Thomas Eakins: "The Gross Clinic" Restored

Thomas Eakins is indisputably one of America’s greatest 19th century painters. Deemed a master in psychological realism with a noted signature appreciation for darkness, he is best known for his commitment to detail and his honest and most often frank portrayal of his subjects. While his technique earned him the respect of fellow painters and critics during his lifetime, he failed to amass a large following, as many clients felt his paintings were not flattering and made them appear older.

Eakins valued technical precision and aimed to explore the truth of what he saw with little concern for sentiment or propriety. He encouraged this methodology in his students as seen when in a drawing class at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which included female students, he removed a loincloth from a male model in an attempt to illustrate a point of anatomy. Very soon after, he was dismissed from his position as director at the academy.

In line with this expressed appreciation for what is real, he depicted a surgeon with a blood-spattered hand in his painting The Gross Clinic (1875). The surgeon was Dr. Samuel D. Gross, the nation’s most famous surgeon at that time. The painting featured an operation conducted in a surgical theater amidst a symphony of darkness. When it was first exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition, the jury rejected it as unsightly. Later, it was sold to a medical school for an insulting sum of $200.

This same painting has garnered much attention recently as the Philadelphia Art Museum launched an ambitious restoration effort to reverse extensive changes made to lighten the painting sometime between 1917 and 1925 under the direction of Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, its former owner. These changes included suffusing the painting with a false red light that consequently destroyed the balance of light and dark. In the edited painting, the figures standing in the corridor behind Dr. Samuel D. Gross appear to emerge from an orange inferno aflame. Many of the medical students in the darkened galleries above are bright and reddish, as if illuminated by individual flashlights.

Guided primarily by a photograph taken of the painting by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1917 before changes were made, the conservation effort sought to restore the carefully calibrated dim tones for which this painting was best known.

The restored painting will be on view through January 9th at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of the exhibition “An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing The Gross Clinic Anew.”

For more information please visit The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Also, Eakins’ study Portrait of John McLure Hamilton will be on view as part of the Georgia Museum of Art’s permanent collection gallery when it reopens in January 2011. His study will also be featured in GMOA’s catalogue of the collection: One Hundred American Paintings.