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Thomas Cowperthwaite Eakins (July 25, 1844 - June 25, 1916) was a painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. He is associated with realism, and is often identified as a "father" to American painting.

Eakins lived in Philadelphia. He graduated from Central High School (Philadelphia), studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and then in Europe 1866-1870, notably with Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris. He returned to the Pennsylvania Academy to teach in 1876. Some of his most well-known works include "The Gross Clinic" (1875) and "The Agnew Clinic" (1889) (both portraits of surgeons), as well as "The Swimming Hole" (1884-1885, also referred to as "Swimming"). His portrait of Walt Whitman was the poet's favorite.

Eakins's attitude towards realism in painting, and his desire to explore the heart of American life strongly influenced the Ashcan School. He was a teacher of early African-American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner. Though his is not a household name, and in spite of the fact that during his lifetime Eakins struggled to make a living from his work, today he is regarded as one of the most important American artists of any period.

Furthermore, since the 1990s, Eakins has emerged as a major figure in sexuality studies in art history, for both the homoeroticism of his work and for the complexity of his attitudes towards women. Controversy shaped much of his career as a teacher and as an artist. He insisted on teaching men and women "the same", used nude models in mixed sex classes, and was accused of abusing female students. Recent scholarship suggests that these controversies were grounded in more than the "puritanical prudery" of his colleagues (as has been assumed). Today, scholars see these controversies as caused by a combination of factors such as the boheminanism of Eakins and his circle (in which students, for example, sometimes modeled in the nude for each other), and Eakins's own personality (he was known to make rude jokes etc. to provoke people).

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