Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (1844—1916)
Painter and sculptor, born on July 25, 1844, in Philadelphia, Eakins was educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and from 1866 to 1869 at the Ecole des Beaux Arts3 in Paris, and travelled briefly in Spain, where he was enthralled by the works of Spanish realists, particularly Velazques and Goya.
Returning to Philadelphia in 1870, he studied anatomy at Jefferson Medical College and in 1873 became a lecturer at the PennsylvaniaAcademy of the Fine Arts. His work was carefully laid out and painted with enormous attention to detail, creating a feeling of stark realism. Two of his most famous studies were of scenes in clinics: The Gross Clinic4, 1875, and The Agnew Clinic, 1869. He also painted sport scenes, notably Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, 1871, and Between the Rounds, 1899.
He died in Philadelphia on June 25, 1916. After only moderate recognition in his lifetime, he eventually came to be acknowledged one of the greatest of American artists.
Baby at Play, 1876 Miss Van Buren, 1891
Mary Cassatt (1844 - 1926)
A tall, taut Philadelphia society girl, Mary Cassatt insisted on going to Europe to study art. Her banker father declared he would almost rather see her dead. Nevertheless, in 1866, Cassatt went. She was then only twenty-two. After travelling extensively throughout Europe, studying and copying the old masters in Holland, France, Italy, and Spain, she finally settled down in Paris and gave herself over to the influence of Edgar Degas. Degas transmitted much of his precise craftsmanship to Cassatt. The impressionists — Monet and others — followed his lead in charming the prim, determined creature into their sunlit circle. From them she learned to subordinate form, space, and texture to the pure play of light, and to give her pictures their characteristic air of calm and gracious ease. She made a habit of painting plain people in unconsciously beautiful poses, and with the same care that earlier artists lavished on saints and goddesses. From the start, French critics noted her rather puritanical simplicity. “She remains exclusively of her people”, said one. But America failed to realize the fact; she had no native fame until after her death.
Mary Cassatt felt more at home in Paris. For decades she rarely left her studio, painting from eight in the morning until the light failed, and then turning to her drawings and etchings. During World War I the light failed in her eyes. Blind, she lived on for another decade, feeling her way about with an umbrella, and snapping her large and bony fingers as she recalled the great days of impressionism.
Woman at her Toilette, 1909 Tea, 1880
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)
Sargent’s output was more than 800 portraits and innumerable sketches of people and places. Sargent’s “manner” was not that of a neo-expressionist but of a virtuoso: his drawing lacks the tenacity of an Eakins, let alone a Cezanne, yet it was drawing of a high order, heartless sometimes, but rarely less than dazzling in its fluency; and there is nothing like it in American art today.
He was a stylist without a natural subject, unlike such Americans as Winslow Homer or Thomas Eakins whose work was rooted in unmistakably American values and experiences. He spent most of his adult life in England. If Sargent was the painter of his age, it was also because his talent suited a changed climate in England in the late 19th century — one in which John Ruskin's passionate social moralizing had dropped out of fashion, to be replaced by Matthew Arnold's exhortations to detach art from politics, the seed of “art for art’s sake”.
His fame as a social portraitist and his passage from France into the English upper crust began at the Paris Salon of 1884 with the scandalous Madame X. This portrait caused a sensation. Over the years to come Sargent’s social and celebrity portraits became an indispensable record of their time and. class. Sargent was the last of what had passed, not the first of what was to come; but he still looks impressive, and one realizes that his sense of decorum went deeper than the mere desire to cure the vanity of the rich.