Thomas Eakins that was often as tender as it was vigorous, and to have preserved for us the essence of an American life which, indeed, he did not idealize—because it seemed to him beautiful beyond the necessity of idealization. Thomas Eakins Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916) 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
Thomas Eakins a result, Eakins came to rely on his friends and family members to model for portraits. His portrait of Walt Whitman (1887–1888) was the poet's favorite. Eakins' lifelong interest in the figure, nude or nearly so, took several thematic forms. The rowing paintings of the early 1870s constitute the first series of figure studies. In Eakins' largest picture on the subject, "The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake" (1873), the muscular dynamism of the body is given its fullest treatment. In the 1877 painting "William Rush and His Model", he painted the female nude as integral to a historical subject, even