The art of looking at science

Analysis of the painting The Agnew Clinic (1889) by Thomas Eakins

Abstract

The painting The Agnew Clinic (1889) by Thomas Eakins proves to be a collection of themes that concern two specific aspects developed at the end of the 19th century. The first one, the presentation of the human body as something common, uncensored, far from the divinization presented by pictorial academicism. On the other hand, it presents a very intimate view of the author as a response to the society of the time on the alleged abuses to his female students, and as a continuity represented in most of his photographic and pictorial work, the view of others of the nude. The purpose of this paper is to interpret the influence of positivism on the representation of Thomas Eakins on medical study in his work The Agnew Clinic (1889), through a rigorous analysis of the persons and elements of the work as well as the understanding of the author’s own motivations in making it. For the analysis of this pictorial piece, Michael Baxandall's proposal of the "the period eye" under his theory of social history of art is used as a methodology, as well as the comparative method, both with a series of adaptations that allow a better understanding of the piece. Through this analysis it is intended to glimpse the medical scientific knowledge of the time, understand the surgical study that was built with the application of positivist sciences, especially with the use of the clinical method of observation as a method for the art.