William Rush Carving his Allegorical Figure of Schuylkill River

Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins 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 from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia. He painted several hundred... portraits, usually of friends, family members, or prominent people in the arts, sciences, medicine, and clergy. Taken en masse, the portraits offer an overview of the intellectual life of Philadelphia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; individually, they are incisive depictions of thinking persons. As well, Eakins produced a number of large paintings which brought the portrait out of the drawing room and into the offices, streets, parks, rivers, arenas, and surgical amphitheaters of his city. These active outdoor venues allowed him to paint the subject which most inspired him: the nude or lightly clad figure in motion.
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The Philadelphia Museum of Art has collections of more than 227,000 objects that include "world-class holdings of European and American paintings, prints, drawings and decorative arts" and is among the largest art museums in the United States. Its main building is located at the west end of Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Parkway, near the south end of Fairmount Park and is visited by more than 800,000 people annually. Other museum sites... include the Rodin Museum, also located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Perelman Building, across the street from the Main Building, and several other historic sites. The Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building opened in 2007 and houses some of the Museum's more popular collections, as well as over 200,000 books and periodicals and 1.6 million other documents. The Museum was established in 1876 in conjunction with the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Fairmount Park. Originally called the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, and housed in the Centennial Exposition's Memorial Hall, it opened its doors to the public on May 10, 1877.
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