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 exhibition "An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing "The Gross Clinic" Anew", which ran from July 3, 2010 to January 9, 2011. The theme of the exhibition was "Then and Now", an homage to the famed and nearly two hour long lecture by Dr. Samuel D. Gross, "Then and Now: Advances in Medical Science in the Past Forty Years: a Discourse Introductory to the Forty-third Course of Lectures in the Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia". The first gallery was in the style of a salon, with "The Gross Clinic" presented in the middle, flanked by "The Agnew Clinic" and "Professor Benjamin