caption movement death_date death_place birth_name birth_place religion imagesize training nationality awards field birth_date works image article_title name bgcolour
'' self portrait '' realism 25 june 1916 philadelphia thomas cowperthwait eakins philadelphia agnostic 240px pennsylvania beaux-arts academy of the fine arts , École des american national academician painting 25 july 1844 '' 1871 , '' the gross clinic '' , 1875 , max '' the agnew clinic '' , 1889 , '' william schmitt rush and his model , 1908 in a single scull '' , eakins selfportrait.jpg thomas eakins
 thomas eakins # 76a8ff
thomas eakins

thomas cowperthwait eakins -lrb- july 25 , 1844 -- june 25 , 1916 -rrb- was 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 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 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 .
in addition , 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 .
eakins also took a keen interest in the new technologies of motion photography , a field in which he is now seen as an innovator .
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 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 '' .
