Volume 54, Number 5 · March 29, 2007
Three Ways of Looking at Thomas Eakins
By Christopher Benfey
Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist
by Henry Adams
Oxford University Press, 583 pp., $40.00
The Revenge of Thomas Eakins
by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick
Yale University Press, 565 pp., $39.95
Portrait: The Life of Thomas Eakins
by William S. McFeely
Norton, 237 pp., $26.95
On November 10, 2006, Thomas Jefferson University, a medical school in Philadelphia, announced its intention to sell The Gross Clinic, a painting by Thomas Eakins, for $68 million. For an artist who once complained that his only honors were 'misunderstanding, persecution, & neglect,' the price alone might have seemed an act of restitution. Eakins painted The Gross Clinic in 1875 at the age of thirty; widely regarded as one of the greatest American works of art, it has lost none of its power. It depicts Dr. Samuel Gross, a distinguished surgeon who taught at the university's Jefferson Medical College, pausing during a surgical procedure, a bloody scalpel in his blood-drenched fingers, to address an audience of medical students. Four assistants attend to the patient, a young man whose left buttock and thigh, with an open incision, are exposed to view. One holds etherized gauze over the patient's face. In a lower corner, a diminutive woman with clawlike hands shields her eyes in horror from the gory spectacle. Among the students, Eakins has painted a shadowy portrait of himself, dispassionately taking notes.
Review, 4637 words
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