PHILADELPHIA -- Few artists could lecture, as Thomas Eakins did in 1894, on "The Differential Action of Certain Muscles Passing More Than One Joint."

So obsessed was Eakins with painting the human form that he studied anatomy and invented new photographic techniques in an attempt to capture, and copy, motion.

Eakins' graphic depictions of the human body fascinated but also shocked his peers and public. One of his most famous works, "The Gross Clinic" -- with its bold depiction of a surgeon's bloody hand and the patient's open wound -- was relegated to a medical tent instead of the art show at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.

Now, 125 years later, Eakins is viewed as one of the premier American artists of the 19th century and a master of American Realism. More than 200 of his works, including sculptures and some never-before-seen photographs, are on display in "Thomas Eakins: American Realist," which opened Oct. 4 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

"This is the first exhibit that really synthesizes it all," said Darrel Sewell, the museum's curator of American art, who organized the show and an earlier Eakins' retrospective in 1981.

"There's been so much work and information on Eakins and on American art, it's like working on a new person."

Some of the photographs and sculptures that Eakins used as studies for his work will be on display for the first time alongside the paintings that resulted.

In "Mending the Net," Eakins overlays figures from several photographs onto his composition. In "Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River," family members captured in one photograph become spectators to a different scene.

Some of the show's photographs were only found in 1986, in the collection of Eakins student Charles Bregler.

The exhibit also includes experimental photographs by Eakins and Eadweard Muybridge, who in the 1880s were both at work in Philadelphia on motion photography.

While Muybridge settled on the use of a row of cameras, triggered successively, to create his famous series of photographs, Eakins wanted the images to come from a single camera. He instead cut slots into counterrevolving wheels inside his camera, capturing an image each time a slot aligned with the camera plate.

Eakins' results include "History of a Jump," detailing the arc of movement as a man jumps through the air.

Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was born in 1844 to Benjamin Eakins, a calligrapher, and his wife, Caroline. The family was working class, but Benjamin Eakins earned enough to support his only son's four-year sojourn to Paris, from 1866-70, where the young artist refined his technique.

When Eakins returned, he decided to live in Philadelphia, then the second-largest city in the United States, and a distant second in prestige, behind New York, in art circles.

"His studio was a garret room without one single object upon which the eye might rest with pleasure -- the sole ornaments some skeletons & some models of the frame & muscles which looked, of course, like the contents of a butcher shop," wrote an admiring, but somewhat aghast, New York art critic following an 1881 interview for "The American Art Review."

Eakins avoided society subjects, and instead painted common people -- mostly those he knew and admired -- rowing, boxing, fishing, teaching. His choice of subjects contrasted sharply with European Impressionists of the day, with their focus on landscape, and portrait artists who tended to idealize their sitters.

Even when Eakins, in the late 1890s, turned his attention to portraiture, he created psychological studies that captured people's inner doubts and outward shortcomings. At least one of his subjects, disturbed by the final product, declined to buy it.

The warts-and-all approach didn't bother Walt Whitman, whose 1887 portrait by Eakins is among the works on display.

"Of all the portraits of me made by artists I like Eakins' best," Whitman later wrote. "The Eakins portrait gets there -- fulfills its purpose: sets me down in correct style, without feathers -- without any fuss of any sort."

Eakins had a rocky relationship with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which installed him as a member, teacher and finally its director before asking him to resign in 1886, after a series of disputes punctuated by his use of nude models.

The school by then had admitted women, and Eakins once moved a male model's loincloth in a demonstration of the movement of the model's hip.

"Was ever so much smoke for so little fire?" Eakins complained.

Eight years later, when the Academy awarded him a prize, Eakins balked, "I think you've got a heap of impudence to give me a medal."

Eakins, who was married to fellow artist Susan Macdowell but had no children, spent most of his life in his childhood home near the art museum. He died there in 1916.

The City of Philadelphia now owns the four-story row house. The house has long been vacant, but starting this month is set to house Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program.

"His wife told me that he had abandoned all hope of recognition," former student Charles Henry Fromuth wrote of Eakins after a 1910 visit, at which he found Eakins "dispirited."

Thousands are expected to attend the ticketed show, which runs through Jan. 6. The exhibit then moves to the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

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The Philadelphia Museum of Art: http://www.philamuseum.org