The Gross Clinic
Encyclopedia
The Gross Clinic, or, The Clinic of Dr. Gross, is an 1875 painting by American artist Thomas Eakins
. It is oil
on canvas
and measures 8 feet (243.8 cm) by 6.5 feet (198.1 cm). Dr. Samuel D. Gross
, a seventy-year-old professor dressed in a black frock coat, lectures a group of Jefferson Medical College students. Included among the group is a self-portrait of Eakins, who is seated to the right of the tunnel railing, sketching or writing. Seen over Dr. Gross's right shoulder is the clinic clerk, Dr. Franklin West, taking notes on the operation. Eakins's signature is painted into the painting, on the front of the surgical table.
, The Gross Clinic has an important place documenting the history of medicine—both because it honors the emergence of surgery
as a healing profession (previously, surgery was associated primarily with amputation), and because it shows us what the surgical theater looked like in the nineteenth century. The painting is based on a surgery witnessed by Eakins, in which Gross treated a young man for osteomyelitis
of the femur
. Gross is pictured here performing a conservative operation as opposed to an amputation (which is how the patient would normally have been treated in previous decades). Here, surgeons crowd around the anesthetized patient in their frock coats. This is just prior to the adoption of a hygienic surgical environment (see asepsis
). The Gross Clinic is thus often contrasted with Eakins's later painting The Agnew Clinic
(1889), which depicts a cleaner, brighter, surgical theater. In comparing the two, we see the advancement in our understanding of the prevention of infection.
It is assumed that the patient was a teenage boy, although the exposed body is not entirely discernible as male or female; the painting is shocking for both the odd presentation of this figure and the matter-of-fact goriness of the procedure. Adding to the drama is the lone woman in the painting seen in the middle ground, possibly the patient's mother, cringing in distress. Her dramatic figure functions as a strong contrast to the calm, professional demeanor of the men who surround the patient. This bloody and very blunt depiction of surgery was shocking at the time it was first exhibited.
wrote that it was:
This opinion was not universal. The critic for Philadelphia's The Evening Telegraph, who may have been aware of the personal politics involved in the advisory group of artists who rejected it, wrote:
Controversy about the painting has centered on its violence, and on the melodramatic presence of the woman. Contemporary scholars have suggested that the painting may be read in terms of castration anxiety and fantasies of mastery over the body (e.g. Michael Fried), and that it documents Eakins's ambivalence about representing sex difference (e.g. Jennifer Doyle). The painting has also been understood to be drawing an analogy between painting and surgery and as identifying the work of the artist with the emergence of surgery as a respected profession.
In 2002 Michael Kimmelman
of The New York Times
called it "hands down, the finest 19th-century American painting". In 2006, in response to the impending sale of this painting, The New York Times published a "close reading" which sketches some of the different critical perspectives on this work of art.
in Philadelphia until it was moved in the mid-1980s to Jefferson Alumni Hall. Although undocumented, in the late-1970s there was a rumor of a substantial offer by a collector who wished to donate the painting to the National Gallery of Art
. On November 11, 2006, the Thomas Jefferson University Board
voted to sell the painting for US$68 million to the National Gallery of Art
in Washington and the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, now under construction in Bentonville, Arkansas
. The sale would represent a record price for an artwork made in the United States prior to World War II.
The proposed sale was seen as a secretive act. In late November 2006, efforts began to keep the painting in Philadelphia, including a fund with a December 26 deadline to raise money to purchase it and a plan to invoke a clause regarding "historic objects" in the city's historic preservation code. In a matter of weeks the fund raised $30 million, and on December 21, 2006, Wachovia
Bank agreed to loan the difference until the rest of the money has been raised, keeping the painting in town at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Pledges alone were not enough to cover the US$68 million purchase price. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
was forced to deaccession Eakins's The Cello Player to an unidentified private buyer; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art
deaccessioned Eakins's Cowboy Singing, along with two oil sketches for Cowboys in the Badlands, to the Anschutz collection
and the Denver Art Museum
. The Denver-based Anschutz collection
purchased Cowboys in the Badlands at a 22 May 2003 auction at Christie's New York
for $5,383,500, which was the previous record for an Eakins painting.
A reproduction of The Gross Clinic sits in the place of the original at Thomas Jefferson University.
three times. The first restoration between 1917 and 1925 substantially damaged the painting, rendering secondary figures in the composition inconsistently bright or reddish in color. In 1929 the artist's widow wrote a letter of complaint regarding the "fancy red light' that had falsified the painting's intended tones.
The painting's backing was reinforced with plywood by H. Stevenson in 1915. This was replaced by in 1940 by Hannah Mee Horner, who glued the painting to a plywood backing. Within two decades, however, this backing began to warp and threatened to tear the painting in half.
In 1961, at the request of Jefferson Medical College, the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) undertook another restoration, under conservator Theodor Siegl. Mark Tucker, a later PMA conservationist, described the work as "a rescue mission... They were saving the painting from tearing itself in half. These were the nail heads that were starting to work forward into the canvas and show as bumps on the front... Yeah. It was just hair-raising." Siegl used a power plane
to remove the plywood down to the last, thin ply. The rest of the wood and the tenacious glue were painstakingly removed by hand. Siegl and his colleagues also restored, to some extent, the faces in the upper right of the canvas.
In 2009, in response to long term concerns regarding inconsistencies in the painting's disposition of darkness and light, conservators at the Philadelphia Museum of Art undertook restoration of The Gross Clinic from July 2009 to July 2010, during which time the painting was not publicly visible. The restoration sought to revert changes that had been made by the Jefferson Medical College during the 1917 restoration. Definition of parts, including Eakins' self-portrayal, was restored, using as reference an ink wash copy of the painting made by the artist, as well as a photograph taken by the Metropolitan Museum of Art
previous to the Medical College's changes in 1917.
— Description of previous and current conservation and restoration work on the Eakins painting.
Thomas Eakins
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator...
. It is oil
Oil painting
Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil—especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil. Often an oil such as linseed was boiled with a resin such as pine resin or even frankincense; these were called 'varnishes' and were prized for their body...
on canvas
Canvas
Canvas is an extremely heavy-duty plain-woven fabric used for making sails, tents, marquees, backpacks, and other items for which sturdiness is required. It is also popularly used by artists as a painting surface, typically stretched across a wooden frame...
and measures 8 feet (243.8 cm) by 6.5 feet (198.1 cm). Dr. Samuel D. Gross
Samuel D. Gross
Samuel David Gross was an American academic trauma surgeon. Surgeon biographer Isaac Minis Hays called Gross "The Nestor of American Surgery." He is immortalized in Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic, , perhaps the most important American painting of the nineteenth century.-Early life and...
, a seventy-year-old professor dressed in a black frock coat, lectures a group of Jefferson Medical College students. Included among the group is a self-portrait of Eakins, who is seated to the right of the tunnel railing, sketching or writing. Seen over Dr. Gross's right shoulder is the clinic clerk, Dr. Franklin West, taking notes on the operation. Eakins's signature is painted into the painting, on the front of the surgical table.
Description
Admired for its uncompromising realismRealism (visual arts)
Realism in the visual arts is a style that depicts the actuality of what the eyes can see. The term is used in different senses in art history; it may mean the same as illusionism, the representation of subjects with visual mimesis or verisimilitude, or may mean an emphasis on the actuality of...
, The Gross Clinic has an important place documenting the history of medicine—both because it honors the emergence of surgery
Surgery
Surgery is an ancient medical specialty that uses operative manual and instrumental techniques on a patient to investigate and/or treat a pathological condition such as disease or injury, or to help improve bodily function or appearance.An act of performing surgery may be called a surgical...
as a healing profession (previously, surgery was associated primarily with amputation), and because it shows us what the surgical theater looked like in the nineteenth century. The painting is based on a surgery witnessed by Eakins, in which Gross treated a young man for osteomyelitis
Osteomyelitis
Osteomyelitis simply means an infection of the bone or bone marrow...
of the femur
Femur
The femur , or thigh bone, is the most proximal bone of the leg in tetrapod vertebrates capable of walking or jumping, such as most land mammals, birds, many reptiles such as lizards, and amphibians such as frogs. In vertebrates with four legs such as dogs and horses, the femur is found only in...
. Gross is pictured here performing a conservative operation as opposed to an amputation (which is how the patient would normally have been treated in previous decades). Here, surgeons crowd around the anesthetized patient in their frock coats. This is just prior to the adoption of a hygienic surgical environment (see asepsis
Asepsis
Asepsis is the state of being free from disease-causing contaminants or, preventing contact with microorganisms. The term asepsis often refers to those practices used to promote or induce asepsis in an operative field in surgery or medicine to prevent infection...
). The Gross Clinic is thus often contrasted with Eakins's later painting The Agnew Clinic
The Agnew Clinic
The Agnew Clinic, or, The Clinic of Dr. Agnew, is an 1889 oil painting by American artist Thomas Eakins, Goodrich #235. It was commissioned to honor anatomist and surgeon David Hayes Agnew, on his retirement from teaching at the University of Pennsylvania.-Background:The Agnew Clinic depicts Dr....
(1889), which depicts a cleaner, brighter, surgical theater. In comparing the two, we see the advancement in our understanding of the prevention of infection.
It is assumed that the patient was a teenage boy, although the exposed body is not entirely discernible as male or female; the painting is shocking for both the odd presentation of this figure and the matter-of-fact goriness of the procedure. Adding to the drama is the lone woman in the painting seen in the middle ground, possibly the patient's mother, cringing in distress. Her dramatic figure functions as a strong contrast to the calm, professional demeanor of the men who surround the patient. This bloody and very blunt depiction of surgery was shocking at the time it was first exhibited.
Critical reception
The painting was submitted for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, but was rejected by the Committee of Selection. When it was eventually displayed in Ward One of the U.S. Army Post Hospital, a critic for the New York TribuneNew York Tribune
The New York Tribune was an American newspaper, first established by Horace Greeley in 1841, which was long considered one of the leading newspapers in the United States...
wrote that it was:
"... one of the most powerful, horrible, yet fascinating pictures that has been painted anywhere in this century...but the more one praises it, the more one must condemn its admission to a gallery where men and women of weak nerves must be compelled to look at it, for not to look at it is impossible."
This opinion was not universal. The critic for Philadelphia's The Evening Telegraph, who may have been aware of the personal politics involved in the advisory group of artists who rejected it, wrote:
"There is nothing so fine in the American section of the Art Department of the Exhibition, and it is a great pity that the squeamishness of the Selecting Committee compelled the artist to find a place for it in the United States Hospital building. It is rumored that the blood on Dr. Gross' fingers made some of the members of the committee sick, but, judging from the quality of the work exhibited by them we fear that it was not the blood alone that made them sick. Artists have before now been known to sicken at the sight of pictures by younger men which they in their souls were compelled to acknowledge were beyond their emulation."
Controversy about the painting has centered on its violence, and on the melodramatic presence of the woman. Contemporary scholars have suggested that the painting may be read in terms of castration anxiety and fantasies of mastery over the body (e.g. Michael Fried), and that it documents Eakins's ambivalence about representing sex difference (e.g. Jennifer Doyle). The painting has also been understood to be drawing an analogy between painting and surgery and as identifying the work of the artist with the emergence of surgery as a respected profession.
In 2002 Michael Kimmelman
Michael Kimmelman
Michael Kimmelman is an author, critic, columnist and pianist. He is the chief architecture critic for The New York Times and written on issues of public housing, community development and social responsibility. He was the paper's longtime chief art critic and, in 2007, created the Abroad column,...
of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
called it "hands down, the finest 19th-century American painting". In 2006, in response to the impending sale of this painting, The New York Times published a "close reading" which sketches some of the different critical perspectives on this work of art.
Provenance
After its purchase for US$200 at the time of the Centennial Exhibition, the painting was housed in the College Building of Jefferson Medical College, Thomas Jefferson UniversityThomas Jefferson University
Thomas Jefferson University is a private health sciences university in Center City, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States. The university consists of six constituent colleges and schools, Jefferson Medical College, Jefferson College of Graduate Studies, Jefferson School of Health...
in Philadelphia until it was moved in the mid-1980s to Jefferson Alumni Hall. Although undocumented, in the late-1970s there was a rumor of a substantial offer by a collector who wished to donate the painting to the National Gallery of Art
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden is a national art museum, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, in Washington, DC...
. On November 11, 2006, the Thomas Jefferson University Board
Board of directors
A board of directors is a body of elected or appointed members who jointly oversee the activities of a company or organization. Other names include board of governors, board of managers, board of regents, board of trustees, and board of visitors...
voted to sell the painting for US$68 million to the National Gallery of Art
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden is a national art museum, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, in Washington, DC...
in Washington and the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, now under construction in Bentonville, Arkansas
Bentonville, Arkansas
Bentonville, Arkansas is a city in Northwest Bahamas, and county seat of Benton County, Arkansas, United States The population was 35,301 at the 2010 census. It is part of the Fayetteville–Springdale–Rogers, AR-MO Metropolitan Statistical Area...
. The sale would represent a record price for an artwork made in the United States prior to World War II.
The proposed sale was seen as a secretive act. In late November 2006, efforts began to keep the painting in Philadelphia, including a fund with a December 26 deadline to raise money to purchase it and a plan to invoke a clause regarding "historic objects" in the city's historic preservation code. In a matter of weeks the fund raised $30 million, and on December 21, 2006, Wachovia
Wachovia
Wachovia was a diversified financial services company based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Before its acquisition by Wells Fargo in 2008, Wachovia was the fourth-largest bank holding company in the United States based on total assets...
Bank agreed to loan the difference until the rest of the money has been raised, keeping the painting in town at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is among the largest art museums in the United States. It is located at the west end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. The Museum was established in 1876 in conjunction with the Centennial Exposition of the same year...
and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Pledges alone were not enough to cover the US$68 million purchase price. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is a museum and art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1805 and is the oldest art museum and school in the United States. The academy's museum is internationally known for its collections of 19th and 20th century American paintings,...
was forced to deaccession Eakins's The Cello Player to an unidentified private buyer; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is among the largest art museums in the United States. It is located at the west end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. The Museum was established in 1876 in conjunction with the Centennial Exposition of the same year...
deaccessioned Eakins's Cowboy Singing, along with two oil sketches for Cowboys in the Badlands, to the Anschutz collection
Anschutz collection
The Philip F. Anschutz Collection is a private collection of paintings of the American West assembled by Philip Anschutz. Parts of it are exhibited in the Denver Art Museum, the majority is housed in the Navarre Building in downtown Denver and not generally viewable by the public....
and the Denver Art Museum
Denver Art Museum
The Denver Art Museum is an art museum in Denver, Colorado located in Denver's Civic Center.It is known for its collection of American Indian art,and has a comprehensive collection numbering more than 68,000 works from across the world....
. The Denver-based Anschutz collection
Anschutz collection
The Philip F. Anschutz Collection is a private collection of paintings of the American West assembled by Philip Anschutz. Parts of it are exhibited in the Denver Art Museum, the majority is housed in the Navarre Building in downtown Denver and not generally viewable by the public....
purchased Cowboys in the Badlands at a 22 May 2003 auction at Christie's New York
Christie's
Christie's is an art business and a fine arts auction house.- History :The official company literature states that founder James Christie conducted the first sale in London, England, on 5 December 1766, and the earliest auction catalogue the company retains is from December 1766...
for $5,383,500, which was the previous record for an Eakins painting.
A reproduction of The Gross Clinic sits in the place of the original at Thomas Jefferson University.
Restorations
The painting has been restoredArt restoration
Art restoration is related to art conservation. Restoration is a process that attempts to return the work of art to some previous state that the restorer imagines was the "original". This was commonly done in the past...
three times. The first restoration between 1917 and 1925 substantially damaged the painting, rendering secondary figures in the composition inconsistently bright or reddish in color. In 1929 the artist's widow wrote a letter of complaint regarding the "fancy red light' that had falsified the painting's intended tones.
The painting's backing was reinforced with plywood by H. Stevenson in 1915. This was replaced by in 1940 by Hannah Mee Horner, who glued the painting to a plywood backing. Within two decades, however, this backing began to warp and threatened to tear the painting in half.
In 1961, at the request of Jefferson Medical College, the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) undertook another restoration, under conservator Theodor Siegl. Mark Tucker, a later PMA conservationist, described the work as "a rescue mission... They were saving the painting from tearing itself in half. These were the nail heads that were starting to work forward into the canvas and show as bumps on the front... Yeah. It was just hair-raising." Siegl used a power plane
Power plane
In printed circuit board design, a power plane is the counterpart to the ground plane and behaves as an AC signal ground, whilst providing DC voltage for powering circuits mounted on the PCB.- Uses :...
to remove the plywood down to the last, thin ply. The rest of the wood and the tenacious glue were painstakingly removed by hand. Siegl and his colleagues also restored, to some extent, the faces in the upper right of the canvas.
In 2009, in response to long term concerns regarding inconsistencies in the painting's disposition of darkness and light, conservators at the Philadelphia Museum of Art undertook restoration of The Gross Clinic from July 2009 to July 2010, during which time the painting was not publicly visible. The restoration sought to revert changes that had been made by the Jefferson Medical College during the 1917 restoration. Definition of parts, including Eakins' self-portrayal, was restored, using as reference an ink wash copy of the painting made by the artist, as well as a photograph taken by the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
previous to the Medical College's changes in 1917.
Further reading
- Jennifer Doyle, "Sex, Scandal, and Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic" in Representations (Fall 1999), included in Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (University of Minnesota Press, 2006)
- Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, and Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (University of Chicago Press, 1998)
- "Philadelphia Works to Keep Gross Treasure", broadcast Thursday, 12/14/06, on National Public Radio's Morning EditionMorning EditionMorning Edition is an American radio news program produced and distributed by National Public Radio . It airs weekday mornings and runs for two hours, and many stations repeat one or both hours. The show feeds live from 05:00 to 09:00 ET, with feeds and updates as required until noon...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6622315 - "Wal-Mart Heir's Bid for Art Riles Philadelphians", broadcast Thursday, 12/14/06, on National Public Radio's All Things ConsideredAll Things ConsideredAll Things Considered is the flagship news program on the American network National Public Radio. It was the first news program on NPR, and is broadcast live worldwide through several outlets...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6626805 - "Philadelphia Museum of Art: American Art Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic)" http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/299524.html?mulR=3970
External links
— Description of exhibition of the Eakins painting, plus related works.— Description of previous and current conservation and restoration work on the Eakins painting.