Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) was an American Realist painter and photographer based in Philadelphia whose unflinching commitment to depicting the human body and the actual texture of American life put him years ahead of his contemporaries and cost him dearly during his lifetime. Trained in Paris under Gérôme and deeply influenced by both Velázquez and the new science of photography, he returned to Philadelphia and produced a body of work — rowers on the Schuylkill River, surgeons at work in the operating theater, athletes and boxers, portraits of singular psychological intensity — that constitutes one of the most rigorous and honest bodies of work in American art. His insistence on nude model study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts resulted in his forced resignation in 1886, and his reputation suffered throughout most of his career. He is now recognized as the most important American painter of the nineteenth century by many scholars, a necessary corrective to the decorative prettiness that surrounded him.