What he sought with his searching brush was reality, because his cultivated intellect perceived that beauty rests in reality so deeply that nothing genuine can be ugly.
--Harrison S. Morris, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 1917
Whatever objection a sensitive fastidiousness may find to the subject of his picture, exhibited here a year ago, entitled "An Operation in Practical Surgery," none could be made to the skill with which the scene was rendered. It was a canvas ten feet high, and being an upright and the focus being in the middle distance, it presented many difficulties of a practical nature to the painter; the figures in the foreground were a little more, and those in the background a little less, than life size, but so ably was the whole depicted that probably the reason why nine out of ten of those who were startled or shocked by it were thus affected, was its intense realism: the sense of actuality about it was more than impressive, it was oppressive. It was impossible to doubt that such an operation had in every one of its details taken place, that the faces were portraits, and that a photograph would have fallen far short of the intensity of reproduction which the picture possessed.
-- William C. Brownell, The Younger Painters of America, Scribner's Monthly May 1880
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