“[The painting is] one of the most powerful, horrible and yet fascinating pictures that has been painted anywhere in this century,” wrote the New York Tribune in 1879 of then 31-year-old Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic. “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.” Eakins’ masterpiece suffered the indignity of a jury’s rejection at the 1876 Centennial in his native Philadelphia, but in An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing The Gross Clinic Anew at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, that injustice is posthumously corrected by bringing back Eakins’ original artistic intentions after nearly a century of conservationist interventions. The savage grace of The Gross Clinic returns in the PMA’s saving efforts to restore Eakins’ sense of tone and atmosphere. How this iconic image of the brutal ballet of science and art fell into a twisted tango of aesthetic missteps over time serves as a cautionary tale as well as a hopeful one in its new restoration.

Eakins the young artist and Samuel Gross, the “Emperor of American Surgery,” crossed paths just as the artist took his first steps toward fame and the surgeon stood at the height of his renown. Hounded by Eakins to pose for more studies for the painting, Gross reportedly said, “Eakins, I wish you were dead.” The Gross Clinic gave Dr. Gross artistic immortality that outpaced his medical accomplishments, while launching Eakins into the ranks of American art fame, and infamy. Love it or hate it, as the New York Tribune said of the painting, you can’t take your eyes off of it. The jury of the 1876 Centennial art exhibition hated it, relegating the painting to the medical section, far from the eyes of the general public.

As Dr. Kathleen Foster, the curator of the exhibition, explained, this is a “remedial Centennial” for Eakins. Set among dark walls and red drapery in the PMA’s gallery space, The Gross Clinic finally enjoys the salon-type setting it was denied so long ago. Reunited with Eakins’ Portrait of Dr. Benjamin H. Rand, which the jury did accept for the Centennial, and with Eakins’ other “clinical” masterpiece, The Agnew Clinic, The Gross Clinic finally takes its rightful place. It’s a wonderful birthday present for the artist, who would have been 166 years old on the day on which the exhibit opens.