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 hall leading out of the amphitheater was considerably lighter; Dr. Samuel W. Gross and orderly Hughey O'Donnell originally appeared lighter than the background. The majority of the painting now had a considerably redder tone. Thomas Eakins' widow, Susan Macdowell Eakins, upon seeing the 1925 reproduction and thinking the changes had been made for the reproduction rather than to the painting itself, strongly objected to its release. A letter from Eakins to Jefferson Medical College Dean Ross V. Patterson details her frustrations: The next recorded treatment of the painting took place in 1940 was by Philadelphia restorer Hannah Mee Horner, at