Thomas Eakins

The most uncompromisingly empirical painter in American art and, in his own time, among the least commercially successful. Eakins trained in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1866 to 1869 — absorbing both the demand for precise anatomical knowledge and the Realist commitment to direct observation — and returned to Philadelphia convinced that the human body, understood scientifically and painted honestly, was the legitimate center of serious painting. He enrolled in anatomy classes at Jefferson Medical College alongside medical students, studied the musculature of horses photographically, and calculated perspective with an engineer's precision before touching a brush. The Gross Clinic (1875), which shows the surgeon Samuel Gross operating on a patient's thigh before a gallery of medical students, is his masterpiece and one of the most demanding paintings in American art: the operating theater, the surgeon's blood-covered hands, the patient's exposed flesh, the horror of the observer in the background who turns away. It was rejected from the art section of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition as too disturbing and shown in the medical section instead. His rowing subjects, his boxing and wrestling scenes, his portraits of athletes and scientists — all pursue the same interest in bodies that actually do things rather than pose in elegant attitudes. He was dismissed from the directorship of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1886 after removing a loincloth from a male model in a mixed life-drawing class. The incident destroyed his institutional career, and he spent the rest of his life in relative obscurity, his commissions for portraits so few and so poorly compensated that he gave many away. His reputation was largely posthumous; the 20th century has placed The Gross Clinic among the ten or twenty greatest American paintings.