Who is Thomas Eakins?

Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (; July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916) was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and Good arts educator. He is widely traditional to be one of the most important American artists.

For by the side of his professional career, from the prematurely 1870s until his health began to fail some 40 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 allow an overview of the intellectual life of contemporary Philadelphia; individually, they are incisive depictions of thinking persons.

In addition, Eakins produced a number of large paintings that 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 that 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 Make images of deep tone utilizing his studies in perspective. Eakins plus took a Eager interest in the supplementary technologies of movement photography, a arena in which he is now seen as an innovator.

No less important in Eakins’ life was his piece of legislation as a teacher. As an assistant professor 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 execution and damaged his reputation.

Eakins was a controversial figure whose feint received little by mannerism of authorization during his lifetime. Since his death, he has been applauded by American art historians as “the strongest, most obscure realist in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American art”.