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) 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 a smaller unsigned and undated oil, thought to have been made at about the same time, are the only unadorned self-portraits he ever painted. Lloyd Goodrich wrote that it "is not only one of his finest head and bust likenesses, but a revealing human document; in the direct look of