"The Gross Clinic' restored (1st review)

The restored version of The Gross Clinic by Thomas Eakins, reminds me of the dayenu prayer that Jews sing at Passover.

"Dayenu""“ "It would have been sufficient"— if money had been raised so the Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy could jointly own the historic painting and keep it in the hometown of the artist and his subject.

For that alone we'd be thankful. And it would have been more than sufficient if The Gross Clinic were exhibited in the same room as The Agnew Clinic, a comparable Eakins work. These two paintings of similar subjects now hang together for an extended museum showing for the first time since 1893. (They were together briefly at Johns Hopkins University in 1998.)

If that weren't enough, the two museums also have performed an important restoration of The Gross Clinic. Now the painting is seen as Eakins envisioned it, revealing details that have been distorted since an aggressive cleaning and "improving" took place in the 1920s.

Dayenu indeed.

Condemned for realism

Eakins was a 30-year old-anatomy student and a not-yet-famous painter when he started The Gross Clinic in 1875. His subject, Dr. Samuel D. Gross (1805-1884), was revered as a teacher and surgeon. Eakins's depiction of a doctor performing surgery for medical students in a hospital amphitheater is now esteemed as a landmark of medical history and a masterpiece of 19th-Century painting. But at the start it was condemned for its excessive realism.

Critics found it horrifying to see blood and knives, not to mention a naked thigh. The Art Journal called it "black and disagreeable…. a degradation of art." The New York Times winced at "the pincers and lancets, the spurting blood." The New York Tribune found it "horrible and yet fascinating," adding, "One must condemn its admission to a gallery where men and women of weak nerves must be compelled to look at it." (These quotations are posted in the entranceway to the new exhibition.)

Eakins hoped The Gross Clinic would be displayed at Philadelphia's 1876 U.S. Centennial Exposition, a celebration of 100 years of American artistic and scientific advancement. But his painting was rejected and was shown, instead, at a U.S. Army medical post nearby. Not until three years later was the painting exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy and then at New York's National Academy of Design.

Darkness at noon

Much of the eight-by-six-foot painting is black, and the students are in deep shadow, thus spotlighting the surgeon whose hair gleams with the reflection of sunlight from above. But the painting's dark color, as well as the perceived darkness of its subject, alienated many viewers.

The painting was owned by Jefferson Medical College, which commissioned a cleaning after the artist's death in 1916. Well-meaning craftsmen lightened and brightened The Gross Clinic, thus drawing attention to figures that Eakins intentionally put in shadow, and detracting attention from the surgeon. The restorer removed a final dark layer that Eakins applied specifically to mute parts of the painting.

Because the painting was displayed at the college rather than a gallery or museum, critics didn't report the changes. Eakins's widow privately wrote that the cleaning had "destroy[ed] the tones" that her husband created. Visitors to this new exhibition can see a photograph of the painting as it existed for the past 90 years, when a yellowish-orange-ish aura pervaded it.

This masterpiece captures a time when all doctors were male, dressed in ordinary, unsanitary street clothes, a time when all illumination came from a skylight above. Surgery in those days was scheduled between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., when the sun was high.

Agnew's new world

A fascinating contrast is seen in The Agnew Clinic, which Eakins created 14 years later. That painting chronicles the use of electric lights, the presence of a female assisting the surgeon, and white gowns and sterilized instruments in a covered case. In the intervening years, Joseph Lister's discoveries had led to antiseptic practices by Dr. D. Hayes Agnew at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and by others.

The painting itself is larger (seven feet by 11, horizontal) because Eakins wanted to give more space to the group of students who had commissioned this piece. The most prominent similarity between the two paintings is the focus on a charismatic surgeon who turns from his patient to address his students. Eakins himself appears in both.

Eakins's dream

The Art Museum is displaying these clinic paintings in the same room at right angles to each other. That way, you can easily turn your eyes from one to the other, or step back and see them together. The curators wisely chose not to place them side by side on one wall where the larger Agnew might have overpowered the Gross. The colors of the walls replicate those of the 1876 Centennial Exposition hall, so the work now hangs in the setting that Eakins dreamed of.

The exhibit includes much more"“ about Eakins's career, the art of restoration, the Centennial Exposition and the Pennsylvania Academy, where the exhibition will move in January.♦


To read another review by Michael Woods, click here.