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 :. | Study for William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill | portrait de Louis N.Kenton | Frances Eakins | Play the Cello | The William is Carving his goddiness |
Related Artists:
GENTILESCHI, Artemisia
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1593-1652 Tuscan painter, daughter and pupil of Orazio Gentileschi, b. Rome. She studied under Agostino Tassi, her father's collaborator, who was convicted of raping the teen-age Artemisia in 1612. Over the years, she has been portrayed as a strumpet, a feminist victim or heroine, and an independent woman of her era and her life has been fictionalized in several novels and plays. In purely artistic terms, she achieved renown for her spirited execution and admirable use of chiaroscuro in the style of Caravaggio, and during her life she achieved both success and fame. In 1616 she became the first woman admitted to the Academy of Design in Florence. About 1638 she visited England, where she was in great demand as a portraitist. Among her works are Judith and Holofernes (Uffizi);
BACKER, Jacob Adriaensz.
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1608-1651 Backer was born in Harlingen, but his family moved soon (in 1611) to Amsterdam. Between 1627 and 1633 he and Govert Flinck were pupils of Lambert Jacobsz in Leeuwarden. In 1633 he returned to Amsterdam, where he remained until his death. His extreme quickness in painting portraits has been particularly noticed, and it is said by his Amsterdam colleague Joachim von Sandrart that he completely finished, in one day, the half length portrait of a lady in full dress, even so early, that she was able to return the same day to Haarlem. Besides being an important portrait painter - some 70 portraits can be attributed to him with certainty, among them the 1642 Company of Cornelis de Graeff voor de Nieuwe Doelen in Amsterdam, on the same wall as Rembrandt's Night Watch - Backer was an excellent painter of religious and mythological paintings. He was especially interested in pastoral subjects, themes from contemporary history, like the huge Crowning of Mirtillo from 1641 in the Brukenthal collection in Sibiu (250 x 250 cm.). In fact, Backer was a leading artist in Amsterdam until his premature death in 1651.
Elihu Vedder
American Symbolist Painter, 1836-1923 American painter, illustrator, sculptor and writer. He studied under Tompkins Harrison Matteson in Shelbourne, NY, and went to Paris in March 1856. After eight months in the studio of Fran?ois-Edouard Picot, he settled in Florence until the end of 1860. There he learnt drawing from Raffaello Bonaiuti, became interested in the Florentine Renaissance and attended the free Accademia Galli. A more significant artistic inspiration came from the Italian artists at the Caff? Michelangiolo: Telemaco Signorini, Vincenzo Cabianca (1827-1902) and especially Nino Costa (1827-1902). This group sought new and untraditional pictorial solutions for their compositions and plein-air landscapes and were particularly interested in the experiences of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon painters. They became known as Macchiaioli for their use of splashes (macchia) of light and shadows and for their revolutionary (maquis) attitude to prevailing styles. Among Vedder's most notable Florentine landscapes are Mugnone Torrent near Fiesole (Detroit, MI, Inst. A.) and Le Balze, Volterra (Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.)