Pocket Guide -> Media -> Oil on canvas -> Weda Cook
Weda Cook
by Thomas Eakins · American, 1844 - 1916
| Creation Date: | 1891 (1896 |
| Media & Support: | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions: | 24 x 20 inches |
| Credit: | Museum Purchase, Howald Fund |
Along with Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins is the most celebrated American Realist painter of the nineteenth century. Eakins is also one of the great nineteenth-century portrait painters. He studied with Jean-Léon Gérôme at the French Academy and taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He insisted that his students develop a rigorous knowledge of anatomy for figure-painting, and he also emphasized the importance of portraying a sitter’s emotional and psychological state. Here, Eakins has painted a popular Philadelphia contralto as distant, fragile, and sad.
