AP Features, April 13th, 2007
Thomas Jefferson University has sold a second Thomas Eakins painting, this time to the Wal-Mart heiress who earlier expressed interest in acquiring another of the artist's masterpieces.
Eakins' 1874 "Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand" will go to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., for an undisclosed amount, the university said. The museum is being built by Alice Walton, a multibillionaire inheritor of the Wal-Mart Stores Inc. fortune.
The university ruffled feathers in Philadelphia's art community in November when it announced plans to sell Eakins' "The Gross Clinic" to a Walton project. The news spurred a fundraising drive to match the $68 million price tag and keep the painting in Philadelphia.
"The Gross Clinic" was purchased jointly by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art to be exhibited by both.
Thomas Jefferson said this week in a statement that it discussed its interest in selling the Rand portrait with both Philadelphia art institutions before entering an agreement with Crystal Bridges.
The Arkansas museum said it will lend the piece to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for public viewing later this spring. The portrait will be exhibited permanently at Crystal Bridges after the museum's scheduled opening in 2009.
The university had owned the portrait, the first in an Eakins series on physicians and scientists, since Rand donated it without restriction upon retiring from Jefferson Medical College in 1877. The tableau depicts the professor lost in concentration at his cluttered desk.
Proceeds from the sale will be used to support university initiatives. Christie's in New York arranged the private sale.
