Thomas Eakins

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., has decided to auction three paintings by Thomas Eakins, the 19th century American artist, to raise money for its acquisition fund. The works, which are being sold by Christie's in a public sale May 20, have been culled from the 220 pieces by Eakins in the museum's collection. The three have not been exhibited at the Hirshhorn since a survey of the artist's work in 1977. The paintings are a study for "Portrait of Mrs. Charles L. Leonard," a study for "William Rush and His Model" and a portrait of Robert C. Ogden.

Funny how our views of great artists change over time. It's equally curious how, in changing, they stay the same. Thomas Eakins, currently the subject of an exhibition at the Huntington's Scott Gallery, offers a case in point. He's long been regarded as America's great, once-neglected genius of modern realist painting, a kind of Yankee Manet. His only competition for this honor might be Edward Hopper, but the two stand at such different points in the stream of time the choice is a wash.

The National Academy Museum in New York has been under fire recently for selling off art from its collection to pay debts. It turns out the museum has deaccessioned paintings before -- the first time in the 1970s with a work that, after a long and circuitous route, became the gain of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. LACMA last year acquired Thomas Eakins' terrific 1899 painting "Wrestlers" as a gift from the Cecile and Fred Bartman Foundation....

To help finance a $68 million deal to keep Thomas Eakins' masterpiece "The Gross Clinic" in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has sold another Eakins painting, "The Cello Player," academy officials said. One of the academy's most recognizable artworks, the large 1896 oil portrait shows cellist Rudolf Henning with his instrument.

Philadelphia's Thomas Jefferson University, which caused a stir with its November announcement that it would sell Thomas Eakins' masterpiece "The Gross Clinic," may sell two other Eakins works, university President Robert L. Barchi said. The announcement that "The Gross Clinic" would leave the university after 129 years of ownership spurred an intense fundraising drive to match the $68 million price and keep that painting in the city.

Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia has sold a second Thomas Eakins painting, this time to the Wal-Mart heiress who earlier had 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 billionaire Alice Walton, daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton.

THOMAS EAKINS created some of the most iconic images of American art. Even people who shun museums recognize the nobly lighted forehead of a surgeon turning to speak to a gallery of students while his fingers hold a bloody scalpel. You can buy a mouse pad with the glorious image of Max Schmitt sculling on Pennsylvania's Schuylkill River. Eakins was of the generation of another American original, Winslow Homer.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has acquired Thomas Eakins' "Wrestlers," a large-scale sporting painting created by the American realist in 1899, the museum announced Thursday. Michael Govan, LACMA's director and chief executive, called the painting "one of the most significant acquisitions the museum has ever made. "It's a turn-of-the-last century piece, and here we are at another century," Govan said in an interview.

Re "Free 'The Gross Clinic,' " Opinion, Dec. 16 I find incomprehensible Henry Adams' assertion that this celebrated painting by Thomas Eakins "has been almost inaccessible for more than a century." When I lived in Philadelphia in the late '60s, the painting hung openly in the entranceway of old Jefferson Medical College; tourists and students could view it for free and at their leisure. In fact, so accessible to public viewing was this masterpiece that medical students had carved their initials and other marks into it. When I revisited the city in 1997 and wished to see the painting once again, I was told that owing to such student vandalism, it had finally been moved to a pavilion across the street.

The scion of one of this country's most famous families has taken a scalpel to an American art icon. And his fellow scholars are not amused. In "Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist," Henry Adams, a direct descendant of our second president, describes the acclaimed 19th century portraitist Thomas Eakins as an "exhibitionist-voyeur" who was hostile toward women, confused about gender and sexuality, inclined to incest and a likely victim of childhood sexual abuse.