Considered among the most important of American paintings, Thomas Eakins' 1875 masterpiece "The Gross Clinic" has now been installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art to powerful effect.

"It's rich, it's spectacular," said Kathleen A. Foster, the museum's curator of American art who conceived the reinstallation, to Philly.com. "People walk in and say, 'Oh my God! Have I ever been in this room before?' "

The museum jointly acquired the painting with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2006 after a massive fundraising campaign. The work will travel at times to PAFA where Eakins once taught and was notoriously fired for allowing female art students to view too much male anatomy during class.

The Philadelphia museum has now hung a cleaned and conserved The Gross Clinic, depicting a bloody surgeon during mid-surgery in a crowded operating theater. It is across from another massive Eakins' painting, The Agnew Clinic (on long-term loan from the University of Pennsylvania).

 Eakins is shown in context among his contemporaries, such as Mary Cassatt, William Trost Richards, John Singer Sargent, Frank Furness, James McNeill Whistler, Celia Beaux, Louis Comfort Tiffany, John La Farge, and Henry Ossawa Tanner.