Original Document

Thomas Eakins, of Philadelphia, is quite a different character. Nearly every one who looks at his "Operation," the portrait of Doctor Gross, a Philadelphia medical celebrity, lecturing to a class of students in a college amphitheater, exclaims, "How brutal! " And yet it has only the brutality the subject demands. Our American art is so effeminate at present that it would do no harm to have it inoculated with just some of that brutality. Among our mentally barren, from photograph working, and yet so blase, sweet-caramel artists, it is as refreshing as a whiff of the sea, to meet with such a rugged, powerful personality…. Eakins, like Whitman, sees beauty in everything.

Credit: Sadakichi Hartman, A History of American Art, rev. ed. (New York: Tuch Publishers, 1934), 203-207.