Max Schmitt a l'aviron | Portrait Einer Dame mit Setter | Studies of Game Birds, probably Viginia Rails | The Study of Baseball | Portrait of Professor Benjamin H Rand |
Related Artists:
Durrie George Henry
American Painter b.1820 d.1863 Durrie and his older brother John (1818-98) studied sporadically from 1839 to 1841 with the portrait painter Nathaniel Jocelyn. From 1840 to 1842 he was an itinerant painter in Connecticut and New Jersey, finally settling permanently in New Haven. He produced c. 300 paintings, of which the earliest were portraits (e.g. Self-portrait, 1839; Shelburne, VT, Mus.); by the early 1850s he had begun to paint the rural genre scenes and winter landscapes of New England that are considered his finest achievement. His landscapes, for example A Christmas Party (1852; Tulsa, OK, Gilcrease Inst. Amer. Hist. & A.), are characterized by the use of pale though cheerful colours and by the repeated use of certain motifs: an isolated farmhouse, a road placed diagonally leading the eye into the composition, and a hill (usually the West or East Rocks, New Haven) in the distance. By the late 1850s Durrie's reputation had started to grow, and he was exhibiting at prestigious institutions, such as the National Academy of Design. In 1861 the firm of Currier & Ives helped popularize his work by publishing prints of two of his winter landscapes, New England Winter Scene (1858; Mr and Mrs Peter Frelinghuysen Carleton priv. col.) and the Farmyard in Winter.
Otto Scholderer
(25 January 1834 - 22 January 1902) was a German painter. He was born in Frankfurt am Main. On completing his schooling, Scholderer went to the Städel academy of arts in 1849, where he remained until 1851. Among his teachers were the art historian Johann David Passavant and the painter Jakob Becker. Subsequently, Scholderer established himself in Städel as a freelance painter. During this period his friendship with Victor Meller began; Scholderer became his brother-in-law in 1868. Through Meller, Scholderer became acquainted with the works of Gustave Courbet. Scholderer made several short study trips to Paris between 1857 and 1858, where he became friends with Henri Fantin-Latour and Édouard Manet, whose influence can be seen in his subsequent work. Fantin-Latour depicted Scholderer in his picture Studio aux Batignolles . Starting from 1858, Scholderer worked and lived predominantly in Kronberg in Taunus, where his colleagues included Anton Burger, Peter Burnitz and Louis Eysen; he was close to the Kronberger painter colony. In 1866, Scholderer established himself in Desseldorf and made friends with Hans Thoma. With Thoma, Scholderer went in 1868 to Paris and returned to Germany only shortly before the outbreak of the French-German War. First Scholderer established himself in Munich, renewing his friendship with Wilhelm Leibl and becoming one of the artists of the Leibl-Kreis (Leibl circle). At the beginning of 1871 he went to London and worked there till the autumn of 1899. After 1899, Scholderer returned to his hometown of Frankfurt, where he died at the age of almost 68 years on 22 January 1902. Otto Scholderer's art, initially dominated by landscapes, later consisted primarily of portraits and still lifes. The important connection between the romantic period and the Impressionists is evident in his work.
CLEVE, Cornelis van
Flemish painter, Antwerp school (b. 1520, Antwerpen, d. after 1570, Antwerpen).