Pennsylvania Academy Sells One Eakins to Get Another
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has sold a painting by Thomas Eakins to help it buy another.
Yesterday it announced that it had sold “The Cello Player,” an 1896 portrait that it had owned since 1897 (and that until Sunday had been at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as part of the exhibition “Americans in Paris, 1860-1900”) to raise the money to pay for “The Gross Clinic,” a revered work the academy is buying with the Philadelphia Museum of Art from Thomas Jefferson University, a Philadelphia medical college, for $68 million.
Herbert S. Riband Jr., vice chairman of the academy’s board, would not say who had bought the painting or how much money the academy and the Philadelphia Museum of Art had raised toward paying for “The Gross Clinic.”
After Thomas Jefferson University agreed last fall to sell “The Gross Clinic” to the National Gallery of Art and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a museum being founded by a Wal-Mart heir in Bentonville, Ark., it gave Philadelphia institutions a chance to match the offer. In December, Wachovia Bank agreed to provide financing until all of the money had been raised.
Read entire article at NYT
Yesterday it announced that it had sold “The Cello Player,” an 1896 portrait that it had owned since 1897 (and that until Sunday had been at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as part of the exhibition “Americans in Paris, 1860-1900”) to raise the money to pay for “The Gross Clinic,” a revered work the academy is buying with the Philadelphia Museum of Art from Thomas Jefferson University, a Philadelphia medical college, for $68 million.
Herbert S. Riband Jr., vice chairman of the academy’s board, would not say who had bought the painting or how much money the academy and the Philadelphia Museum of Art had raised toward paying for “The Gross Clinic.”
After Thomas Jefferson University agreed last fall to sell “The Gross Clinic” to the National Gallery of Art and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a museum being founded by a Wal-Mart heir in Bentonville, Ark., it gave Philadelphia institutions a chance to match the offer. In December, Wachovia Bank agreed to provide financing until all of the money had been raised.