Thomas Eakins

Thomas Eakins was an American Realist painter, photographer and teacher who spent nearly all his life in Philadelphia. After study in Paris he painted rowers on the Schuylkill River, sporting scenes and searching portraits, and his surgical scene The Gross Clinic shocked viewers with its blood. He taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, insisting on study from the nude, and was forced to resign in 1886 after removing a male model’s loincloth before a mixed class. He also experimented with photographing motion, alongside Eadweard Muybridge.