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 :. | The Concert Singer | The Gross Clinic | Study for William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill | the agnew clinic | Maud Cook |
Related Artists:
gottfrid kallstenius
seated male model, 1887-88. royal academy of fine arts
J.S.Sargent
American 1856-1925
LINARD, Jacques
French Baroque Era Painter, ca.1600-1645 French painter. He was in Paris by 1626, and his first securely attributed still-life work is dated the following year. He lived in the Saint-Germain-des-Pr?s district, where a number of French still-life painters such as Louise Moillon and Lubin Baugin worked alongside Flemish artists specializing in this genre. In 1631 he was created Peintre et Valet de Chambre du Roi, a post that guaranteed him a degree of financial independence. Linard's works of 1627-44 were mainly of fruit and flowers; with Louise Moillon, however, he was among the first French artists to combine successfully the female form with still-life elements, as, for example, in Woman with Flowers and Woman with Fruit (both Paris, priv. col., see Far?, 1974, pp. 22-3). A painting such as Basket of Flowers (Paris, Louvre) owes something to Flemish prototypes in the anachronistic grouping of flowers that span several months. Patiently recording the flowers as they bloomed, and working on the picture from a series of drawings and sketches, Linard demonstrated his commitment to working from nature. However