Philly Art

I took my brother to the airport today and was then going to meet up with my aunt and uncle in their new apartment in Center City, which is in the same building where my grandparents lived (more about that in another post).

So, since I had some time to kill, I went to the Philadelphia Art Museum. It's like a mini-Met. Very encyclopedic and dismissive of most art created after the Impressionists.

It was the first time I had been there since they took down the Rocky statue from the top of the stairs. It wasn't quite like going to NYC since the twin towers came down, but it was still very weird.

But, there was a particular painting I did want to see that the museum recently acquired. It's The Gross Clinic by Thomas Eakins.



I wish Blogger would allow for a larger image, so be sure to click on the link above. It is such a cool painting. It was executed in 1875 when "real" medicine was still new and a source of wonder. Gross was, in a sense, the Michael DeBakey of his time in that he was a great surgeon, teacher, researcher and writer. Eakins not only romanticizes Gross, but also the new science. Powerful stuff and you can see why the paining hung at the Thomas Jefferson medical school for so long.

What I didn't expect to find was another Eakins painting, The Agnew Clinic (use the link for a larger image), on the same subject matter which was executed 14 years later.



Note that the focus is more on the surgical team than Agnew. More importantly, compare the men observing in the surgical theater. In the Gross painting, all of the students are paying rapt attention. In the Agnew painting, some are and some aren't. It was painted in 1889, what we now would consider still being the dark ages of medicine. Yet, it seems old hat to these medical students. Just as we consider some of our infant sciences (e.g., biotechnology) as state-of-the art, even though they are very young.

Some trips to the museum are more than worth the effort.