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 Swimming Hole | Study for William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River | Portrait of J. Laurie Wallace | The Chess Players | The Portrait of Walt Whitman |
Related Artists:
Vasco Fernandes
Vasco Fernandes (c.1475-c.1542), better known as Grão Vasco, was one of the main Portuguese Renaissance painters. Vasco Fernandes was probably born in Viseu, in Northern Portugal, where he began his career in the team of painters executing the main altarpiece of Viseu Cathedral (1501-1506). Between 1506 and 1511 he painted the main altarpiece of Lamego Cathedral. After working in the Santa Cruz Monastery of Coimbra, Vasco Fernandes returned to Viseu and executed a series of altarpieces for Viseu Cathedral, considered his main works. Most of his paintings hang nowadays in the Grão Vasco Museum, in Viseu.
Antonio Munoz Degrain
Spanish , Valencia, 1840 - M - laga, 1924
Johann Hermann Carmiencke
Johann Hermann Carmiencke, a landscape painter and etcher, was born at Hamburg in 1810. He went to Dresden in 1831 as a journeyman painter, and while there studied in Dahl's school. Thence he went to Copenhagen in 1834, where he studied in the Academy, and presently repairing to Leipsic, received instruction there from Sohonberg. Returning to Copenhagen in 1838, he proceeded to travel as an artist in Sweden, Bavaria, and the Tyrol, visiting Italy from 1845 to 1846. He was then appointed court painter to Christian VIII, for whom he executed many works. In consequence of the war, he went in 1851 to New York, where he was well received, and admitted into the Academy of Brooklyn. His works were mainly groups of mountain ranges, which were very effectively rendered, and possessed an excellent tone the execution being simple and true to nature. The 'Mountain Tarn' and the 'View on the Zillerthal' may be particularly noticed. There are thirty-five careful etchings of landscapes by him, some of which were published by the Art Association of Copenhagen in 1850 and 1851. He died at New York in 1867.