Broad Street, the Avenue of the Arts under your feet, has been the center of Philadelphia's visual and performing arts for more than a century. Broad Street is called the Avenue of the Arts, and its institutions — the Academy of Music, the Kimmel Center, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Merriam Theater — give the city a cultural infrastructure that rivals any American city outside New York. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, founded in 1805 at the corner of Broad and Cherry Streets, is the oldest art museum and school in the United States.
Its greatest alumnus and faculty member was Thomas Eakins, the Philadelphia painter who worked in the realist tradition at the end of the nineteenth century with a commitment to anatomical accuracy and psychological depth that was too challenging for his contemporaries. His painting The Gross Clinic, depicting a surgery in graphic detail, was rejected from the art exhibition of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition as too disturbing. Today it hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art as one of the greatest American paintings.
Eakins was dismissed from the Academy in 1886 for removing a loincloth from a male model in a mixed-gender class. He continued working in his studio on Mount Vernon Street, producing masterpieces that Philadelphia now claims with enormous pride.