Philadelphia Groups Raise Millions of Dollars to Keep a Masterpiece in the City

Many Philadelphians are still angry over the recent decision by board members of Thomas Jefferson University to sell a famous 19th-century American painting to two museums outside the city.

Feelings have remained high even after local nonprofit organizations, donors, and foundations last month announced they had raised $68-million — enough to keep the painting in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia art enthusiasts and Thomas Jefferson alumni were outraged by the university’s surprise announcement in November that it would sell its most famous artwork, Thomas Eakins’s “The Gross Clinic,” to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville, Ark.

The painting is widely considered one of the most influential works in the history of American art. It depicts Samuel D. Gross, the first chair of surgery at Thomas Jefferson’s medical college, performing bone surgery before a gallery of attentive medical students.

The university’s board of trustees decided it would be a smart financial move to sell the painting to help pay for the medical college’s expansion efforts. It enrolled Christie’s in New York to negotiate a sale of the painting.

The Crystal Bridges Museum, still under construction, is bankrolled by Alice Walton, heir to the Wal-Mart fortune. The museum had planned to share the painting with the National Gallery of Art, in Washington.

But critics decried the university’s decision to sell the work to an out-of-town buyer without first attempting to broker a deal locally. And the deal reminded some of Ms. Walton’s 2005 purchase of “Kindred Spirits” by Asher B. Durand. That $35-million sale by the New York Public Library earned widespread protest in New York, where Ms. Walton and her museum were branded as artistic pirates.

While the university made no effort to find a local buyer before announcing the sale of the Eakins masterpiece, it did include a clause in the sales agreement giving precedence to one or more Philadelphia organizations — if they could match the sum Crystal Bridges and the National Gallery had offered for the painting by December 26.

Thus began a frantic, 45-day fund-raising drive led by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to generate enough money to keep “The Gross Clinic” in Philadelphia.

From the start, the sale was marked by controversy. The 1875 painting had been the property of Thomas Jefferson University since 1878, when it was donated by a group of alumni who scraped together $200 to buy the work for their alma mater.

Meeting a Deadline

Not everyone supported the effort to keep the painting, however. Some art critics and philanthropists argued that Philadelphia could find much better uses for $68-million than spending it on a single painting, especially at a time when many local cultural institutions are in big capital campaigns.

In the end, though, Philadelphians proved they were up to the challenge: By December 21, five days before the deadline, Mayor John F. Street announced that the fund-raising effort had been successful, with more than 2,000 donors from 27 states and the District of Columbia contributing more than $30-million, with the remainder to come from a bridge loan offered by Wachovia Bank.

The bulk of private contributions are from some of Philadelphia’s most prominent philanthropic institutions. The Annenberg Foundation is donating $10-million. The Lenfest Foundation, Neubauer Family Foundation, and the Pew Charitable Trusts are each giving $3-million.

“A city’s cultural icons are central to its identities and aspirations,” says Anne d’Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “If the city of Amsterdam were faced with the potential loss of Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch,’ that community, too, would rally.”

The painting will be jointly owned and exhibited by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Representatives of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the National Gallery of Art have been unavailable for interviews. The institutions instead issued a statement: “We are disappointed that Eakins’ Gross Clinic will not be coming to the nation’s capital or America’s heartland,” it said. “However, we are pleased for the city of Philadelphia.”

Thomas Jefferson University, meanwhile, is getting its $68-million, money it plans to use to create scholarships and endowed professorships, and to pay for capital improvements.

But it is also left with the task of repairing relationships with other Philadelphia nonprofit organizations — and its alumni, many of whom were angry that the university decided to sell the painting without consulting the institution’s alumni association, a successor to the group that originally bought the painting for Thomas Jefferson.

“There’s an immediate outcry that it will impact on the giving” of alumni, says Lorraine C. King, president of Thomas Jefferson University’s board of alumni. “Time will tell.”