The Gross Clinic Essay

The Gross Clinic is a painting done by Thomas Eakins, an American realist painter, who also dabbled in photography. Eakins is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important artists in American art history. Throughout Eakins career he had difficulties with the public and critics. The Gross Clinic, 1875 is an oil on canvas, 96" x 77" and was rejected by the art jury for the exhibition in Philadelphia, because it was too brutally realistic. The painting illustrates the prominent surgeon Dr. Samuel Gross conducting a surgery in the operating amphitheater of the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. The painting also includes Dr. Gross’s colleagues, the patients mother, and an audience of onlookers, also included in the painting is a self-portrait …show more content…
Sallie galloping on a horse is series of photographs done as a photographic experiment, done by Muybridge June 15, 1878. The sequences consist of 24 photographs shot in quick secession that were exposed on a zoopraxiscope. Muybridge constructed the first zoopraxiscope, which presented the “motion picture” for the first time. The photographs are sometimes cited as an early silent film, these photos and other experiments like Muybridge’s were the forerunners of early motion films. Former California Governor Leland Stanford contacted Muybridge to help settle a bet. There was speculation on whether all four hooves of a running horse left the ground at the same time. Stanford believed they did, but the motion was too fast for the human eye to detect. After many trial and error Muybridge eventually proved that the horses do at times have all four hooves off the ground during their running stride. “Muybridge and others in a series of stop-action photographs, images that made forever obsolete the “hobbyhorse” pose-legs stretched forward and backward -long conventional in paintings of running beasts (Anson,