About this work
At the center of this monumental canvas stands Dr. Samuel D. Gross, a seventy-year-old professor in a black frock coat, mid-lecture before a group of Jefferson Medical College students.
Bright red blood colors the surgeon's fingers and scalpel, and the gaping incision is fascinating, repulsive, and confusing because it is so hard to read the position of the patient's body.
To the left, a seated woman — possibly the patient's mother — turns away from the scene and shields her face in horror.
In contrast, Gross embodies the confidence that comes from knowledge and experience. The palette is overwhelmingly dark — deep ochres, blacks, and shadowed flesh — with the amphitheater's raking overhead light falling squarely on Gross's silver head and bloodied hand, drawing the eye to the esteemed lecturer as light and composition conspire together.
Eakins placed a self-portrait at the right-hand edge of the painting, next to the tunnel railing, his white-cuffed sleeve bent over a sketchbook — the painter as embedded witness, not detached observer.
Eakins created this work early in his career after returning from his studies in Paris, and exhibited this large-scale canvas at the Philadelphia 1876 Centennial as a means to showcase his talents.
Through the painting, Eakins hoped to honor the scientific breakthroughs coming out of the local Jefferson Medical College.
Considered too gruesome by the Centennial's art jury, *The Gross Clinic* was moved to a nearby model U.S. Army field hospital exhibition. The rejection proved a kind of prophecy: admired for its uncompromising realism, the painting has an important place documenting the history of medicine — both because it honors the emergence of surgery as a healing profession, and because it shows us what the surgical theater looked like in the nineteenth century.
The scene evokes Rembrandt's art-historical precedent, *The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp* (1632) , though Eakins's version is rawer, more American, and unmistakably alive. It is today widely considered the greatest American painting ever made.
In 2007, 3,600 donors from all fifty states helped purchase the work so that it could remain in Philadelphia, exhibited in alternation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
As a fine art print, *The Gross Clinic* commands a room rather than decorating one. Its near-
