The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Thomas Eakins · an oil painting on canvas · an operation in the amphitheatre of Jefferson Medical College: Dr. Samuel D. Gross, standing, turned from the table with a scalpel in his bloodied right hand, assistants at the opened thigh of a patient lying on the side, a woman in black recoiling at the left, students in the dark tiers above · about 244 by 198 cm, an upright of about 1.23 to 1, the foreground figures at or near life size · painted in Philadelphia in 1875 for the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 · owned jointly by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts since 2007 · the one canvas, scored as it now stands, its form whole and its surface restored after abrasion
Mode
Contemporary history painting made as a group portrait: a surgery in progress at life size, in the realist line of the Dutch anatomy pictures and of Spain
Mythos
The master at the altar: a robed man lit from above before a body laid on a table, attended by acolytes in a round theatre of witnesses; the mourning mother at the margin, evoked
Phase
One instant of one operation, the surgeon turned from the wound to the room; painted in Philadelphia in 1875 for the Centennial of 1876
Presentation
Oil on canvas, about 244 by 198 centimetres, upright; the foreground group at or near life size under one high light, the amphitheatre in shadow
Register
Grave and dreadful: clinical calm at the centre, horror at the edge, and the red of the wound the only colour in a brown and black room
Scale
One room, one profession at work, one institution; the nation present by occasion
Governing Proposition
A surgeon has turned from the opened body on the table toward the room, and the scalpel in his hand is red. One light from above falls on his brow, on the hands at the incision and on the wound; the students in the tiers, the clerk at the rail and a woman who covers her face are left in the dark, each placed by how they stand toward the wound. The wager of the painting is that a contemporary surgery, blood and all, can carry the weight of a history painting; that the portrait of a living man at his work can show both the authority of modern knowledge and its price; and that light can rank a whole room by its relation to a body that is opened and has no face.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Thomas Eakins, born in 1844, painted the canvas in Philadelphia in 1875 for the Centennial Exhibition the city held the next year. Its full title is Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic), and it is a portrait of a surgeon at work: an operation in the amphitheatre of Jefferson Medical College, Gross standing at the table and turned from it toward the room, a scalpel in his right hand. The canvas is about 244 by 198 centimetres, an upright of about 1.23 to 1, and the figures of the foreground group are at or near life size. His country was celebrating itself, and he gave it its science at the size of history.
He came to it from Paris, where he had studied under Gérôme and Bonnat, and from Spain, which he visited in 1869 and 1870 for the realism of Ribera and Velázquez. Behind both stood the Dutch anatomy pictures and Rembrandt’s above all, and at home the American portrait of the eminent man. What he made of them was new: a contemporary surgery, with blood and an opened body, painted with the gravity of history painting, and a group portrait in which the sitter’s dignity rests on the wound in front of him. The realist turn was already under way in Paris, and the Dutch precedent is close; the departure is real all the same.
The canvas was not hung in the art galleries of the Centennial. It was shown in the medical section, among the hospital displays, a placing the literature reads as a rejection, and some critics of the time reviewed it as brutal or unfit. In 1878 the alumni of the medical college bought it from the painter for a small sum, and it hung at Jefferson for about 130 years. The stake of the departure was paid, not only risked, and the picture fixed its painter’s name as a difficult realist.
Movement II
Gross stands at the centre of the room in the black of a frock coat, and he has turned his head away from the wound toward the room. That turn is the picture’s act. One high light falls from above and to the left, and it falls first on his brow and on the grey hair it lifts, a head of authority painted as light itself against the black of the amphitheatre. His eyes are in shadow. The calm of the picture is the calm of a man who has finished looking, for the moment.
The head is among the most authoritative painted heads of its century, and it is built on knowledge: Eakins had his anatomy from the dissecting room, and the brow, the hair and the shadowed eyes are made from it. The light is held across a dark field without losing the volume of the room, and it argues. It falls on the mind, at the brow, and on the work, at the hands and the wound, and it leaves the witnesses in the dark. Light ranks knowledge. The black of the coats and the tiers leaves the red of the wound the only colour, and the blood carries what a text would have to say.
At about life size, hung above a standing viewer, the canvas seats the viewer in the lowest tier, close to the table, a student placed to see. What that student sees is an old figure built new: a man robed in black and lit from above, attended by acolytes, before a body laid on a table, in a round theatre of witnesses. It is Rembrandt’s anatomy lesson turned from the dead to the living, and behind it the priest and the sacrifice. The composition does not allude to them; it is them. The particulars stay particular: a named surgeon, a named college, a frock coat, a clerk’s pen, a real disease.
Movement III
At the centre of the canvas, near the viewer’s eye, is the surgeon’s right hand, at rest, holding the scalpel, the fingers bloodied. It is the shock of the work and its most remembered passage. The blood is laid on the fingers with a restraint that makes it worse, and in a brown and black room it is the only red. The authority of the head above is calm because the hand below has done its work, and the price of the calm is held in view.
On the table a young patient lies on the side, the thigh opened, the body foreshortened. The buttocks and the bare leg are what the eye finds first. Assistants hold the incision open with retractors; one bends over the leg; another holds a cloth of anaesthetic over the face, which names what the century had just made possible. The operation is, by the usual account, the removal of dead bone from the femur, a conservative surgery in place of amputation. The retractors, the probe and the blood are the fact the painting will not soften.
The patient has no face. The man who knows is given a face, a brow and the light; the body he works on is anonymous, reduced to a thigh and buttocks. That is the picture’s disclosure: modern knowledge is a public act performed on a private body. It is also its limit. The body is a knot of foreshortening, at the very centre, that generations of viewers have struggled to read, and its confusion interrupts the form where it should be clearest. The readings that find a meaning in its ambiguity of sex, age and posture are open questions, and they do not cancel the cost. The sacrifice the composition builds does not reach into the patient, who remains a body.
Movement IV
At the left a woman in black, by tradition the patient’s mother, recoils with her face covered and one hand clenched. She is the one figure in the room who refuses to look. The one person bound to the patient by love cannot bear to see, and the picture sets her at the edge, in shadow and smaller: the institution has no place for her, and she is there. Without her the canvas shows only authority; with her it shows authority’s cost.
She is also where the picture is weakest. She is smaller in scale and more rhetorical in gesture than the room allows, and her drawing is the weakest in the group. Her grief is theatrical, as if from another genre, at the edge of an otherwise plain idiom, and she is the mourning mother at the margin of a sacrifice, a figure from the Passion called up by gesture more than built. Why she is so small, so theatrical, and so central to the moral of a picture that hides her face is among the questions the canvas still holds open.
One law holds her with the clerk at the rail, who writes calmly at the far side of the room. Everyone is ranked by their relation to the wound: by working, recording, looking, enduring or refusing to look, and the light gives each a share by that relation. The surgeon’s brow, the assistants’ hands, the clerk’s pen, the students’ eyes and the woman’s averted face answer to it; the students in the tiers are a field of dim heads, required as a mass, and the figures in the doorway at the right are atmosphere. The painter himself is in the tiers at the right. Michael Fried’s reading of 1987 made writing, drawing and the scalpel one instrument, and the picture a figure of its own making.
Movement V
The canvas hung at Jefferson for about 130 years, in a medical college’s hall rather than a gallery, until it was sold in 2007 to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which own it jointly; a public campaign in 2006 and 2007 kept it in the city. A cleaning in the earlier twentieth century abraded its glazes and disturbed the balance of dark and light on which its argument rests. A later restoration sought to recover the original tonality, guided by Eakins’s own ink and watercolour replica made for reproduction and by early photographs. Its form is whole: every figure and the composition stand as painted. The abrasion and the repair are facts of survival, not of the painter.
In its own time it moved little. It was refused the galleries, bought by a medical school and kept there. Its reach came by other roads: through Eakins’s teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy, and by Thomas Anshutz to Robert Henri and the Ashcan painters, a lineage that ran through the teacher more than through this canvas; and through his own answer to it, The Agnew Clinic of 1889. Later it became an emblem, the picture by which American realism is named. The first decades of its life were neglect; the last hundred have been an accumulation of readings, of the woman, the patient and the hand, and of gender, class and the medical gaze.
On this desk it stands at 8.4, a tenth above Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp at 8.3, the picture it answers: the clinic brings the living body, the blood and the excluded witness into the anatomy lesson, and the Tulp has the longer survival and the wider reach. It stands three tenths below Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans at 8.7, which is the swerve of realism itself where the clinic is a later and more local one, and above its American contemporary, Homer’s The Gulf Stream, at 8.2, and Hopper’s Nighthawks at 8.3. What holds it is one room: an archetype built at the centre that does not reach the patient, a height gathered in the band from brow to wound, and a reach that came late and stands as presence more than redirection.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged figure by figure. Gross cannot go: he is the intellect of the scene and its light, and the turn of his head from the wound toward the room is the picture’s act. The patient cannot go, nor the hands at the incision: the retractors, the probe and the blood are the fact the painting will not soften. The cloth of anaesthetic names what the century had just made possible. The woman in black cannot go: she is the one figure who refuses to look, and without her the picture loses its cost. The clerk recording and the painter in the tiers make the clinic a place where seeing is turned into record. What yields is the field of students, required as a mass and permitted as individuals, and the figures in the doorway, which are atmosphere.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Something can be stated, and it holds outside Philadelphia in 1875: modern knowledge is a public act performed on a private body. The patient is anonymous and faceless, reduced to a thigh and buttocks; the man who knows is given a face, a brow and the light. His authority is calm because he has turned his eyes from the wound to the room, and the blood on his hand is the price of that calm, held in view. The one person bound to the patient by love cannot bear to look, and she is set at the edge, in shadow, smaller: the institution has no place for her, and she is there. Held where it is because the disclosure is of one institution’s order through one instant, and its widest meaning, what is owed to the body that is studied, is set out more than pressed.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The elevation is real, dreadful rather than beautiful, and it rises in three places. The brow of Gross, high and still, a head of authority painted as light itself against the black of the amphitheatre. The bloodied hand with the scalpel at the centre of the canvas, near the viewer’s eye at life size: the shock of the work and its most remembered passage. The opened thigh under the working hands, the wound’s red the only saturated colour in the room. The woman’s clawed hand is a smaller fourth. The register is grave, with terror at its edge and nothing of transport. What holds the axis is range and frequency: the vast dark of the tiers is mood rather than height, and the elevation is gathered in one vertical band, from brow to wound.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Built at the centre and evoked at the edges. The built structure is the old figure of the master at the altar: a man robed in black and lit from above, attended by acolytes, before a body laid out on a table, in a round theatre of witnesses. It is Rembrandt’s anatomy lesson turned from the dead to the living, and behind that the priest and the sacrifice; the composition does not allude to them, it is them. The woman covering her face is the mourning mother at the margin of a sacrifice, a figure from the Passion, evoked by gesture more than built. The particulars stay particular: a named surgeon, a named college, a frock coat, a clerk’s pen, a real disease. Held below the gate because the pattern is carried by one figure and one arrangement and does not deepen into the patient, who remains a body and not a figure of the sacrificed.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance: the anatomy lesson of Rembrandt and the Dutch group portrait; the Spanish realism Eakins sought in Ribera and Velázquez on his visit to Spain in 1869 and 1870; the academic finish of Gérôme and the portraiture of Bonnat, under whom he studied in Paris; and the American portrait of the eminent man. The departure: a contemporary surgery, with blood and an opened body, painted at the scale and gravity of history painting as the portrait of a living man at his work, his dignity resting on the wound before him, and made for his country’s Centennial. The stake was paid, not only risked: the canvas was kept from the art galleries, called brutal by critics, and sold for a small sum to a medical school. Held below the top because the realist turn was under way in Paris and the Dutch precedent is close.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Substitute another form and much goes. At about life size, hung above a standing viewer, the canvas seats the viewer in the lowest tier of the amphitheatre, close to the table: one is a student, placed to see. The single high light is the argument. It falls on the mind, at the brow, and on the work, at the hands and the wound, and leaves the witnesses in the dark, so that light ranks knowledge. The black of the frock coats and the tiers makes the red the only colour, and the blood carries what a text would have to say. In a print, as Eakins’s own replica for reproduction shows, the scene survives as an illustration; what goes is the scale that places the viewer and the red that makes the hand the centre. Held below the top because the confusion of the patient’s body, a matter of drawing, interrupts the form’s clarity at its centre.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over promise: 151 years, the first decades of them neglect and the last hundred an accumulation of readings. The open questions are of meaning, not only of fact. Is the woman the mother, and why is she so small, so theatrical, and so central to the moral of a picture that hides her face? Why is the patient’s body so hard to read, and is its ambiguity of sex, age and posture an accident of foreshortening or a meaning? What is the place of the painter in his own picture, and of the clerk writing? Michael Fried’s reading of 1987, in which writing, drawing and the scalpel are one instrument and the picture a figure of its own making, opened a second layer, and readings of gender, class and the medical gaze a third. Held below the top because the debate turns on a few elements: the mother, the patient, the hand.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The field is American painting of the 1870s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: it is the most serious attempt in American painting of its century to make the modern world, its science and its professions, the subject of a picture at the scale of history, and it does not flinch. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its time the canvas moved little, refused the galleries, bought by a medical school and hung there for over a century; Eakins’s teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy carried his realism through Thomas Anshutz to Robert Henri and the Ashcan painters, a reach credited and discounted, since it ran through the teacher more than through this canvas; Eakins answered it himself in The Agnew Clinic; and later it became the picture by which American realism is named, and the centre of a public campaign in 2006 and 2007 to keep it in Philadelphia. That is presence more than redirection.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 151 years. Form: whole. Every figure and the composition stand as painted, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: continuous but partial for most of its life, in a medical college’s hall rather than a gallery, then at the centre of its city’s two museums since 2007; fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: charged. A cleaning in the earlier twentieth century abraded the glazes and shifted the balance of dark and light, a real charge in a picture whose tonality is its argument; a later restoration sought to recover the original tonality, with Eakins’s replica and early photographs as guides. That restoration is a making good of loss, weighed here only. The figure stands at the foot of its row for the abrasion.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged as command of oil on canvas at life size, and the making is load-bearing. The head of Gross is among the most authoritative painted heads of its century: the brow, the grey hair lifted by the light, the eyes in shadow, built on anatomical knowledge Eakins had from the dissecting room. The hands are painted with the same knowledge, the surgeon’s at rest with the scalpel, the assistants’ at work, the blood laid on the fingers with a restraint that makes it worse. The light is held across a dark field without losing the volume of the room. The costs are charged: the patient’s body, at the very centre, is a knot of foreshortening that generations of viewers have struggled to read; the woman is smaller and more rhetorical in gesture than the room’s scale allows, the weakest drawing in the group; the tiers are brushed broadly toward obscurity.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the woman at the left, in black, her face covered and her hand clenched, and the clerk at the rail, writing calmly. One law holds them: everyone in the room is ranked by their relation to the wound, by looking, recording, working, enduring or refusing to look, and the light gives each a share by that relation. The surgeon’s brow, the assistants’ hands, the clerk’s pen, the students’ eyes and the woman’s averted face all answer to it. The range is wide for one room, from horror to clinical calm, from the anonymous body to the named man, from the work of the hand to the work of the mind, and nothing contradicts the law. Held below the top because the woman’s theatrical grief sits at the edge of the picture’s plain idiom, as if from another genre; the law includes her, but her manner tests it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held, and held in one room: the body, the patient’s, opened; labour, as a profession and its hands; the institution, the college and its amphitheatre; knowledge and its transmission, in the students and the clerk; the family, in the woman at the edge; the self, in the painter among the tiers; and, by occasion, the nation at its Centennial and the age’s confidence in science. The light integrates them; they are not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or only implied: no sacred order except as the structure of the altar, no natural order, no history beyond the instant, no state but by occasion. It is a group portrait of a profession at work, and for that form the figure is high.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, The Made at 8.8 and The Inner Law at 8.7, then The Swerve and The Living Form at 8.6. A canvas whole in form after 151 years, its abraded surface recovered; a command of oil at life size in the surgeon’s head and hands; one law that ranks every figure in the room by its relation to the wound; and a contemporary surgery raised to the scale of history, its stake paid at its first showing.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.4, then The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2: one room and one profession, with no sacred, natural or historical order but by implication; a height gathered in one band from brow to wound; an archetype built at the centre that does not deepen into the patient; and a reach that came late, ran through the teacher more than the canvas, and stands as emblem more than redirection. Behind them, the patient’s unreadable body and the woman’s theatrical gesture are charged against the making.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 fall three tenths short, the altar built at the centre and not carried into the patient, and a reach narrow in its time and later more emblem than redirection. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 101.0, an average of 8.42 that displays 8.4, in Tier IV.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic), oil on canvas, about 244 by 198 centimetres, painted by Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia in 1875 and owned jointly by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts since 2007: well as an image and in its history, its reception and its main literature, above all Michael Fried’s reading of 1987; as a surface, from reproductions and accounts of its restoration, so that where a judgment turns on the paint it is held with a wider margin. No image or written source was consulted, and nothing is quoted. The work scored is the one canvas as it now stands. Its form is whole; its surface was abraded by a cleaning in the earlier twentieth century and later restored on the evidence of Eakins’s ink and watercolour replica made for reproduction and of early photographs. These are the work of time and of later hands, bear on The Imperishable only, and are not charged to the painter. The replica, the photographs and The Agnew Clinic (1889) are context and are not scored. The woman in black is the patient’s mother by tradition, and the operation is named by the usual account. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the date of the replica, whether this is the painter’s largest canvas, what the painter in the tiers is doing, the source of the light, whether the canvas was painted on the painter’s own initiative, the number of figures in the room, the particulars, dates and place of each campaign of cleaning and restoration, and the words of the critics.