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 | The buddie is rowing the boat | Max Schmitt im Einerboot | The Artist's Wife and his Setter Dog | Landscape of Biglin |
Related Artists:
Abbott Fuller Graves
1859-1936
Carducci, Bartolommeo
Italian Baroque Era Painter, ca.1560-1610
Pietro della Vecchia
(1603 - 8 September 1678) was an Italian painter also known as Pietro Muttoni. Born in Vicenza (Venice), he likely trained with Alessandro Varotari, called Padovanino, deriving a notable interest in Venetian masters such as Titian and Giorgione. Until 1984, he was mistakenly referred to as Pietro Muttoni. This misnomer is attributed to Italian art historian and archaeologist, Luigi Lanzi (June 14, 1732 - 30 March 1810), who in his Storia pittorica della Italia confused the name of the artist with the name of a collection, Muttoni, in which he had seen one of his paintings. In fact, Pietro was from the well known Venetian family, the della Vecchia. Renowned among his contemporaries for his ability to imitate the styles of 16th-century masters, he was also known for his grotesque paintings and portraiture. His earliest known works, two representations of St Francis, which have survived in many versions (e.g. Modena, Gal. Estense; Rovigo, Accad. Concordi), and a Crucifixion (1633; Venice, S Lio) are so heavily influenced by Carlo Saraceni and his student and collaborator Jean Leclerc as to suggest that della Vecchia trained with them. Certain Caravaggesque elements, which remained in his work for some time to come, suggest that he spent some time in Rome after Leclerc had left Venice, in 1621 or 1622. The influence of Alessandro Varotari or Padovanino, who is described by sources (e.g. Orlandini) as della Vecchia's teacher, is only noticeable in dated works from 1635 onwards. Della Vecchia probably worked in Padovanino's studio c. 1625-6, after his trip to Rome, and from the latter he derived his great interest in 16th-century painting in Venice and the Veneto. His monumental Crucifixion (1637; Venice, Fond. Cini), in which the composition harks back to the 16th century while the figures derive from Caravaggio, is characteristic of this phase. Around 1640 the influence of Bernardo Strozzi is apparent in his work, as in the Angel Offering a Skull to St Giustina, who stands between St Joseph and St John (1640; Venice, Accad.), painted for the church of S Giustina. In 1640 he began to design cartoons for the mosaics in S Marco, on which he worked until 1673. From 1640 to 1673 he was commissioned from the Venetian Republic for the design of the mosaic cartoons for the St. Mark's Basilica. He painted four idyllic landscapes that presage some of the Rococo content (now in Pinacoteca Querini-Stampalia). He married Clorinda Renieri, daughter of Nicolas Regnier, Flemish painter and art dealer. Della Vecchia died in Venice, September 1678.