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 :. | max schmitt in a single scull | John Biglin in a Single Scull | The Professor | Baby at Play | Starting out after Rail |
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Edvard Petersen
(4 February 1841 - 5 December 1911) was a Danish painter. He also designed the Stork Fountain on Amagertorv in Copenhagen From 1851 he attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In the 1860s and 1870s he painted romantic landscape paintings under influence of Vilhelm Kyhn. He was a close friend of fellow painter Theodor Philipsen and together they went on several travels, including two stays in Italy between 1875 and 1880 and a visit to France.The friendship did not seem to influence Petersen's rather conservative style of painting and his works from the times abroad are generally traditional paintings of local life. In the 1880s Petersen painted a number of figure paintings of street life in Copenhagen under influence of French Realism. His most famous paintings are Emigrants on Larsens Plads (1880) and A Return, the America Liner at Larsens Plads (894). With his Stork Fountain proposal, Petersen won the competition for the design of a new fountain on Amagertorv in Copenhagen in 1888. The sculptor Vilhelm Bissen moulded the birds and the fountain was inaugurated in 1904
Pieter van der Werff
(1665 - September 26, 1722) was a Dutch Golden Age painter. He assisted his older brother, Adriaen van der Werff. He learned to paint from his brother Adriaen and according to the RKD, he spent most of his life working in Rotterdam, where he painted the rich and famous
James Barry
b.Oct. 11, 1741, Cork, County Cork, Ire. d.Feb. 22, 1806, London, England. Irish James Barry Gallery was born on 9th November at Captain Lieutenant Bouchiers quarters at the Old Train Barrack Yard in Ann Street, Belfast, Co. Antrim in the north of Ireland. Although Barry lived his adult life as a man, his true gender is unknown. It is widely accepted that Barry was a woman who chose to live as a man so that he might be accepted as a university student and be able to pursue his chosen career as a surgeon.