Thomas Eakins 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 from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia. He painted several hundred portraits, usually of friends, family members, or prominent people in the arts, sciences, medicine, and clergy. Taken "en masse", the
Conservation-restoration of Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic surgery at a desk behind Gross. Gross' son Dr. Samuel W. Gross and orderly Hughey O'Donnell can be seen standing in the hall leading out of the amphitheater. A woman, possibly the patient's mother, can be seen recoiling at the bottom right. A self-portrait of Eakins himself can be seen on the right side of the painting, in the front of the theater, taking notes. Work on the painting likely began sometime in April 1875, as evidenced by a letter from Eakins to his friend Earl Shinn in which he declares, "What elates me more is that I have just