Even then, he sensed that a more extensive treatment might someday be warranted. That day has come.
"An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing 'The Gross Clinic' Anew," an exhibition featuring the just-restored painting, opens at the Art Museum's Perelman Building Saturday for a run through Jan. 9.
The Gross Clinic, now owned jointly by the Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, has received the most extensive and informed restoration in its history, an astonishing effort led by Tucker, now 55, the museum's vice chair of conservation and its senior painting conservator.
The restoration was made possible by a massive public effort in 2006, led by the academy and the Art Museum, to raise $68 million and buy the work when Jefferson announced its intent to sell it to a pair of out-of-town museums.
Successful acquisition paved the way for an intimately informed restoration. Working with academy conservator Aella Diamantopoulos and museum conservators Teresa Lignelli and Allen Kosanovich, plus curators from both institutions, Tucker applied his 30 years of up-close experience with a huge range of Eakins canvases to produce not a "new" Gross Clinic, but an old one; not a Gross Clinic that demands compliance with 21st-century taste, but one that seeks kinship with what Eakins himself saw when he stepped away from the canvas 135 years ago and decided he was done.
Julie Berkowitz, former university art historian at Thomas Jefferson University, said she was "dazzled by the conservation" work done by Tucker and his team.
When she walked into the painting conservation lab on the Perelman Building's third floor recently, Tucker asked her what she thought.
"I said, 'clarity,' " she recalled. "I was thrilled by the new clarity of the painting, as though a veil had been lifted from the surface."
