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 Gross Clinic | The Fairman Rogers Four in Hand | Portrait | Characteristic of Performance | Mrs William Shaw Ward |
Related Artists:
Henri van Assche
born at Brussels in 1774, showed from his earliest years a predilection for painting, and received from his father, who was a distinguished amateur artist, the first principles of design and perspective. He was afterwards placed with Deroy of Brussels, from whom he received further instructions in painting. Journeys in Switzerland and Italy contributed to develop his talent as a landscape painter. His great partiality for representing waterfalls, mountain streams, and mills gained for him the name of 'The Painter of Waterfalls.' Several pictures by him may be seen in public and private collections of Brussels, Ghent, Lille, and Haarlem, some of which are enriched with figures and animals by Ommeganck. He died at Brussels in 1841.
John Houghton Hague
1831-1934
BASSEN, Bartholomeus van
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1590-1652 Dutch painter and architect. He was the grandson of Bartolt Ernst van Bassen from Arnhem, who was Clerk of the Court of Holland in The Hague. In 1613 van Bassen was admitted to the Guild of St Luke in Delft, having come from outside the city. In 1622 he became a member of the Guild in The Hague where he was also municipal architect from 1638 until his death. He married in 1624; his son Aernoudt married a daughter of Cornelis van Poelenburch.