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 :. | William Rush Carving his Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River | Frank Hamilton cushing | Zwishchen den Runden | The Lawn | Miss Amelia Van Buren |
Related Artists:
Antwerp of Leiden
ca.1500/50
Johann Wilhelm Preyer
painted A Still Life with Peaches and Grapes on a Marble Ledge in 1803-1889
ALTICHIERO da Zevio
Italian Gothic Era Painter, ca.1330-1390 Altichiero da Verona (also called Aldighieri da Zevio; c. 1330 ?C c. 1390) was an Italian painter of the Gothic style. A follower of Giotto, Altichiero is credited with founding the Veronese school. He worked in Verona and Padua ?? works by him survive in the church of Sant'Anastasia in Verona and in the basilica of Sant'Antonio and the Oratorio di San Giorgio in Padua (where the credit for the work has been generally shared with Jacopo d'Avanzi, about whom little is known). Altichiero was probably born somewhere near Zevio. He became an important member of the della Scala's household, and around 1364 painted a series of frescoes based upon Flavius Josephus's The Wars of the Jews at the della Scala palace of Sala del Podest??. There are frescoes by him in the Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua. In conjunction with D'Avanzo Veronese, he frescoed the chapel of St. James for which he was paid 792 ducats. The first seven frescoes on the life of St. James the Elder were by Altichiero.