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 :. | Clara(Clara J.Mather) | Landscape | Elizabeth at the Piano | Portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing | Advances |
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John Robert Cozens
British 1752-1797 ). Painter, draughtsman and printmaker, son of (1) Alexander Cozens. He was taught by his father, and an album by John Robert (Aberystwyth, N. Lib. Wales) indicates that he also learnt to sketch landscape directly from nature. The album contains drawings that record sketching tours to Nacton, near Ipswich, Suffolk (Aug 1768); day trips to the outskirts of London: Greenwich and Blackheath (1768, 1771), Epsom (1768) and Hampstead (1770-71); and a trip to Matlock, Derbys (June 1772). The earliest of these sketches are careful pencil drawings, some later reworked in pen, ink and wash, and there is at least one attempt at added colour. Later drawings are freer, either noting an idea for a composition or recording light and shade with rapid washes of ink over pencil. His father worked mainly in monochrome brown or grey washes, and John Robert earliest exhibits (he exhibited at the Society of Artists every year from 1767 to 1771) were also in this medium.
Luke Clennell
Born, 1781, Back. Died, 1840, Country, England was an English engraver and painter. Born in Morpeth, Northumberland, the son of a farmer, he was apprenticed to the engraver Thomas Bewick in 1797. Between 1799 and 1803 he acted as Bewick's principal assistant on the second volume of the History of British Birds. After completing his seven-year apprenticeship with Bewick he moved to London, where he married a daughter of the copper-engraver Charles Turner Warren (1762-1823). Through his marriage he became acquainted with such book illustrators as William Finden and Abraham Raimbach. He gained a reputation as an engraver and in May 1806 he was awarded the gold palette of the Society of Arts for a wood-engraving of a battle scene. He subsequently gave up engraving for painting. In 1814 he received from the Earl of Bridgewater a commission for a large picture to commemorate the banquet given to the Allied Sovereigns at the Guildhall, London. He experienced great difficulty in getting the distinguished guests to sit for their portraits, and suffered a mental breakdown. After a spell in an asylum, he recovered and returned home.
Edward Hicks
1780-1849 Edward Hicks (April 14, 1780 ?C August 23, 1849) was an American Folk painter, a distinguished minister of the Society of Friends, and he also became a Quaker icon because of his paintings. Edward Hicks was born in his grandfather's mansion at Langhorne, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He was born into a life of luxury, and his parents were both Anglican. After his mother passed away when he was eighteen months old, Matron Elizabeth Twining - a close friend of his mother's- raised him as one of her own. She also taught him the Quaker beliefs. This had a great effect on the rest of his life. At the age of thirteen he was an apprentice for coach makers William and Henry Tomlison. He stayed with them for seven years. His living situation inspired him to desire a much better way of life for himself. He wanted a simple, well respected life and to be able to earn his own wages. He wanted to be able to make choices for himself, in all that he did. It was then that he knew that something amusing and entertaining such as a career in art could satisfy his goals. He spent three years contemplating what his life meant to him, and grew a strong passion for art. His religious commitments affected his thoughts on living and art in many ways. In 1803, he married a Quaker woman named Sarah Worstall.