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Thomas EakinsThomas Eakins was born on July 25, 1844, in Philadelphia, and with the exception of four years of study in Paris and Spain, the city remained his home. Its school, public and private art collections, and community of artists, many of whom were recent emigrants from europium trained in the academic tradition and familiar with new esthetical styles, provided Eakins with an unusually wide-ranging art education for an American artist of his day.When Eakins arrived in Paris in 1866 to continue his art studies, he was in the head of young artists who would revolutionize American art over the next devil decades, breaking away from the literalism of Hudson River School landscapes to emulate the figurative pillowcase matt of European academic art. For the rest of his career, Eakins would remain the closely dedicated American prop unmatchednt of the painstaking, analytical artistic methods taught in European academies. Yet, as before long as he arrived back in Philadelph ia, Eakins declared his independence from European conventions by painting subjects close to his consume experience. Moreover, he did not move lake his contemporaries. One critic described him as much more manage an inventor working (out) curious and interesting problems for himself than like an average artist.Eakins was wide recognized as a formidable artistic talent nearly as soon as he began to exhibit in the mid- 1870s. However, his scenes of working- and middle- discriminate life found little support from critics and patrons. His decision to concentrate on portraiture after 1886 presented an even greater challenge for his viewer, who expected laudation and stylistic dash, rather than the intense scrutiny and introspective mood that characterized Eakins portraits. afterward four years of studying in Europe, Thomas Eakins returned to Philadelphia in 1870 and amaze up a studio in his family home. As did many of his Paris-trained American contemporaries, Eakins brought back a conviction that the figure was the most important subject for art. While his peers remained committed to allegorical, historical, and exotic genre themes, however, Eakins sought his subjects form the immediate experience of his life in Philadelphia. He began with the now-famous rowing, sailing, and track down pictures, and made p... ... artists, culminating in his election in 1902 to the National Academy of Design, the most prestigious art organization in the United States. Designated an associate-elect in March, Eakins particolored the required self-portrait in less than two months, and was elected a blanket(a) academician in May. No other artist in the account statement of the institution previously had been elected both associate and academician in the same year.He received a number of commissions from men in the professional and business communities. Yet, the intensely introspective quality that characterized his best portraits was close for people he knows well, such as his father-in-law, William Macdowell. In 1908, perhaps reviewing his own career, Eakins revisited the William Rush theme of thirty-two years before. In one of these paintings, he portrayed his own stocky figure helping a naked model down from the modeling stand.Eakins died on June 25, 1916. In the following year, the metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened a memorial army of sixty of his paintings, and the Pennsylvania Academy mounted and exhibition of more than one hundred of his works.