Thomas Eakins - The Agnew Clinic

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Inspired by: Thomas Eakins - The Agnew Clinic

This painting was commissioned in 1889, to honor anatomist and surgeon David Hayes Agnew, on his retirement from teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. His students put up the $750 (equivalent to $21,600 today) to pay for the depiction. Each student came to Eakins studio to be sketched for placement in the final painting. Eakins placed himself in the painting on the far right behind the nurse – although the actual painting of him is attributed to his wife, Susan Macdowell Eakins.

It depicts a mastectomy, which was a novel procedure. Despite the lack of expectation of cure, it was an attempt to lengthen the life of the patient. The portrayal of a procedure in which a partially nude woman is observed by a roomful of men (even though they were doctors) was controversial. It was denied a spot in 1891's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and 1892's New York's Society of American Artists. One art critic warned that “delicate women or children suddenly confronted by the portrayal of these clinical horrors might receive a shock from which they would never recover.” Agnew asked not to have as much blood as seen in the Gross clinic (one cause for its rejection). His hands are covered in liquid, which would have been used for sterilization, rather than blood.

To see original: bit.ly/4c9bCJQ

George Caleb Bingham - The Jolly Flatboatmen

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Inspired by George Caleb Bingham - The Jolly Flatboatmen

Except for three months of study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Bingham was self-taught. He began his career as a portrait painter, which was his money maker all through his career. But where he made his mark was genre painting. He was one of the most important American painters of genre subjects in the 19th century. Working before America’s vastness was made accessible by roads and railways, Bingham found his subjects in the boatmen and trappers who populated the Missouri and the Mississippi, the great rivers of his home state. Through these subjects he captured a taste of life in the West. The Jolly Flatboatmen is from his series depicting life on the river. It is among the first distinctly American paintings that capture the allure of Western expansion during the mid-19th century.Several New York businessmen formed the American Art Union to promote paintings of American scenes by American artists. Every year, the union bought a painting, and held a lottery for their members to decide who took the painting home. They paid Bingham $290 for the Floatmen and gave it to Benjamin van Schaick, a New York city grocer. The total cost to the winner was the $5 he paid for his membership. In 1986 it was sold for $6 million, a record-breaking auction price. The American Art Union produced a large mezzotint that was distributed to its 10,000 members throughout the country, This immediately made it one of the best-known works of art of its era. Some 18,000 were circulated to hang in American homes and places of business. In today’s terms, it went viral.