Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross, more commonly referred to as The Gross Clinic, is a painting with a history.

The painting is regarded as the masterpiece in the oeuvre of Thomas Eakins, who was in turn considered the greatest American painter of his time. The painting has been described as the most important American painting of the 19th Century.

It is a dramatic, large scale canvas, 8ft by 6½ft (240x200cm), showing the pioneering surgeon lecturing students as he performs an operation. Among the recognizable figures portrayed is a self-portrait of Eakins, who sits, sketching or writing, to the right of the tunnel railing (above, bottom right).

The young Eakins, who while a student at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts had also studied anatomy at Jefferson Medical College where Dr. Gross taught, wanted to create a grand canvas, perhaps partially to cement his reputation as an artist, in what may be seen as a homage to Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp; but also, it has been suggested, to compare the role of an artist with that of a physician, both of which were emerging as more respected professions at the time.

Eakins spent a year on the canvas; reportedly, he badgered the retired Dr. Gross so often for additional sittings that the latter found the painter supremely annoying.

Eakins was hoping to exhibit the painting at the important Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, but it was rejected by the Committee of Selection. It was eventually displayed in another part of the Exposition, in Ward One of the U.S. Army Post Hospital, representatives of the Medical College having pulled strings as they felt the painting improved the image and status of the school.

General reception was the the painting was artistically strong, striking in its realism, but inappropriate and graphic in subject matter; a critic for the New York Tribune describing it as: ‘… one of the most powerful, horrible, yet fascinating pictures that has been painted anywhere in this century..”. The reaction from the public was perhaps anticipated by Eakins’ portrayal of a woman covering her face in revulsion in the painting’s left foreground.

At the end of the Centennial, in 1878, the Alumni Association of Jefferson Medical College purchased the painting for $200 (perhaps roughly $3,000 in current dollars) and donated it to Jefferson Medical College (now Thomas Jefferson University), with the intention that the portrait of their teacher and mentor would be a permanent part of the cultural legacy of the school.

In 2006, a lazy and arrogant board of directors of Thomas Jefferson University decided it was their privilege to sell off part of the cultural heritage of the school, and the city of Philadelphia, rather than sully their delicate hands with the actual work of fundraising.

To this end, they connived a secretive deal with Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, as part of her corporate raider style acquisition of works from financially weakened institutions from various cities to stock her ego monument, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas. (Not the most art collections didn’t start as ego monuments of rich people.) In the attempt to surreptitiously remove the Gross Clinic from Philadelphia, they were shamefully aided by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. which would have shared ownership of the work.

Fortunately, news of the board’s machinations leaked and the impending deal flared into scandal as Jefferson students and alumni, the city and its arts community mounted opposition, and eventually, though the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, mounted a $68 million fundraising campaign to keep the painting in Philadelphia.

This was at the cost of the Academy having to sell off Eakins’ The Cello Player (also here) to an unidentified buyer (a painting I personally liked more than the Gross Clinic, though not considered nearly as important), and the PMA having to sell (or “deaccession”, to use the current weird euphemism for museums selling off art) Eakins’ Cowboy Singing and two Eakins sketches.

For more, see my posts from the time, Eakins’ The Gross Clinic – held for ransom? and The Continuing Saga of the Thomas Eakins Gross Clinic Art-as-Commodity Scandal.

The Gross Clinic is now part of a special exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Museum, centering on it’s recent restoration.

In addition to other indignities, The Gross Clinic has been subjected over time to several disastrous attempts at “restoration” (out of five overall). These were often performed by perhaps well intentioned individuals who lacked a knowledge of Eakins’ appraoch and technique, as well as the aesthetics of his time.

The worst was a “cleaning” sometime between 1917 and 1925, in which an attempt to “brighten” the painting removed several layers of Eakins’ glazed color, unbalancing the painting’s deep chiaroscuro and changing the overall nature of the image. In 1940 a restorer attached two pieces of plywood to the back of the canvas, ostensibly to “stabilize” it, resulting in straining of the canvas as the plywood warped.

In 2008 the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts undertook and assessment, and in 2009 a modern restoration project, in which the painting was in the hands of knowledgeable restorers and Eakins experts. This has led to a number of articles and reviews with headlines in which The Gross Clinic is described as being “in surgery” or “operated on”. (I have of course refrained from such silliness, mainly because they beat me to it.)

The conservators were faced with the challenge of restoring areas of paint that had been removed by previous hands, and rebalancing the color of the painting to Eakin’s original intentions. In this effort they were armed, fortunately, with a photograph of the painting prior to the first cleaning, along with a preliminary color sketch and an monochromatic version (a collotype) by the artist. The most important factor, however, is probably their deep understanding of Eakins, his works and original techniques.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has several web pages devoted to the exhibition, An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing The Gross Clinic Anew, the conservation project and the painting itself.

The exhibition, which includes the preliminary color sketch and a later painting by Eakins of a similar subject, The Agnew Clinic (also here), to which The Gross Clinic is often compared, runs to January 9, 2011.

Hopefully this is one of the brighter chapters in the painting’s eventful history.

Garlands of fruits, rendered with softly psychedelic colors; twisted networks of wiry limbs and roots, framed by lush tropical plants, luminous in distant mist; topographical cornucopias of formal gardens, resplendent on the surface of a globe, itself set in a magical walled garden; fruit laced bowers sheltering asexual twins; glowing indoor showers of jeweled raindrops; flaming chandeliers hanging from trompe l’oeil ceilings in baroque drawing rooms, an adolescent boy lifting a folded carpet of landscape amid a netting of captured momentos; and a rope mesh dress with flowing skirts made of small game animals and fruits; these are some of the lushly painted items, signs and symbols that make up Julie Heffernan’s “Self Portraits”.

The Illinois born, Brooklyn based artist names many of her works as such, “Self Portrait as Big World”, “Self Portrait as Broken Home”, “Self Portrait as Animal Bed” and “Self Portrait as Fabulous Droppings”; others are part of a sequence with more direct names, “Tender Trapper”, “Boy in Flight” and “Budding Boy”; but the sense of enigma, hidden meaning waiting to be sought out, and the elaborate Baroque meets Magic Realism detail of her compositions is common to all.

Heffernan’s paintings carry echoes of the Early Renaissance, Botecelli, Bruegel and Bosch, along with the more overt stylings of 17th Century Baroque painting and the profusion of shapes, colors and patterns with which the Baroque style gave meaning to our contemporary use of the word.

These are mixed with the dream state juxtapositions of the Surrealists, by which I don’t so much mean Dali and Magriette, as Ernst, Tanning and Tanguy; and the intensely chromatic rendering of contemporary Magic Realism. All of these affections and influences are assembled and woven into a dense and intricate tapestry of styles that becomes uniquely her expression, and by extension, her self portrait within her self portraits.

Heffernan studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz and received her MFA in painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art and Architecture. She is an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University in Upper Montclair, New Jersey. She delivered this year’s commencement address at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Though the artist doesn’t appear to have a dedicated web presence, you can find her work well represented by several galleries, particularly the P-P-O-W Gallery in New York (also here). There is a post on Escape Into Life that features several works large enough to get a quick overview (more here). There is a brief interview with Heffernan on ArtSlant.

Quoted in an article on Montclair State University Insight Online, Heffernan says she seeks out her imagery in the semi-waking state on the edge of sleep in a process she calls “image streaming”. In this she shares some of the true intentions of the Surrealists, who were most interested in inspiration from dreams and the unconscious mind.

(Painting titles above: “Budding Boy”, “Self Portrait as Big World”, “Boy in Flight”, “Self Portrait as Booty”)

Painter Robert J. Barber lists his inspirations as including Joaquín Sorolla, John Singer Sargent and Diego Velázquez (a superb short list); and you can see the influence of the first two in particular in both his figurative and landscape paintings, which emphasize fresh, clear color choices and expressive brushwork.

Personally, I also see echoes of American Impressionists like William Merritt Chase and Theodore Robinson in his direct, colorful and painterly approach.

Landscapes, and notably, townscapes, are the focus of much of Barber’s work. In the examples on his website, which are unfortunately a bit small, his landscapes seem looser and more casual, more likely done en plein air; and the townscapes seem brought to a higher degree of finish as studio paintings (it can also be a matter of scale, Barber doesn’t give dimensions in his online galleries, and I think the townscapes are larger in size).

Barber often chooses views that look down a sidewalk in his town paintings, adding challenges of dramatic perspective to his compositions. His color choices, though rich, are naturalistic; and I particularly like the way he handles the muted tones of overcast days and objects in shadow.

In his website galleries you will also find figurative work and a few still life and interior subjects.

Born in Illinois, Barber grew up in California and now lives in Pennsylvania. He studied Studio Art at the University of California at SantaBarbara and Fine Arts at the Art Center College of Design. He also pursued independent study with painters Ken Auster, Craig Nelson and Dan McCaw.

After 20 years as a freelance illustrator, working for book publishers, movie studios and natural history museums, Barber transitioned into gallery art, garnering awards in several juried shows. He also conducts painting workshops in Maryland other locations.

In addition to the work on his own website, you can find some of his paintings reproduced a bit larger on the Peter McPhee Fine Arts site. There are also works at the McBride Gallery and Susan Calloway Fine Arts.

Barber’s work will be part of a group exhibition at Peter McPhee Fine Arts in Stone Harbor, NJ from August 7 – September 1, 2010, with an opening on August 7 at 7pm.