Thomas Eakins 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 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
Self-portrait (Thomas Eakins) expression that has been interpreted as one of "accusation and bitterness", art historian Darrel Sewell has noted that the painting's power resides in its emotional ambiguity, and that it bears closer relationship to the sympathetic intimacy of Eakins' portraits of women than to his more psychologically distant images of men. Self-portrait (Thomas Eakins) Self-portrait is an oil on canvas painting by Thomas Eakins, presented as a diploma piece upon his election as an Associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1902. Although Eakins included himself as an observer or participant in group portraits and genre scenes, this and