The Gross Clinic, Thomas Eakins' 1875 masterpiece, is back at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it hangs when it is not at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

The back-and-forth travels of this monumental painting, owned jointly by the two institutions since a dramatic public fund-raising campaign ended in its acquisition in 2006, have almost always been marked by something special: a complete cleaning and restoration of the picture, for instance; or its installation in an unusual setting, such as a 2011 exhibition focusing on the human body at PAFA, where Eakins taught and was famously fired for showing too much of the male anatomy to female art students.