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 Conservation-restoration of Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic The conservation-restoration of Thomas Eakins' "The Gross Clinic" refers to the on-going conservation-restoration treatments of American painter Thomas Eakins' 1875 painting "The Gross Clinic" throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. These treatments are a testament to the changing methodologies undertaken in the field of paintings conservation. The painting portrays surgeon Dr. Samuel D. Gross performing a surgical debridement on a boy with osteomyelitis of the femur for an audience of students in his clinic at Jefferson Medical College. The painting was subject to several conservation-restoration treatments both prior to Eakins' death and in