Thomas Eakins

Thomas Eakins wanted American art to look at the body honestly, and it cost him. In 1875, in Philadelphia, he painted The Gross Clinic — a renowned surgeon, Dr Samuel Gross, standing bloody-handed over a patient in a teaching operating theatre, lecturing while he cuts. The jury for the 1876 Centennial exhibition found it too gruesome for the art halls and hung it in a military-hospital display instead.

Eakins had studied in Paris and in the dissecting rooms of a medical school, and he taught the way he painted, insisting his students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts work from the completely naked model, women included. In 1886, during an anatomy lecture, he removed the loincloth from a male model to show a muscle group to a class that included women. The academy dismissed him. Twenty-eight students walked out with him and started their own art league.

He spent the rest of his career somewhat out in the cold, painting unsparing portraits of Philadelphia doctors, scientists and musicians who often disliked how plainly he saw them, and experimenting with the new motion photography alongside Eadweard Muybridge. Recognition came mostly at the very end and after his death in 1916. The Gross Clinic stayed in Philadelphia, where in 2007 a public campaign saved it from sale for 68 million dollars.