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 Miller | The Portrait of Martin Cardinals | May morning-s park | Bathing | Max Schmitt a l'aviron |
Related Artists:
Ralph Earl
1751- 1801 Ralph Earl Galleries Ralph Earl was born in either Shrewsbury or Leicester, Massachusetts. By 1774, he was working in New Haven, Connecticut as a portrait painter. In the autumn of 1774, Earl returned to Leicester, Massachusetts to marry his cousin, Sarah Gates. A few months later, their daughter was born; however, Earl left them both with Sarah's parents and returned to New Haven. Like so many of the colonial craftsmen, Earl was self-taught, and for many years was an itinerant painter. In 1775, Earl visited Lexington and Concord, which were the sites of recent battles in the American Revolution. Together with engraver Amos Doolittle, he painted four of his most famous pictures, all battle scenes. Although his father was a colonel in the Revolutionary army, Ralph Earl himself was a Loyalist. In 1778, he left behind his wife and daughter and escaped to England by disguising himself as the servant of British army captain John Money.
Jacob de Gheyn II
Jacob de Gheyn II (also Jacques de Gheyn II) (c. 1565, Antwerp - March 29, 1629, The Hague) was a Dutch painter and engraver, whose work shows the transition from Northern Mannerism to Dutch realism over the course of his career.
CORNEILLE DE LYON
Dutch-born French Northern Renaissance Painter, 1500-1575 Dutch painter, active in France. It is uncertain whether he was apprenticed in his native city of The Hague or in Antwerp, and nothing is known of him before 1533, when he was recorded in Lyon. It was possibly in the same year, while the French court was resident in Lyon, that Corneille was made painter to Queen Eleanor, the second wife of Francis I. In 1541 Corneille was painter to the Dauphin (later Henry II), and when the new king succeeded to the throne (1547) and made his state entry into Lyon in 1548, Corneille became Peintre du Roi. Corneille had obtained his naturalization papers in December 1547 and retained French nationality for the rest of his life. He married Marguerite Fradin, the daughter of a Lyon printer of some importance, and this allowed him to enter Lyon society. His studio was extremely prosperous until c. 1565, the year he is known to have visited Antwerp, but disappeared completely after his death despite the fact that he founded a dynasty of painters. His sons Corneille de La Haye II (b 1543) and Jacques de La Haye and his daughter Cl?mence de La Haye were all painters, and the family continued to be known for its artists until the 18th century. Corneille de Lyon was a Protestant, like all those in the circles in which he moved, and it may be that the decline of his fortunes in the 1560s