Thomas Eakins that was often as tender as it was vigorous, and to have preserved for us the essence of an American life which, indeed, he did not idealize—because it seemed to him beautiful beyond the necessity of idealization. Thomas Eakins Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916) was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important artists in American art history. For the length of his professional career, from the early 1870s until his health began to fail some 40 years later, Eakins worked exactingly
Conservation-restoration of Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic completed in 2008 by the Philadelphia Museum of Art's sale of "Cowboy Singing" and two oil sketches of "Cowboys in the Badlands" and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts sale of "The Cello Player," all works by Eakins. The first recorded conservation-restoration treatment to "The Gross Clinic" took place sometime in 1915 by restorer T. H. Stevenson at the behest of Jefferson Medical College. The canvas on which "The Gross Clinic" was painted had become weak and brittle and was lined with a new piece of linen. A 1916 issue of "The Jeffersonian" noted that Stevenson cleaned and treated