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 :. | Am Klavier | Fishing | John Biglin in a Single Scull | Portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing | Home Ranch 1888 |
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Felix Ziem
French Painter, 1821-1911 was a French painter in the style of the Barbizon School. Born Felix-Francois Georges Philibert Ziem in Beaune in the Côte d'Or departement of the Burgundy region of France, his mother was a native of Burgundy who married a Croatian immigrant. Originally, Ziem planned to be an architect and studied at the School of Architecture in Dijon, and for a time worked as an architect. Painting developed from a hobby to a career following an 1841 visit to Italy where he fell in love with the city of Venice, a place that would become the source for many of his works. Apart from Venetian scenes, he also painted many still lifes, portraits and landscapes from a variety of places including Constantinople, Martigues, Cagnes-sur-Mer and his native Burgundy. Ziem's works were first exhibited in 1849 at the Paris Salon and remained a regular exhibitor there for many years. Part of the Barbizon school, he also traveled extensively throughout Europe and in 1860 moved to Montmartre, the artistic quarter of the city of Paris. Financially successful, he was known to assist struggling young artists. In 1857, the government of France recognized his contribution to the art world by making him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.
PERRONNEAU, Jean-Baptiste
French Rococo Era Painter, ca.1715-1783 French pastellist, painter and engraver. He was, with his older contemporary Maurice Quentin de La Tour, the most important pastel artist and portrait painter in 18th-century France. Perronneau trained first with the engraver Laurent Cars and then with the successful portrait painter Hubert Drouais. His work as an engraver, which includes prints after Charles-Joseph Natoire, Fran?ois Boucher, Edme Bouchardon and Carle Vanloo (see Vaillat and Ratouis de Limay,), did not continue beyond the 1730s. Nevertheless, his involvement with Cars, much of whose work consisted in the reproduction of portraits by artists such as Hyacinthe Rigaud, left its mark on the composition of his pastels, most of which employ the bust-length format, often within a feigned stone oval typical of 17th- and 18th-century engraved portraits. His early pastel portrait of Mme Desfriches (1744; France, A.M. Ratouis de Limay priv. col.), mother of his friend and patron, the Orl?ans collector Aignan-Thomas Desfriches,
Wendel, Theodore
American, 1859-1932