Thomas Eakins
After studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Thomas Eakins returned to his native Philadelphia. Although he is considered one of the most important American artists of his time, he primarily built his reputation as a teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Eakins insisted that his students paint directly from live models and believed in teaching male and female artists together. His work is recognized today for its commitment to unbiased realism and precise details.
Where do art and science intersect?
Although some of Eakins’s portraits incorporate objects that help identify his sitters’ hobbies and occupations, portrait heads emphasize who they were as thinking and feeling human beings. Eakins probably perceived William Woolsey Johnson, a professor of mathematics at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, as a kindred spirit, as he once observed, “All the sciences are done in a simple way; in mathematics the complicated things are reduced to simple things. So it is in painting.”
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd
\ Also in this gallery
