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Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) studied in Paris in the 1860s. He has absorbed many art styles there. Eakins is famous with paintings of boat racers. In The Biglin Brothers Racing, he captures a sense of cinematic action. You feel the strength of the rowers, yet the surrounding scene is peaceful.

Eakins was a very versatile master of many genres. His Agnew Clinic, a painting of a surgical operation performed on a woman before the auditorium of by medical students is a probing study of human character. He examines the personalities of the medical students as carefully as the surgeons examine the body on the operating table.

Influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s back-to-Eden philosophy: “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they”, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) tried to return to the primitive state through art to find the “noble savage” or natural person.

Gauguin considered the life in Europe is “artificial and conventional… In order to do something new we must go back to the source, to humanity in its infancy.” Eventually, he went to Tahiti to seek the noble savage.

The concept of the noble savage, man living in harmony with nature, was popular in the 18th century. According to the concept, man shall not be corrupted by civilization. Jean-Jacques Rousseau supported the idea, though he never actually used the term. In Emile, he wrote: “Everything is good in leaving the hands of the creator of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”

Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) was born in Solingen, Germany; grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts; went back to Germany for four years to study painting; and returned to the United States to paint. Bierstadt is famous with spectacular mountain scenery. He often went to treacherous and dangerous locations to made sketches and took photos of the scene. From these photos, he painted his awe-inspiring landscapes. Bierstadt once headed west with an expeditionary party in 1859 and, in the summer of 1861, took sketches of Eastern Shoshone country in the Wind River region of Wyoming.

In The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak Bierstadt focuses on the natural sunlight on the scenes. Although Native Americans and animals populate the foreground and middle ground of the painting, they do not dominate on the painting - they’re simply local color and ambience. It’s the light in the painting that has personality. Bierstadt was in favor of the long, wide shot rather than intimate close-up.