64 Facts About Thomas Eakins

Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator.

Thomas Eakins is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important American artists.

Thomas Eakins painted several hundred portraits, usually of friends, family members, or prominent people in the arts, sciences, medicine, and clergy.

Thomas Eakins took keen interest in new motion photography, a field in which he is seen as an innovator.

Thomas Eakins was an educator, and his instruction was a highly influential presence in American art.

Thomas Eakins was a controversial figure whose work received little recognition during his lifetime.

Thomas Eakins was born and lived most of his life in Philadelphia.

Thomas Eakins was the first child of Caroline Cowperthwait Eakins, a woman of English and Dutch descent, and Benjamin Eakins, a writing master and calligraphy teacher of Scottish and Irish ancestry.

Thomas Eakins's father grew up on a farm in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, the son of a weaver.

Thomas Eakins was successful in his chosen profession, and moved to Philadelphia in the early 1840s, to raise his family.

Thomas Eakins observed his father at work and by twelve demonstrated skill in precise line drawing, perspective, and the use of a grid to lay out a careful design, all skills he later applied to his art.

Thomas Eakins was an athletic child who enjoyed rowing, ice skating, swimming, wrestling, sailing, and gymnastics; he later used these as subjects in his painting and encouraged them in his students.

Thomas Eakins attended Central High School in Philadelphia, the premier public school for applied science and arts in the city, where he excelled in mechanical drawing.

Thomas Eakins met fellow artist and lifelong friend Charles Lewis Fussell in high school, and they reunited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where Thomas Eakins enrolled in 1861.

At Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Thomas Eakins enrolled in courses in anatomy and dissection at Jefferson Medical College from 1864 to 1865.

Thomas Eakins then studied art in Europe from 1866 to 1870, including with Jean-Leon Gerome in Paris; he was only the second American pupil of the French realist painter, who was known as a master of Orientalism.

Thomas Eakins attended the atelier of Leon Bonnat, a realist painter who emphasized anatomical preciseness, a method adapted by Thomas Eakins.

Thomas Eakins's selection of a contemporary sport was "a shock to the artistic conventionalities of the city".

Thomas Eakins placed himself in the painting, in a scull behind Schmitt, his name inscribed on the boat.

Thomas Eakins's first known sale was the watercolor The Sculler.

Thomas Eakins returned to the Pennsylvania Academy to teach in 1876 as a volunteer after the opening of the school's new Frank Furness designed building.

Thomas Eakins became a salaried professor in 1878, and rose to director in 1882.

Thomas Eakins's teaching methods were controversial: there was no drawing from antique casts, and students received only a short study in charcoal, followed quickly by their introduction to painting, in order to grasp subjects in true color as soon as practical.

Thomas Eakins encouraged students to use photography as an aid to understanding anatomy and the study of motion, and disallowed prize competitions.

Thomas Eakins believed in teaching by example and letting the students find their own way with only terse guidance.

Thomas Eakins was ultimately forced to resign in 1886, for removing the loincloth of a male model in a class where female students were present.

Thomas Eakins's family was split, with his in-laws siding against him in public dispute.

Thomas Eakins lectured and taught at a number of other schools, including the Art Students League of New York, the National Academy of Design, Cooper Union, and the Art Students' Guild in Washington DC.

Thomas Eakins has been credited with having "introduced the camera to the American art studio".

In 1884, Thomas Eakins worked briefly alongside Muybridge in the latter's photographic studio at the northeast corner of 36th and Pine streets in Philadelphia.

Thomas Eakins soon performed his own independent motion studies, usually involving the nude figure, and even developed his own technique for capturing movement on film.

Whereas Muybridge's system relied on a series of cameras triggered to produce a sequence of individual photographs, Thomas Eakins preferred to use a single camera to produce a series of exposures superimposed on one negative.

Thomas Eakins was more interested in precision measurements on a single image to aid in translating a motion into a painting, while Muybridge preferred separate images that could be displayed by his primitive movie projector.

Some figures appear to be detailed transcriptions and tracings from the photographs by some device like a magic lantern, which Thomas Eakins then took pains to cover up with oil paint.

Thomas Eakins' methods appear to be meticulously applied, and rather than shortcuts, were likely used in a quest for accuracy and realism.

Thomas Eakins used photography for his own private ends as well.

For Thomas Eakins, portraiture held little interest as a means of fashionable idealization or even simple verisimilitude.

Thomas Eakins spent nearly a year on the painting, again choosing a novel subject, the discipline of modern surgery, in which Philadelphia was in the forefront.

Thomas Eakins initiated the project and may have had the goal of a grand work befitting a showing at the Centennial Exposition of 1876.

In 1876, Thomas Eakins completed a portrait of Dr John Brinton, surgeon of the Philadelphia Hospital, and famed for his Civil War service.

For Portrait of Letitia Wilson Jordan, Thomas Eakins painted the sitter wearing the same evening dress in which he had seen her at a party.

Thomas Eakins is a substantial presence, a vision quite different from the era's fashionable portraiture.

Deeply affected by his dismissal from the academy, Eakins focused his later career on portraiture, such as his 1905 Portrait of Professor William S Forbes.

The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 helped foster a revival in interest in Colonial America and Thomas Eakins participated with an ambitious project employing oil studies, wax and wood models, and finally the portrait in 1877.

Nonetheless, Thomas Eakins found a subject that referenced his native city and an earlier Philadelphia artist, and allowed for an assay on the female nude seen from behind.

Lloyd Goodrich, for example, considered this illustration of Christ's suffering completely devoid of "religious sentiment" and suggested that Thomas Eakins intended it simply as a realist study of the male nude body.

The last, in which Thomas Eakins appears, is increasingly seen as sensuous and autobiographical.

Thomas Eakins met Emily Sartain, daughter of John Sartain, while studying at the academy.

In 1884, at age 40, Thomas Eakins married Susan Hannah Macdowell, the daughter of a Philadelphia engraver.

Macdowell was 25 when Thomas Eakins met her at the Hazeltine Gallery where The Gross Clinic was being exhibited in 1875.

Thomas Eakins posed nude for many of his photos and took images of him.

Thomas Eakins died on June 25,1916, at the age of 71 and is buried at The Woodlands, which is located near the University of Pennsylvania in West Philadelphia.

Susan Macdowell Thomas Eakins did much to preserve his reputation, including giving the Philadelphia Museum of Art more than fifty of her husband's oil paintings.

Thomas Eakins's work was part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics.

Thomas Eakins taught hundreds of students, among them his future wife Susan Macdowell, African-American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Thomas Anshutz, who taught, in turn, Robert Henri, George Luks, John Sloan, and Everett Shinn, future members of the Ashcan School, and other realists and artistic heirs to Eakins' philosophy.

Thomas Eakins insisted on teaching men and women "the same", used nude male models in female classes and vice versa, and was accused of abusing female students.

Thomas Eakins was unable to sell many of his works during his lifetime, so when he died in 1916, a large body of artwork passed to his widow, Susan Macdowell Thomas Eakins.

Thomas Eakins carefully preserved it, donating some of the strongest pieces to various museums.

Thomas Eakins was a man of iron will and his will to paint and to carry out his life as he thought it should go.

Thomas Eakins was a deep student of life, and with a great love he studied humanity frankly.

Thomas Eakins was not afraid of what his study revealed to him.

Thomas Eakins struggled to apprehend the constructive force in nature and to employ in his works the principles found.

Thomas Eakins was our first major painter to accept completely the realities of contemporary urban America, and from them to create powerful, profound art.

In portraiture alone Thomas Eakins was the strongest American painter since Copley, with equal substance and power, and added penetration, depth, and subtlety.