EAKINS PAINTING TO STAY IN PHILADELPHIA

Bloomberg‘s Sophia Pearson reports that Thomas Eakins’s painting The Gross Clinic, 1876, will stay in the city, blocking a sixty-eight-million-dollar sale to the National Gallery and a museum founded by Wal-Mart Stores heir Alice Walton. Philadelphia had until December 26 to match the price for the work. Local groups have raised more than thirty million dollars so far, and Wachovia Corporation extended a line of credit to cover the balance if needed, said Herbert Riband Jr., vice chairman of the board of trustees for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. “The Gross Clinic_ is by a Philadelphian, about Philadelphians, and is set in Philadelphia,” Mayor John Street said in a statement. “It belongs in Philadelphia just as much as the Liberty Bell and our sports teams.”