Discover how this painting came to be recognized as one of America’s greatest paintings with Timothy Rub, Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Location: Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Gross Clinic by Thomas Eakins portrays the famous surgeon, Dr. Samuel D. Gross. It was made for the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, but was rejected by the jury, evidently because it was considered too frightening. Discover how it came to be recognized as one of America’s greatest paintings with Timothy Rub, Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The ...
The artist imbues the scene of the darkening piazza with a sense of foreboding.
Giorgio de Chirico, The Soothsayer’s Recompense
Exploring how Duchamp's art challenges viewers is essential to understanding his creativity and much of the art of the last century.
Marcel Duchamp and the Viewer
A black painter confronts white supremacy amidst the two world wars.
Horace Pippin, Mr. Prejudice
Which one is “true,” the one that tricks the viewer into thinking it is really there, or the one that announces itself as what it is, lines drawn on paper?
Juan Gris, The Table
African Americans' ongoing fight against racism in the U.S. undermined the sense of victory in both world wars.
Horace Pippin, Mr. Prejudice
Living in peace—predator and prey, and Native Americans and settler colonists—but for how long?
Hicks’s The Peaceable Kingdom as Pennsylvania parable
An explosion in a mine kills 111, Shahn captures the devastation of those left behind.
Ben Shahn, Miners’ Wives
On the eve of the American Revolution, a glimpse of politics in portraiture
John Singleton Copley, Portrait of Mr. and ...
A brutal history told for a modern American city, Mexican muralism in New York
Diego Rivera’s Sugar Cane
How a portrait of an African Muslim came to hang side-by-side with the founding fathers in one of America's earliest museums.
An African Muslim among the founding fathers, ...
Perspective is the star of this painting. Saenredam expertly widens the viewpoint to create an interior panorama.
Saenredam, Interior of Saint Bavo, Haarlem
Mary cries and falls into John’s arms. Rogier’s precise observations accentuate the emotional impact of this scene.
Rogier van der Weyden, The Crucifixion, with ...
As the European public grew increasingly hard to scandalize, Duchamp crossed the Atlantic to stir up more trouble.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No ...
Love, sex, science, broken glass, a coffee grinder, a bride from another dimension—this one really has it all.
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare ...
Suspended above the sea, the drama of this rescue scene comes from nature, not man.
Winslow Homer, The Life Line
One of the leaders of Impressionism turns his back on the movement and attempts to reclaim the classical nude.
Auguste Renoir, The Large Bathers
A city inhabited: Renoir’s optimistic but sketchy representation of modern life on the new boulevards of Paris.
Auguste Renoir, The Grands Boulevards
Obsessed with this view, Monet paid the owner of the trees not to cut them down until he finished his paintings.
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