The Gross Clinic

Thomas Eakins’s Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic) is widely considered the greatest American painting ever made. At the time of its creation and for decades after, though, many deemed the work too gruesome for polite society: the incision in the thigh, the blood on the surgeons’ hands, the patient’s mother recoiling in horror. But even the squeamish critics couldn’t deny Eakins’s unparalleled mastery of composition, detail, and light and shadow.

Eakins painted The Gross Clinic for the city’s Centennial Exhibition of 1876, which drew ten million visitors. In 2007, 3,600 donors from all fifty states helped purchase the work so that it could remain in Philadelphia, to be exhibited for alternating five-year periods at the Philadelphia Art Museum and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Eakins studied and later taught.

Come see this monumental favorite before it leaves the museum in March 2026.