Thomas Eakins

Born: Philadelphia, PA, 25 July 1844

Died: Philadelphia, PA, 25 June 1916

Nationality: American


Works by this Artist

Gross Clinic
Thomas Eakins, 1875

Background

Son of a Scottish-Irish weaver

Studies

Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1862)

With Jean-Léon Gérôme at Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1866-69, Paris)

With sculptor Augustin-Alexandre Dumont

With portrait painter Léon Bonnat

Career

1870 - Returns to Philadelphia after studying in Europe

1876 - Gross Clinic rejected from Centennial Exposition, but Dr Gross sponsors its exhibition in a medical pavilion

1882 - Becomes Director of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

1884 - Assists Eadweard Muybridge in motion studies at the University of Pennsylvania

1886 - Forced to resign as Director of Pennsylvania Academy

1889 - Commissioned to paint the Agnew Clinic by graduating class of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School

1901 - Wins prize at Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY

1904 - Wins prize at Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis, MO

1917 - Wemorial exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)

Travels:

Paris (1866-69); Spain (1869-70); Dakota Territory (1886)

Commissions from

1889 - Graduating class of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School

Important Artworks

The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake, 1873 (Cleveland Museum of Art)

The Swimming Hole, 1884-85 (Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth)

The Agnew Clinic, 1889 (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

Web Resources:

Metmuseum: Eakins

smarthistory: Eakins, Gross Clinic

Readings:

Doyle, Jennifer. “Sex, Scandal, and Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic,” Representations, no. 68 (Autumn 1999): 1-33

Foster, Kathleen A. and Cheryl Leibold, eds., Writing About Eakins: The Manuscripts in Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989

Fried, Michael. Realism, Writing, and Disfiguration in Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic, with a Postscript on Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces, Representations, no. 9 (Winter 1985): 33-104, Representations, no. 9 (Winter 1985): 33-104

Hendricks, Gordon. “Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 51, no. 1 (March 1969): 57-64

Johns, Elizabeth. Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983

Werbel, Amy Beth. Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007

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