Thomas Eakins

Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator who lived from 1844 to 1916, widely acknowledged as one of the most important American artists. For the length of his professional career, from the early 1870s until his health began to fail some forty years later, he worked exactingly from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia, and painted several hundred portraits of friends, family members, and prominent people in the arts, sciences, medicine, and clergy. He also produced large paintings set in the offices, streets, parks, rivers, arenas, and surgical amphitheaters of his city, active outdoor venues that let him paint the nude or lightly clad figure in motion, model the forms of the body in full sunlight, and create images of deep space using his studies in perspective, and he took a keen interest in new motion photography, a field in which he is now seen as an innovator. He was also an educator whose instruction was a highly influential presence in American art, though the difficulties he encountered seeking to paint portraits and figures realistically, along with behavioral and sexual scandals, truncated his success and challenged his reputation. A controversial figure whose work received little recognition during his lifetime, he has since been celebrated by American art historians as the strongest, most profound realist in nineteenth and early twentieth century American art. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/