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 :. | The Portrait of Asbury W-Lee | Salutat | Home Scene | The Dean's Roll Call | Dr Horatio Wood |
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Thomas Ruckle
was a house painter and sign painter in early nineteenth century Baltimore, Maryland, and an amateur painter. He is best known for his paintings The Battle of North Point, and The Defense of Baltimore. Ruckle was a veteran of the War of 1812, in which he had served as a corporal in the 5th Maryland Regiment of the Maryland Militia. Ruckle was born in Ireland and, having moved to Baltimore, Maryland, he became a sign painter and house painter. It is likely that he had very little, if any, formal training as an artist.
Francois Stroobant
Francois Stroobant (14 June 1819 Brussels - 1 June 1916 Elsene) was a Belgian painter and lithographer, and brother of the lithographer Louis-Constantin Stroobant (1814-1872) noted for his part in Flore des Serres et des Jardins de l'Europe. He attended the Brussels Academie des Beaux-Arts between 1832 and 1847, studying under Francois-Joseph Navez, Paul Lauters and Francois-Antoine Bossuet (1798 - 1889). In 1835 he worked in the studio of the lithographer Dewasme-Pletinckx in Brussels. Stroobant's subjects were mainly landscapes and architecture. He travelled extensively through the Netherlands, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Hungary, exhibiting in the galleries of the Belgian towns Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels. His romantic painting style stayed constant throughout his career. He was founder and first director in 1865 of the Academie des Beaux-Arts at Sint-Jans-Molenbeek in Brussels.
Friedrich Gauermann
(September 10, 1807 - July 7, 1862), Austrian painter, son of the landscape painter Jacob Gauermann (1773 - 1843), was born at Miesenbach near Gutenstein in Lower Austria. It was the intention of his father that he should devote himself to agriculture, but the example of an elder brother, who, however, died early, fostered his inclination towards art. Under his father's direction he began studies in landscape, and he also diligently copied the works of the chief masters in animal painting which were contained in the academy and court library of Vienna. In the summer he made art tours in the districts of Styria, Tirol, and Salzburg. Two animal pieces which he exhibited at the Vienna Exhibition of 1824 were regarded as remarkable productions for his years, and led to his receiving commissions in 1825 and 1826 from Prince Metternich and Caraman, the French ambassador. His reputation was greatly increased by his picture "The Storm," exhibited in 1829, and from that time his works were much sought after and obtained correspondingly high prices. His "Field Labourer" was regarded by many as the most noteworthy picture in the Vienna exhibition of 1834, and his numerous animal pieces have entitled him to a place in the first rank of painters of that class of subjects. The peculiarity of his pictures is the representation of human and animal figures in connexion with appropriate landscapes and in characteristic situations so as to manifest nature as a living whole, and he particularly excels in depicting the free life of animals in wild mountain scenery. Along with great mastery of the technicalities of his art, his works exhibit patient and keen observation, free and correct handling of details, and bold and clear colouring. He died at Vienna on the 7th of July 1862. Many of his pictures have been engraved, and after his death a selection of fifty-three of his works was prepared for this purpose by the Austrian Kunstverein (Art Union).