Thomas Eakins’ Philadelphia
September 2007
When “The Gross Clinic” was unveiled in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Fairmount Park,
viewers and critics were horrified by its bloody scalpel and open wound. Jefferson alumni purchased it for $200 and gave it to the college, where it remained tucked away until Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton (in partnership with the National Gallery of Art) attempted to buy it last year for her new Crystal Bridges museum in Arkansas. The news met with outrage. Some 3,400 people donated $68 million to keep the painting in Philadelphia.
You will find “The Gross Clinic” at the Academy through June 2008, between an evocative portrait of Walt Whitman, photographs (including a few by Eakins) of Eakins’ classes and anatomical casts and models he used to teach students there for a decade. After June, the painting moves to the PMA, between the Agnew Clinic and the remarkable portrait of Dr. Benjamin Howard Rand, pensively reading while stroking his cat. Dr. Rand will relocate to Arkansas in 2009. (Walton did not go away empty-handed.) One benefit of this recent flurry of sales was to centralize the city’s Eakins holdings.
The academy now proudly displaying “The Gross Clinic” actually forced Eakins to resign in 1886, after he caused a scandal by removing the loincloth from a male model during a women’s drawing class. Eakins was a revered but controversial teacher who believed in a scientific approach to art, insisting that his students photograph and paint each other nude and dissect cadavers to learn anatomy. They also dissected horses, cows and, on one occasion, a lion that died at the Philadelphia Zoo. Their casts of disintegrating body parts are displayed at both the Academy and the PMA. After his dismissal, Eakins fell into a depression and stopped painting for a couple of years. After his death his widow left the bulk of his estate to the PMA.
Built in 1862 and now containing an inn with five restaurants, the Union League has an art collection that was long restricted to members or guests but tours of the 189 art works displayed throughout the regal French Renaissance building on Broad Street now can be arranged by appointment. Eakins scored his first major commission from the Union League: a painting of its then-president, Rutherford B. Hayes. Members where dismayed by the portrait he produced of a flushed, perspiring Hayes—the chief executive was a well-known teetotaler—and the painting soon vanished, never to be seen again. Eakins scholar Kathleen Foster, curator of American Art at the PMA, has long hoped the portrait would turn up someday. “If it wasn’t destroyed, it seems likely it would be here somewhere,” says Union League curator David Cassedy. “The Union League has a lot of attics.” Until it does turn up, however, you won’t find any Eakins works among the many political portraits.
Eakins’ fascination with science and technology led him to experiment with photography, first by secretly projecting images onto his canvases, and ultimately as an end in itself, using a stop-motion camera he invented. You will occasionally find examples of his early experiments in rotating photography exhibits in the new extension of the PMA opening this month in a renovated Art Deco building across the street. Though the museum won’t have any Eakins works up in September, visitors can schedule an appointment to see anything from storage that’s not on view, says Foster.
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The Water Works with the Philadelphia Museum of Art |
You will find “The Gross Clinic” at the Academy through June 2008, between an evocative portrait of Walt Whitman, photographs (including a few by Eakins) of Eakins’ classes and anatomical casts and models he used to teach students there for a decade. After June, the painting moves to the PMA, between the Agnew Clinic and the remarkable portrait of Dr. Benjamin Howard Rand, pensively reading while stroking his cat. Dr. Rand will relocate to Arkansas in 2009. (Walton did not go away empty-handed.) One benefit of this recent flurry of sales was to centralize the city’s Eakins holdings.
The academy now proudly displaying “The Gross Clinic” actually forced Eakins to resign in 1886, after he caused a scandal by removing the loincloth from a male model during a women’s drawing class. Eakins was a revered but controversial teacher who believed in a scientific approach to art, insisting that his students photograph and paint each other nude and dissect cadavers to learn anatomy. They also dissected horses, cows and, on one occasion, a lion that died at the Philadelphia Zoo. Their casts of disintegrating body parts are displayed at both the Academy and the PMA. After his dismissal, Eakins fell into a depression and stopped painting for a couple of years. After his death his widow left the bulk of his estate to the PMA.
Built in 1862 and now containing an inn with five restaurants, the Union League has an art collection that was long restricted to members or guests but tours of the 189 art works displayed throughout the regal French Renaissance building on Broad Street now can be arranged by appointment. Eakins scored his first major commission from the Union League: a painting of its then-president, Rutherford B. Hayes. Members where dismayed by the portrait he produced of a flushed, perspiring Hayes—the chief executive was a well-known teetotaler—and the painting soon vanished, never to be seen again. Eakins scholar Kathleen Foster, curator of American Art at the PMA, has long hoped the portrait would turn up someday. “If it wasn’t destroyed, it seems likely it would be here somewhere,” says Union League curator David Cassedy. “The Union League has a lot of attics.” Until it does turn up, however, you won’t find any Eakins works among the many political portraits.
Eakins’ fascination with science and technology led him to experiment with photography, first by secretly projecting images onto his canvases, and ultimately as an end in itself, using a stop-motion camera he invented. You will occasionally find examples of his early experiments in rotating photography exhibits in the new extension of the PMA opening this month in a renovated Art Deco building across the street. Though the museum won’t have any Eakins works up in September, visitors can schedule an appointment to see anything from storage that’s not on view, says Foster.
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