Portrait du professeur Benjamin H. Rand

Thomas Eakins painted his old teacher here. Benjamin Rand had taught him chemistry back in Philadelphia, and by 1874 was a professor of chemistry at Jefferson Medical College, shown at his cluttered desk among the tools of his science, a gleaming microscope and a spectroscope for reading the light of chemical elements, while one hand absently strokes his cat. This was Eakins's first large portrait of anyone outside his own family. Two years later he sent it to the great Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the country's hundredth-birthday fair, after the jury there rejected his now-famous surgical scene The Gross Clinic as too bloody to hang. The picture later went to the medical college, and it now hangs at Crystal Bridges in Arkansas.