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Starting today, The Gross Clinic by Thomas Eakins is be ing shown as part of a Special Exhibit through March 4th at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Starting in mid-November, I blogged about the announcement by Thomas Jefferson University to sell the Eakins painting, The Clinic Sale is Gross, until the news that the Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts managed to save the masterpiece for Philly, There's Nothing Gross About That.

As Shaun Mullen at the Moderate Voice, Big Painting, Big Effort, Big Save, observes:

Beginning at 4 this afternoon, visitors to the Philadelphia Museum of Art will be able to see something that only a couple of months ago seemed impossible — “The Gross Clinic,” one of the great masterpieces of American realism — which was about to be snatched from the city where it was painted and had been on display for 128 years.

The Thomas Eakins painting had been owned by Jefferson University, a medical school and teaching hospital, since 1878 when it was donated by alumni. It has hung in a dark corner of a lobby at the university, which is not exactly a tourist attraction.

Jefferson’s board of directors, blithely unaware of the intrinsic value of the canvas, announced in November that they were selling it for $68 million to a Wal-Mart heiress, who planned to exhibit it at a new museum in Bentonville, Arkansas and at a Dallas Museum.

Local institutions were given 45 days to meet the offer — and did so after a dramatic fundraising drive.

The Museum is getting the painting early to help with fundraising efforts, according to the Inquirer, Today, at Art Museum, the prize catch. So what should go on the empty wall at Jeff to replace the Eakins? How about . . .

Tags: Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Eakins