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
Eakins Press Eakins Press The Eakins Press Foundation is an American publishing house based in New York established by Leslie George Katz in 1966 and named after the painter Thomas Eakins. Since its founding in 1966, the Eakins Press Foundation has published some of the classic volumes on American art and photography, including Lee Friedlander’s "The American Monument", Walker Evans’s "Message from the Interior", and Lincoln Kirstein’s definitive monograph on Elie Nadelman. The Eakins Press Foundation was recognized as a 501(c)(3) charitable foundation in 1974. Katz (1918–97), a former Black Mountain College student, established the press from the proceeds of a sale