Birth Year : 1844
Death Year : 1916
Country : US
In 1866, after studying antique casts at the Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts and then anatomy at the Jefferson Medical College, Thomas Eakins
went to Paris. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Gérôme
and Bonnat but, uninspired by both classical form and academic style, Eakins
went to Spain to study the works of Velazquez
and Ribera. Upon his return to Philadelphia in 1870, Eakins painted such
great realistic paintings as "The Gross Clinic" and "The Agnew Clinic":
extremely detailed and powerfully naturalistic works that combine the light
and shade of Manet, the realism of Courbet,
with the basic sympathy of Velázquez. He also painted portraits
of his family and genre scenes of American life. As he grew older and found
little appreciation for what he himself called "solid, heavy, work," and
disheartened also by the loss of his position as a teacher at the Philadelphia
Academy, he became more and more of a recluse -- though he did continue
teaching anatomy at the National Academy of Design in New York, and he
even won a few prizes.
From 1910 until his death in 1916,
Eakins' health was failing, and he consequently painted very little. More
interested in the scientific aspect of life than in pure aesthetics, Eakins
felt that mathematics and painting were similar to the extent that both
of them reduced complicated ideas to simple ones. His greatest desire was
for accuracy in both perspective and in the representation of the human
body. The first he obtained by mechanical techniques and the second by
close observation of the body in motion and in repose. He sought to show
form at its most weighty, space as a mathematical concept, and color and
light as more solid than ephemeral.
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Thomas
Eakins
Biglin
Brothers, Turning the Stake
Thomas
Eakins
Biglin
Brothers Racing
Thomas
Eakins
The
Thinker
Thomas
Eakins
The
Agnew Clinic
Thomas
Eakins
The
Gross Clinic
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Thomas Eakins |
