Word: painterly
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...years before his death, the painter Thomas Eakins made a sale that overnight made headlines. It was an oil sketch; the buyer was Albert C. Barnes, just then beginning to use his great Argyrol fortune to build up his great art collection. The press spread the rumor that Barnes had paid $50,000 for the sketch (a better guess would have been $5,000), and suddenly Eakins found himself being hailed as "the dean of American painters." His place in U.S. art has remained secure ever since, but true recognition came late for Eakins himself...
Though he was, along with Albert Ryder, the greatest American painter of his day, he was given only one one-man show in his lifetime, and it was not until he was almost 60 that he won a prize that carried any kind of prestige. Some of his most ambitious paintings were ridiculed, and so little value was placed on his portraits that several, including one of President Hayes, have simply disappeared. At one point, even his native Philadelphia seemed to forget him: when John Singer Sargent came to town and asked to meet Eakins, he got the bewildered reply...
...cast his lot with the unfortunate and tiresome Angries. No longer the precocious collater of quips and cranks, Mr. Wilson now seeks to chronicle the Soho adventures of an ingenu wanderer with little money and less intelligence. The adventures include a noisy actor, a shabby count, a fiery painter (who seems to be some sort of salvation figure) and a pretty girl (who couldn't really save anybody from anything...
Until the present century, it was often a rather risky business for an American artist to do a nude. When the painter John Vanderlyn exhibited an inoffensive Ariadne in New York in 1815, his great rival John Trumbull was able to stir up enough scandalized protests almost to ruin poor Vanderlyn forever. When William Page tried to exhibit his 1862 Venus in Boston, there was such an outcry that the painting was whisked from public view. At the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where on Ladies' Day the Greek statues were draped, the great Thomas Eakins posed...
Road run by a painter so suspicious of success that he jumps out the window and runs for it when rich art patrons come to buy his paintings. Here Harry has his moment of selfdiscovery: "For better or worse, I am a bourgeois. Doreen made some tea. Presumably, she had known it all along...