Painter Thomas Eakins Brought Into Focus

In his illustrious monumental picture, “The Gross Clinic” (1875), Thomas Eakins invented a new kind of painting. We still have no word for it, probably because the canvas remains a singular example.

Partly it’s a portrait. Eakins establishes an elaborate, illuminating context for the depiction of Dr. Samuel D. Gross, author, inventor, surgeon and celebrated teacher at Philadelphia’s Jefferson Medical College. Partly it’s a genre scene. Building on precedents from Dutch art, he unfolds a riveting and realistic portrayal of everyday life at medical school.

And partly it’s a contemporary history painting, in the manner of the French Academy. (Eakins had gone to Paris in 1869 and studied with Jean-Leon Gerome.) The current practice of medical science gets elevated to near-mythic proportions, with the scalpel-wielding doctor gravely rendered as an Olympian god or Old Testament prophet, towering above lesser mortals in the arena. “The Gross Clinic” is something more, though--something strange yet revealing about its 31-year-old author. Eakins spent nearly a year preparing this picture for exhibition at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, an event that he knew could be critically important to a young artist’s career. It’s as if he were painting a manifesto. With science as its subject, it articulates his artistic faith. In the great and absorbing Eakins retrospective now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the ambitious picture emerges as something akin to a thinly veiled self-portrait.

Dr. Gross is shown emerging from the austere darkness, famously illuminated at two specific points: high on his regal forehead, which is crowned with the white hair of age that signifies wisdom; and, at the sensitive fingers of his right hand, glistening with fresh blood while gently cradling the knife. Head and hand are consecrated with light. In the darkly shrouded operating theater, the only other area that’s brightly lit is the site of the surgical procedure over which the solemn Dr. Gross presides. There the anonymous patient’s naked buttocks are ignominiously exposed. Two attending physicians hold him down. Two others assist the surgery. One probes the long incision carefully cut into the patient’s thigh, like a secular Doubting Thomas testing the truth of a scientific age.

Dr. Gross portrayed in the surgical arena becomes a metaphor of the artist in his studio, the painter’s loaded brush replaced by the physician’s bloody scalpel. Each implement is a tool of modern inquiry, deftly wielded in a concentrated effort to peel back secrets hidden within humanity. Yet the private arena is also a public one, where an audience demonstration is underway; it’s not unlike the Centennial Exhibition, where scores of international artists would assemble to show their stuff. If you thought you knew the paintings of Thomas Eakins, the most profoundly moving artist America produced before the Modern era, this exhibition will probably change your mind. Curator Darrel Sewell and his colleagues have marshaled the resources of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, repository for the finest collection anywhere of Eakins’ work, and they’ve expanded our understanding of the artist in myriad ways.

It’s a beautifully orchestrated show. “The Gross Clinic” is installed across from Eakins’ depiction from the following year of a fellow artist, sculptor William Rush, hard at work in his studio creating an allegory. “William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuykill River” is shown with numerous pencil studies, oil sketches, wax models and other preparatory works--the extensive “surgical dissection” essential to knowing his artistic subject. An inescapable conceptual link between the two pictures is deftly made. Nearby, two 1881 genre scenes of fishermen up the ante another notch. “Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River” and the exquisite “Mending the Nets” are shown with numerous photographs. Eakins had acquired a camera the summer before, and he immediately began to use his photographs as studies in the preparation of paintings.

Everything from the graceful, feathery tree that rises above the fastidious net-menders to the geese that wander idly in the foreground turn up as subjects in the extensive photographs Eakins took at the site. You have a sense of the camera-wielding artist casting his own net over the scene, carefully gathering up diverse elements, fragment by fragment, in an effort to get at the truth of his depiction. Sometimes, though, pictures taken elsewhere were cannibalized and inserted into a new context, almost in the manner of a collage. Two little girls with bobbed hair, photographed with Eakins’ sister and their mother on a city rooftop, turn up in the verdant riverside landscape of “Mending the Nets.” In the photographs the girls are minding mommy, but in the painting they’re intently watching the fishermen go about their exacting repairs.

That Eakins had a serious interest in photography and used photographs in the composition of paintings is well known. He owned a set of published prints of animal locomotion studies made by Eadweard Muybridge, which he turned into lantern slides for teaching purposes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts. The positions of the four horses’ legs in his 1879 painting, “A May Morning in the Park,” had been calculated from the Muybridge studies, and the painting is shown here with the small bronze models of the horses Eakins made from them. A 1997 exhibition focused specifically on Eakins’ camera work. The current show explains the myriad ways Eakins used photographs in his painting. Sometimes they were a memory aid, sometimes a general guide to drawing. Elsewhere he appears to have reproduced an image onto canvas by the standard method of the transfer grid.

The show’s most dramatic revelation, explained with clarity in the excellent catalog, is that Eakins sometimes projected photographs directly onto his canvas or paper and traced the figures with pencil or stylus. The relative size and placement of figures, the length of a skirt or the bend of an elbow could be calibrated and readjusted throughout the painting process. However, Eakins was hardly a 19th century photo-realist. He wasn’t attempting to duplicate the photographic surface or explore camera vision. He was embracing the camera as a modern tool of analysis--not unlike Dr. Gross’ industrially honed scalpel--which could serve the visual purposes of painting.

For Eakins, those purposes increasingly became allied with something the Gross portrait, however bold and magnificent, could only imply. From the 1880s to about 1912, when ill health forced him to cease work (he died in 1917), his most compelling paintings were driven by the complex interior life of human beings. His portraiture, typically featuring a single figure shown in splendid isolation against a stark field of brushy grays and ochre, went far beyond the capture of an outward likeness in the world. Rather, Eakins’ genius was to regard American portraiture in a new way, as the depiction of sentience--the responsive consciousness of an individual soul. In the full-length figure of his in-law, Louis Kenton, Eakins shows the man standing with his head bowed and his hands tucked into his vest pockets. He occupies a field of radiant ochre, where small shifts in tone, a few spare lines and a thin shadow are all there is to articulate the space.

Like Velazquez, whose work he had studied closely during his European sojourn three decades before, Eakins smudges the darkly silhouetted figure’s contours, slightly dissolving the man into the atmospheric light. Only at the bright, white shirt collar does the picture suddenly get a razor-sharp focus, creating a stark frame for the fragile pink flesh tones of Kenton’s down-turned face. The brooding 1900 picture has been aptly nicknamed “The Thinker,” which shifts the focus away from a representation of the outer world to the workings of an inner life. The name change is unnecessary, though, to convey its principal quality as a portrait of sentient life. At once particular and abstract, the portrait is profoundly modern.

It’s worth noting that Eakins’ achievement came at a time when Philadelphia was in decline and New York was on the rise as the competitive center of American art. It’s as if Philadelphia’s twilight nurtured Eakins’ introspection. With devastating portraits of his wife, Susan Macdowell; family friends Maud Cook and Mary Adeline Williams; student Amelia C. Van Buren; painter Henry Osawa Tanner and many others, Eakins opened the widest door to 20th century art of any American painter.

“Thomas Eakins: American Realist,” Philadelphia Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th St., (215) 763-8100, through Jan. 6. Closed Monday.