Sunday, January 10, 2010

Gross disappointment.

So here's the deal: I was left craving some more Thomas Eakins paintings after John, Alia and I discovered the Eakins section of the Philadelphia Museum of Art over a week ago. So I heard about this exhibit "Dissecting the Gross Clinic" out at the University of Pennsylvania, about Eakins' painting The Gross Clinic, and decided to check it out. Now, call me crazy, but I got the notion from the description of the exhibit that the actual painting itself would be a part of the exhibit... alas, no dice – it was pretty much just a display case with some info and a small poster of the painting. Zip ZING! That's it. Silly me, I guess the actual painting is... in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts? (they share ownership of it with the PMA). I'll have to go check it out, and thus continue the wild goose chase. Or, in this case, the wild Gross chase.

In the meantime, here's a photo of the Eakins painting The Agnew Clinic, which was painted more than a decade after The Gross Clinic, in 1889 - and it is actually currently hanging in the Philadelphia Museum:

Thomas Eakins’ The Agnew Clinic, 1889, oil on canvas, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.