I’ve become obsessed with Thomas Eakins’s “The Gross Clinic.” Let me show you why.
I’ve become obsessed with Thomas Eakins’s “The Gross Clinic.” Let me show you why.
Taking Lessons From a Bloody Masterpiece
ByJason FaragoMay 28, 2020
Maybe you’ve felt what I’ve felt lately: a certain skepticism of the idea of art as a source of solace.
But who said art should be an escape, a comfort, a barbiturate? Art’s tougher and mightier than that — and for some of the greatest painters of the past, the stuff of art resided in the gory mess of real life.
These last two months I’ve grown obsessed with one American painting: a bloody masterpiece of pain and healing, made in Philadelphia nearly a century and a half ago. Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) was still a young artist when he completed “The Gross Clinic,” an in-action, up-to-the-minute depiction of the vanguard of American medicine that feels particularly relevant right now.
Eight feet tall, “The Gross Clinic” makes a hero of its central surgeon. But the painting has none of the mythmaking of earlier portraiture. Instead, the artist plunges us into the bloody reality of the operating theater, and paints in a frank, even ruthless new style that foregrounds the bare facts of illness and healing.
Critics trashed it when it was first exhibited, and Eakins had to sell it for a pittance. You want to know what The Times said? “So dreadful that the public may be well excused if it turn away in horror.”
Now “The Gross Clinic” is celebrated as one of the most important paintings in American art history. Why such hatred then, and why such praise now? Let me try to show you, detail by detail.
Look first at our protagonist, Samuel Gross: surgeon, educator and author of the leading medical textbook of the age. See the way he leans, almost like a ship’s captain on a choppy sea? And notice what he’s wearing: a heavy, blood-caked frock coat. (Scrubs are still years away.)
His head is crowned with a halo of kinked white hair. Check out the hard contrast between the hair and the space behind him. He’s bathing in the illumination of what I guess is a skylight. He’s a beacon of knowledge in the darkened theater.
A scalpel rests in his right hand, which he holds to the ready even though he’s stepped back from the operation. Gross is gripping the instrument as dexterously as a paintbrush. Surgery, like art, was a matter of the brain and the body.
No gloves. The blood stains his meaty fingers. Get close and you can see how it’s seeped even into the nail bed of his right thumb.
But of course this isn’t blood; it’s red oil. Eakins’s realism has reduced the distinction between flesh and paint to almost nothing.
And the painted body in pain, which artists had depicted in all sorts of saints’ tortures, becomes as immediate as a real flesh wound.
Our gazes are quickly drawn from the heroic doctor to the body on the table: faceless, helpless, gushing blood. Male or female, old or young? I can’t tell — Eakins has left a strange, scary absence at the picture’s heart. The face is obscured under an ether-drenched cloth: not the most advanced form of anesthesia, but way better than nothing.
You can see the same careful dyeing of the nail beds of Gross’s chief assistant. And blood flecks the white sleeve and gray jacket of another assistant, who’s holding the clamp that exposes the wound.
The patient is suffering from an infected femur, an ailment dismayingly common in 19th-century America. At the time, doctors often just hacked off the blighted limb. Gross is lecturing the audience on how to extract necrotic bone — a new technique that would put an end to the butchery of premodern surgery.
With a little patience and some precise excisions, amputation could be avoided. And for Eakins, who signed his name on the operating table, this precision was a virtue common to both science and art.
It might look painful. It might lack poetry. But there was a grandeur in this sort of exactitude, and a conviction that progress was underway.
To Gross’s side is the only woman in the amphitheater. She wears a black shift with a starchy collar, but she’s shielded her face from us. I can’t tell her age any better than I can the patient’s.
Do you think she’s the patient’s mother? Not unlikely: In the 19th century, family members had to sit in on surgeries, and consent to the most gruesome steps.
You can guess what Eakins meant by including her here: a cipher of feminine emotions, set in contrast to Gross’s masculine enlightenment. And maybe, from 145 years’ distance, you want to dismiss her as a stereotype.
But look how tightly she claws her left hand. It’s a grip of concentration, of self-mastery. She is struggling to look, but still here, overawed.
These two hands, his and hers. One clawed, one bloodstained. They complement each other like an Eakins manifesto.
So much of the greatness of “The Gross Clinic” lies here: between the fact of pain and the desire for knowledge, between the gore of surgery and the sublimity of art.
Eakins wasn’t the first artist to take an interest in surgical instruction, which was taught in open amphitheaters until the introduction of aseptic techniques. Painters of the Renaissance obsessed over anatomy, and doctors invited them in.
An evident forerunner is “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp,” painted by the young Rembrandt in 1632; we see a leading Amsterdam surgeon as he grips the muscles of a dead man’s forearm.
By Eakins’s time, Philadelphia had become a capital of medical innovation, and surgery could be a public spectacle. The artist developed friendships with doctors in the city, and he frequented the lessons of surgeons like Gross — as well as D. Hayes Agnew, photographed here.
Eakins would paint him a decade later in “The Agnew Clinic.” He saw these doctors as avatars of progress, men of a new age. Yet when he translated their achievements into art, it caused an uproar.
Eakins studied anatomy, not just art, in Philadelphia and Paris. He taught the subject at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, along with drawing.
He encouraged his art students to attend dissections. He also had them pose nude, in mixed company, for life drawing and for the camera. Big, big scandal in 19th-century Philadelphia. It would cost him his academic post.
But what really shocked people? It wasn’t the bare flesh: nudes were all over the museum and the gallery. The problem was his realism. He had brought painting out of myth and history, and into the arena of contemporary life. The flesh was suppurating. The paint was blood itself.
It was another kind of scandal: a scandal about showing what shouldn’t be shown, about looking directly at what should only be seen from a distance. And to the grandees of Philly, it was intolerable.
It was one thing to make studies from medical observation — as well as from photography, a new technology Eakins obsessed over. But to translate those studies directly into art, without adornment, was untenable.
In “The Gross Clinic,” there are four sharp objects in use: Two scalpels.
Two pencils. One belongs to this stenographer, jotting down Gross’s lesson for posterity.
The other pencil is harder to see. It’s at the extreme right edge of the painting, in the hand of one of the spectators, sitting in shadow. The young man is looking down at the bloody scene, and he won’t flinch.
It’s Eakins: a little over 30, hair still full and thick. His eyes, if we can make them out, seem trained on Gross. His pencil is a near replica of Gross’s scalpel.
To be an artist, Eakins proposed in 1875, means looking without sentiment at the blunt facts of life and death. Even if it costs you your reputation; even if it costs you your job.
It is a vision of progress in which art and medicine have common aims. But when you wield your paintbrush like a scalpel, you have to be prepared for the blood.
Images: Thomas Eakins, via Philadelphia Museum of Art; Rembrandt van Rijn, via Mauritshuis, The Hague; George Chambers, via University of Pennsylvania Archives; Thomas Eakins, via University of Pennsylvania Art Collection.Produced by Gabriel Gianordoli and Alicia DeSantis.
Produced by Gabriel Gianordoli and Alicia DeSantis.