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 the painting. At some point between 1917 and 1925 a treatment of the painting took place that dramatically altered the composition of the painting. It is not known who worked on the painting or when. A comparison of a photograph of the painting taken in October 1917 for the "Loan Exhibition of the Works of Thomas Eakins" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a reproduction of the painting that appeared as the frontispiece of Jefferson Medical College's 1925 yearbook show major differences in the relative tones of the painting, indicating a major restoration in which paint was removed. The