Image source: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain). View source
The Gross Clinic
Thomas Eakins · Realism & Academic
- Artist
- Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (1844–1916)
- Date
- 1875
- Dimensions
- 243.8 x 198.1 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, United States
The Gross Clinic shows the renowned surgeon Dr Samuel D. Gross operating on a young patient’s thigh in a crowded medical amphitheatre at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, while lecturing to students in the tiers above.
A closer look
Gross pauses, scalpel in his bloodied hand, his head lit dramatically from above like a figure by Rembrandt. Around the table, assistants hold the incision open and keep the patient anaesthetised. To the left, a woman, probably the patient’s mother, hides her face in horror. The blunt depiction of blood and surgery shocked the selection committee of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, which refused to hang it in the art section. Today it is regarded as one of the greatest American paintings.
History of the painting
Rejected by the art jury of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, The Gross Clinic was shown instead in the exhibition's army medical section. In 1878 Jefferson Medical College bought it for just 200 dollars, and it hung there for more than a century. In 2006 the college agreed to sell it for 68 million dollars to a partnership including the National Gallery of Art and the new Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas. Philadelphians launched a campaign to keep it, and within weeks the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts matched the price, so the painting stayed in the city where it was made.
More by Thomas Eakins
In this gallery
Famous works elsewhere
- Swimming 1885
- The Chess Players 1876
- Miss Amelia Van Buren 1891