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Philadelphia Raises Enough Money to Retain a Masterpiece by Eakins

It’s taken a citywide fund-raising effort and the sale of two paintings and two drawings by Thomas Eakins, but the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts have now managed to raise the entire $68 million needed to keep an Eakins masterpiece, “The Gross Clinic,” in Philadelphia.

The Philadelphia Museum announced on Wednesday that it had sold the Eakins painting “Cowboy Singing” to the Denver Art Museum and the Anschutz Collection, also in Denver. The work, from around 1892, which depicts a man seated with a banjo, has been in the Philadelphia Museum’s collection since 1929, when the executors of the artist’s estate — his widow, Susan MacDowell Eakins, and Mary Adeline Williams — donated it.
Read entire article at NYT