Philadelphia Inquirer on “The Cello Player”

Picking up on the news made by Herbert Riband, vice chair of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and my fellow guest Monday on the WHYY Radio Times public radio program, the Philadelphia Inquirer today gets around to examining the secret, hasty sale of “The Cello Player.”
Stephan Salisbury writes:
The deal, some say, has soured what had been a heady community fund-raising effort to keep Eakins’ masterpiece, ‘The Gross Clinic,’ in Philadelphia—because now a leader of that effort has done precisely what many donors were upset about in the first place: sold a treasured painting in a secret transaction.
Salisbury quotes David Brownlee, chairman of the art history department of the University of Pennsylvania, saying what Marty Moss-Coane tried to get me to say on the radio by using a time-honored reportorial technique: She asked me the same question several different ways to probe for the “right” answer.
Brownlee gave that answer to Salisbury: Selling PAFA’s beloved Eakins, the professor said, was “not as bad as the risk of losing ‘The Gross Clinic.'” He added, though, that he would have favored selling lesser works to raise the needed funds. (As I observed to Moss-Coane, lesser works bring lesser amounts of money, which makes them much less useful as megabucks cash cows.)
I take what some may consider an extremist position—that principles of museum integrity are essential to uphold, even if it means losing out on an important buying opportunity. It would have been better to lose “The Gross Clinic” to the publicly accessible museums (the National Gallery of Art and Crystal Bridges) that had offered to buy it from Thomas Jefferson University than to lose “The Cello Player” to the private domain, as now appears to have occurred. (The PAFA board members say that they don’t know who bought it.)
This opinion might not make me popular among civic-minded Philadelphians, who are justifiably proud of how they rallied to the “Gross Clinic” challenge.
I admit it: I’m a radical conservative on this subject. Holding museum-quality works that are already in the permanent collection should be an absolute. I believe that museums’ primary mission is to conserve and preserve their collections, not to use them as assets for trading up.