The Gross Clinic

Eakins was an American painter born in Philadelphia. He began painting "The Gross Clinic" (alternately, "The Clinic of Dr. Gross") when he got back from his trip to Europe in 1875. He wanted to make something shocking, not to mention a piece that would establish his position in the art world. After its rejection for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, this painting was actually saved from being forgotten by Dr. Samuel Gross himself — shown at the center of the painting, hands covered in blood and holding a scalpel — who hung this painting in Ward One of the U.S. Army Post Hospital as part of an exhibition illustrating techniques for treating wounds incurred in America's Civil War (1861-65). 

When it was eventually exhibited, some critics immediately identified it as a masterpiece, while others called it "pathologically anatomic." (The critics were both sharply divided and sharp with each other: William J. Clark, the critic then for Philadephia's Evening Telegraph, sniped, "It is rumored that the blood on Dr. Gross' fingers made some of the members of the [Exhibition selection] committee sick, but, judging from the quality of the work exhibited by them we fear that it was not the blood alone that made them sick. Artists have before now been known to sicken at the sight of pictures by younger men which they in their souls were compelled to acknowledge were beyond their emulation.") Now this huge (240cm x 200cm) painting is considered among the top of American masterpieces of the 19th century.