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 for even now I could paint heads good enough to make a living anywhere in America. For Eakins, portraiture held little interest as a means of fashionable idealization or even simple verisimilitude. Instead, it provided the opportunity to reveal the character of an individual through the modeling of solid anatomical form. This meant that, notwithstanding his youthful optimism, Eakins would never be a commercially successful portrait painter, as few paid commissions came his way. But his total output of some two hundred and fifty portraits is characterized by "an uncompromising search for the unique human being". Often this search for