Thomas Eakins born 24 July 1844 (d. 1916)Thomas Cowperthwaite Eakins was a painter, sculptor, photographer and fine arts teacher. He is associated with realism, and is often regarded as the father of American painting.
Raised and educated in Philadelphia, he studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and then spent several years studying in Paris and Spain. He returned to the Pennsylvania Academy to teach in 1876, and in 1882 became its director. His teaching methods were controversial at the time, notably his interest in instructing his students in all aspects of the human figure, including the nude. Though there were tensions between him and the Academy's board of directors throughout his teaching career, he was ultimately fired in 1886 for removing the loincloth of a male model in a class where female students were present. The majority of Eakins's students liked his teaching methods and encouraged him to continue teaching them at Philadelphia's Art Students League.
Deeply influenced by his dismissal, his later painting concentrated on portraiture - usually of friends and family, and done with a realistic but psychological approach, rather than pure representation.
In the 1880s, Eakins became aware of the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge and enthusiastically embraced photography, making nude motion studies of his own and even developing a method of early motion capture. Photography also became an influence on his painting, although his photographs were then regarded as source material and a personal interest and not as art in themselves.
Eakins was unsuccessful as an artist in his lifetime, but has come to be regarded as one of the most influential and important figures in American painting. His work has also been significant for its homoeroticism, and his teaching methods, for his insistence on teaching men and women together and in the same way, which was ground breaking and controversial at the time.
Eakins was married and his sexuality remains a matter of dispute, but his body of nude work, his close friendship with Walt Whitman and his belief that a naked woman was the most beautiful form in nature - 'except a naked man', give some clues.
Probably Eakins' best known work The Swimming Hole (1884-5)
The Wrestlers (1889)
Photographic motion study (1884 or 5)
