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 Professor | Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand | The Portrait of Letita Wison Jordan | Chess Player | Landscape |
Related Artists:
Edward Bailey
(1814-1903) was the most accomplished of the missionary artists in Hawaii. Along with his wife, Bailey arrived in Hawaii as a missionary-teacher in 1837 on the ship Mary Frazier. He worked at the Wailuku Female Seminary in Maui from 1840 until its closure in 1849. After the seminary closed, he built the still standing Ka'ahumanu Church in Wailuku and operated a small sugar plantation that eventually became part of the Wailulu Sugar Company. He began painting about 1865, at the age of 51, without any formal instruction. Bailey's best known paintings are landscapes depicting the natural beauty of central Maui, The Bailey House Museum (Wailuku, Hawaii) and the Lyman House Memorial Museum (Hilo, Hawaii) are among the public collections holding works by Edward Bailey.
John Greenwood
1737-1792 American artist, b. Boston, Mass. An engraver and painter, Greenwood executed some of the first genre paintings in America. He is also noted for his satirical works peopled with small, energetic figures reminiscent of Hogarth's.
George Cooke
English Engraver, 1781-1849 Born in Maryland, Cooke abandoned a fledgling career in business at an early age in order to become a full time artist. After several years of painting portraits for a living, Cooke left for what would become a five year tour of Europe. His time there was mostly spent learning from and copying the works of the Renaissance master artists, with many of Cooke's copies being sent back to the United States for show or sale. After returning to the U.S., Cooke and his wife spent the next decade traveling and working with no fixed home. His work took him throughout the Southern United States, where he primarily made his living painting portraits of both famous and ordinary people, and, by the 1840s, his portraits had earned him both financial success and regional fame.