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 :. | Self portrait | Wagon | Sailboats Racing on the Delaware | fairman rogers fyrspann | The Pathetic Song |
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Therese Schwartze
(December 20, 1852, Amsterdam - December 23, 1918, Amsterdam) was a Dutch portrait painter. Therese was the daughter of Johan Georg Schwartze (1814 - 1874), from whom she received her first training, before studying for a year under Gabriel Max and Franz von Lenbach in Munich. In 1879 she went to Paris to continue her studies under Jean-Jacques Henner. Her portraits are remarkable for excellent character drawing, breadth and vigour of handling and rich quality of pigment. She was one of the few women painters who had been honoured by an invitation to contribute their portraits to the hall of painters at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Some of her best pictures, notably a portrait of Piet J Joubert, and Three Inmates of the Orphanage at Amsterdam, are at the Rijksmuseum, and one entitled The Orphan at the Boyman Museum in Rotterdam.
Lesser Ury
1861 - 1931 was a German Impressionist painter and printmaker. He was born Leo Lesser Ury in Birnbaum, the son of a baker whose death in 1872 was followed by the Ury family's move to Berlin. In 1878 Lesser left school to apprentice with a tradesman, and the next year he went to D??sseldorf to study painting at the Kunstakademie. Ury spent time in Brussels, Paris, Stuttgart, and other locations, before returning to Berlin in 1887. His first exhibition was in 1889 and met with a hostile reception, although he was championed by Adolph von Menzel whose influence induced the Academie to award Ury a prize. In 1893 he joined the Munich Secession, one of the several Secessions formed by progressive artists in Germany and Austria in the last years of the 19th century. In 1901 he returned to Berlin, where he exhibited with the Berlin Secession, first in 1915 and notably in 1922, when he had a major exhibition. By this time Ury's critical reputation had grown and his paintings and pastels were in demand. His subjects were landscapes, urban landscapes, and interior scenes, treated in an Impressionistic manner that ranged from the subdued tones of figures in a darkened interior to the effects of streetlights at night to the dazzling light of foliage against the summer sky. Ury is especially noted for his paintings of nocturnal cafe scenes and rainy streets. He developed a habit of repeating these compositions in order to sell them while retaining the originals, and these quickly made and inferior copies have harmed his reputation.
Sebastiano Bombelli
Italian, 1635-1719, Italian painter. He was perhaps the most influential Italian portrait painter of the later 17th century. His early style was formed by his father, Valentino Bombelli, a painter in Udine, and his godfather, the Mannerist artist Girolamo Lugaro. In the early 1660s he was in Venice (Boschini; Sansovino), where he responded passionately to the brilliant colour, painterly freedom and naturalism of 16th-century Venetian artists, particularly Veronese