Which 1889 painting by Thomas Eakins shows a clinic at the University of Pennsylvania?

Which 1889 painting by Thomas Eakins shows a clinic at the University of Pennsylvania? The answer is The Agnew Clinic.

Eakins painted this large oil-on-canvas work to honor surgeon David Hayes Agnew when he retired from teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. It shows Agnew performing a partial mastectomy in a medical amphitheater while students and colleagues observe. The scene is unusually precise: several doctors, the nurse Mary V. Clymer, and even Eakins himself can be identified.

The painting belongs to Eakins’s scientific-realist approach, treating modern surgery as a serious subject for monumental art. It also records changing medical practice. Unlike the dark frock coats in Eakins’s earlier The Gross Clinic, the doctors here wear white coats, making the medical setting immediately recognizable.

A common mix-up is The Gross Clinic, Eakins’s more famous 1875 operating-room painting. Both depict surgery at Philadelphia medical institutions, but The Agnew Clinic is the 1889 work connected specifically with Dr. Agnew and the University of Pennsylvania.