UPDATE: More on the fundraising campaign here.
Does anyone still remember what happened when the Boston Athenaeum announced that it was selling its celebrated Gilbert Stuart portraits of George and Martha Washington to the Smithsonian in Washington for $5 million?
Back in 1980, the venerable, cash-strapped Boston library bowed to intense pressure to keep the portraits in Boston: It accepted a $4.875-million joint offer from the National Portrait Gallery and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which allowed the portraits to remain, part-time, in the city where they had long resided.
Which is, of course, the type of solution that should have been devised for Thomas Eakins‘ “The Gross Clinic,” now a mere eight days from its $68-million fundraising deadline. If Philadelphia institutions cannot reach that goal (and if the city is unsuccessful in its attempt to stop the sale), Thomas Jefferson University, the painting’s owner, has agreed to accept a joint offer for that amount from Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton‘s planned Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., and the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
The latter, of course, is the wrong partner: With the Boston example as the proper role model, it should have been the Philadelphia Museum. But Walton’s art advisor, John Wilmerding, a trustee of the National Gallery as well as its former deputy director, helped to engineer the deal, having previously advised Walton on her purchase of Asher B. Durand‘s “Kindred Spirits,” sold last year by the New York Public Library. Walton is now a member of the National Gallery’s Trustees’ Council.
Philadelphia institutions would have much less difficulty executing a joint purchase than coming up with $68 million in a mere 45 days. “Donations to date total 40% of that goal,” according to the campaign’s online donation website.
It may be too late for this idea to gain traction. But Earl Powell III, director of the National Gallery, could help get it done. A quasi-federal art museum, the National Gallery describes its donated art as “gifts to the nation.” Snapping up cultural treasures from sister cities does not befit its leadership role. It should work with great urgency towards a more satisfying solution—even if that means losing out on a masterpiece.