A fascination with technique was characteristic of the academically better trained artists of the late 19th century. During the 1870s a group of Americans, including Frank Duveneck, William Merritt Chase, and J. Frank Currier, studied painting at the Munich Academy, where they acquired a bold and brilliant alla prima (rapid completion) technique. Another master who emerged during the 1870s was the facile John Singer Sargent, the most popular Anglo-American portraitist of his time.
 

The two foremost painters of 19th-century American life were Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. Starting his career as an illustrator, Homer began to paint the life of rural America, particularly the world of children, as in Snap the Whip (1872, Butler Institute, Youngstown, Ohio). In the 1880s he turned his attention primarily to the dangerous life of deep-sea fishermen, finding in the struggle against the treacherous sea a metaphor for the helplessness of humans before their fate.
 

His vision became even blacker in such austere late works as The Fox Hunt (1893, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) and The Gulf Stream (1899, Metropolitan Museum). His finest works achieve a depth of vision and mastery of design that has seldom been surpassed in American art. Eakins's realism began with a highly scientific naturalism, as in his series of boating pictures done in the 1870s. In the 1880s and '90s he brought this realist vision to bear mainly in portraiture.
 

His greatest achievement was his portrait of Dr. Samuel Gross demonstrating a surgical procedure to a class, known as The Gross Clinic (1875, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia). Contemporary audiences were shocked by the unflinching realism of the large portrait, particularly by the blood on the hand of the lecturing surgeon. In his other portraits Eakins regularly achieved a penetrating insight and clear understanding of form.