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 Portrait of Letita Wison Jordan | Study for William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill | Biglen Brothers Racing | Landscape | Baby at Play |
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Charles Poerson
French Painter, 1609-1667 He studied under his own father Charles Poerson (himself a former pupil of Simon Vouet) and under Noël Coypel. His notable works include "Dispute Between Neptune and Minerva" at Chateau de Fontainebleau, "Union of the Academie royale de Paris and the Academy of Saint Luke in Rome" at Versailles and participation in the decoration of the Hotel des Invalides. He was buried in San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, in a tomb attributed to the sculptor Pierre de L'Estache, who later became another director of the Academy.
Sergei Sudeikin
Well-known Russian and emigre Symbolist painter, graphic artist, theater and film designer,1882-1946 was a Russian artist and set-designer associated with the Ballets Russes and the Metropolitan Opera. Having been banned from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture for his "obscene drawings", Sudeikin joined the Mir Iskusstva movement. His close friends included the poet Mikhail Kuzmin and the impresario Serge Diaghilev, at whose invitation he came to Paris in 1906 for the Salon d'Automne Exhibition, where his work was first shown abroad. In 1907-1918, he was married to actress Olga Glebova (1885-1945), one of the famed beauties of St Petersburg and the closest friend of Anna Akhmatova. Glebova-Sudeikina is the principal character and addressee of Akhmatova's longest work, "The Poem Without Hero" (1940-65). Sudeikin designed the sets and costumes for Diaghilev's production of La trag??die de Salome by Florent Schmitt in 1913, and assisted in the execution of Nicholas Roerich's designs for Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring the same year. By the time of the October Revolution Sudeikin was among the foremost theatrical designers in Russia.
Herbert James Draper
(1863 - 22 September 1920) was an English Classicist painter whose career began in the Victorian era and extended through the first two decades of the 20th century. Born in London, the son of a jeweller named Henry Draper and his wife Emma,he was educated at Bruce Castle school in Tottenham and then went on to study art at the Royal Academy. He undertook several educational trips to Rome and Paris between 1888 and 1892, having won the Royal Academy Gold Medal and Travelling Studentship in 1889. In the 1890s he worked also as an illustrator, settling in London. In 1891 he married his wife Ida , with whom he had a daughter, Yvonne.He died of arteriosclerosis at his home at 15, Abbey Road, N.W.8 on 22 September 1920