A similar situation had presented itself to Tucker 30 years ago when he worked to restore The Pair-Oared Shell (1872).
"When I worked on The Pair-Oared Shell, I realized there were residues of a toning material of some kind all over the surface of the picture, but they were very broken up and very scattered and I just said, 'There's just no way, with the information I have as of 1982, of understanding what this all means, but someday, someday I'll work on this,' " he recalled.
He did a minimal treatment for the exhibition at the time and left it at that.
"But I knew that restoration wasn't doing all it could or should, and I lived with that idea. And every time I passed by the picture [in the museum] I thought about it harder," he said.
When the museum's 2001 Eakins retrospective loomed, Tucker got his chance. By that point, having intensively studied so many Eakins canvases, he realized that enough of the original glaze remained with The Pair-Oared Shell that a full treatment could be attempted. He also had a firm understanding of how Eakins utilized thin layers of glaze to achieve pictorial unity.
"I did have the experience: Having restored the painting in the 1980s, I saw my restoration taken off, and I saw another conservator restore it," he said. "That was done by Terry Lignelli, one of our conservators here for a long time, and Terry did an amazingly beautiful job on it. . . . She applied all the findings that we were coming up with, and indeed we applied those findings throughout the treatments that we worked on for that show in 2000."
The Gross Clinic has received the same attention. Its dark glazes have been knitted back together, as Tucker describes it, allowing forms and details to emerge that had been virtually obliterated. Eakins, on the right of the canvas, is no longer a shadow but an intense observer with furrowed brow; a student with a crossed leg has emerged from virtually nothing; a deep tunnel behind Gross has had its darkness returned, allowing two figures at its entrance - one of them Gross' son - to emerge as characters in the surgical drama.
And the figure of Gross has gained a fullness in space, a solidity that had all but collapsed over the decades of cleanings.
"I think we got back as much as the picture could give us, applying the information we have," said Tucker. "I think we did as careful a job as you could have done, and we were just all pleased with how reliable the result is. If you were to look at our documentation, if you were to do a close reading of the surface of the painting, if you were to look at many, many other Eakins paintings, this now fits.
"It reconciles all these different types of information - technical information, visual information, historical information. It seems to bring all of that together."
Contact culture writer Stephan Salisbury at 215-854-5594 or ssalisbury@phillynews.com.
