Thomas Eakins
American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator
Years: 1844 - 1916
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916) is an American 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 begins to fail some 40 years later, Eakins works exactingly from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia.
He paints 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 produces a number of large paintings which bring 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 allow him to paint the subject which most inspires him: the nude or lightly clad figure in motion.
In the process, he can 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 is his work as a teacher.
As an instructor, he is a highly influential presence in American art.
The difficulties which beset him as an artist seeking to paint the portrait and figure realistically are paralleled and even amplified in his career as an educator, where behavioral and sexual scandals truncate his success and damage his reputation.
Eakins also takes a keen interest in the new technologies of motion photography, a field in which he is now seen as an innovator.
Eakins is a controversial figure whose work receives little by way of official recognition during his lifetime.
Since his death, he has been celebrated by American art historians.
