The Gross Clinic, 1875 Thomas Eakins (1844-1916)
Location: Philadelphia Museum of Art Pennsylvania USAOriginal Size: 243.8 x 198.1 cm
A Glimpse into Our Studio: Creating Museum-Quality Oil Painting Reproductions
Watch a video showcasing the creation of a hand-painted reproduction of The Gross Clinic by Thomas Eakins in our TOPofART studio. Witness the step-by-step process as our artists bring this masterpiece to life.
Oil Painting Reproduction
If you want a different size than the offered
Description
Painted by European Аrtists with Academic Education
Museum Quality
+ 4 cm (1.6") Margins for Stretching
Creation Time: 8-9 Weeks
Creation Process
We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.
We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.
High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Thomas Eakins also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.
In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.
TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.
We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.
You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.
Delivery
Once the painting The Gross Clinic is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.
We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.
After adding your artwork to the shopping cart, you will be able to check the delivery price using the Estimate Shipping and Tax tool.
Museum Quality
The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.
Additional Information
Admired for its uncompromising realism, "The Gross Clinic" has an important place documenting the history of medicine both because it honors the emergence of surgery as a healing profession (previously, surgery was associated primarily with amputation), and because it shows us what the surgical theater looked like in the nineteenth century. The painting is based on a surgery witnessed by Eakins, in which Gross treated a young man for osteomyelitis of the femur. Gross is pictured here performing a conservative operation as opposed to an amputation (which is how the patient would normally have been treated in previous decades). Here, surgeons crowd around the anesthetized patient in their frock coats. This is just prior to the adoption of a hygienic surgical environment. "The Gross Clinic" is thus often contrasted with Eakins's later painting "The Agnew Clinic", which depicts a cleaner, brighter, surgical theater. In comparing the two, we see the advancement in our understanding of the prevention of infection.
Interestingly, the sex of the patient is not established by anything concrete in the painting itself. This fact makes "The Gross Clinic" somewhat unique, as it presents the spectator with a body that is naked and exposed, and yet is not entirely legible as male or female. Another intriguing element of this painting is the lone woman in the painting, seen in the middle ground of the painting, cringing in distress. She can be read as a female relative of the patient, acting as a chaperone. Her dramatic figure functions as a strong contrast to the calm, professional demeanor of the men who surround the patient. This bloody and very blunt depiction of surgery was shocking at the time it was first exhibited, and remains so for many viewers of the painting today.
Critical reception
The painting was submitted for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, but was rejected. When it was eventually displayed, a critic for the New York Tribune wrote that it was "one of the most powerful, horrible, yet fascinating pictures that has been painted anywhere in this century... but the more one praises it, the more one must condemn its admission to a gallery where men and women of weak nerves must be compelled to look at it, for not to look at it is impossible." Controversy about the painting has centered on its violence, and on the melodramatic presence of the woman. Contemporary scholars have suggested that the painting may be read in terms of castration anxiety and fantasies of mastery over the body (e.g. Michael Fried), and that it documents Eakins's ambivalence about representing sex difference (e.g. Jennifer Doyle). The painting has also been understood to be drawing an analogy between painting and surgery and as identifying the work of the artist with the emergence of surgery as a respected profession.
In 2002 an art critic for The New York Times called it "hands down, the finest 19th-century American painting." In 2006, in response to the impending sale of this painting, The New York Times published a "close reading" which sketches some of the different critical perspectives on this work of art.
Provenance
After its purchase for $200 at the time of the Centennial Exhibition, the painting was housed in the College Building of Jefferson Medical College, Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia until it was moved in the mid-1980s to Jefferson Alumni Hall. On November 11, 2006, the Thomas Jefferson University Board voted to sell the painting for $68 million to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, now under construction in Bentonville, Arkansas. The sale would represent a record price for an artwork made in the United States prior to World War II.
The proposed sale was seen as a secretive act that many from Philadelphia believed betrayed the city's cultural legacy. In late November 2006, efforts began to keep the painting in Philadelphia, including a fund with a December 26 deadline to raise money to purchase it and a plan to invoke a clause regarding "historic objects" in the city's historic preservation code. In a matter of weeks the fund raised $30 million, and on December 21, 2006, Wachovia Bank agreed to loan the difference until the rest of the money has been raised, keeping the painting in town at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
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