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 Louis N Kenton | Fishing | fairman rogers fyrspann | The Swimming Hole | The Portrait of Physicists Roland |
Related Artists:
George Durrie
Landscape painter, Portrait Painter . American , 1820-1863 American painter. 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 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 and the Farmyard in Winter.
Johannes Frederik Hulk
Dutch, 1829-1911
Jan provoost
Dutch, born circa 1465-1529,South Netherlandish painter. He probably came into contact with Simon Marmion, the renowned painter and book illuminator from Valenciennes, via Jacquemart Pilavaine, a publisher and illuminator in his native Bergen. Provoost married Marmion's widow, Jeanne de Quaroube, before 1491, and it is thus assumed that Marmion was his teacher. In 1493 Provoost moved to Antwerp, a promising town for artists, where he registered as a master in the Guild of St Luke, but in 1494 he travelled to Bruges. He became a citizen there and soon played an important part in the painters' guild. In 1506 Maximiliaen Frans (1490-1547) was his pupil. Provoost received commissions for decorative work from the town council and church authorities in 1509, 1513 and 1520, the year of the Triumphal Entry of Charles V into Bruges, for which he worked on the decorations. He returned to Antwerp the same year to meet Albrecht Derer, who may have drawn his portrait. Derer visited Bruges in April 1521 and was Provoost's guest. Of Jan Provoost's children, Adriaen Provoost (b 1508) became a painter and Thomas Provoost a glassmaker, both active in Bruges. Jan Provoost's time as a pupil in a northern French miniaturist's workshop was of decisive influence on his later oeuvre. His work radiates assurance, with its precise drawing, restrained expression and airy landscapes, and he was successful in Bruges, where there was little competition after Hans Memling's death in 1494.