As for the rest of the collection, Barchi said in a statement yesterday: "We do not intend to sell any of our artworks other than the Eakins paintings, even if approached. While the mission of Thomas Jefferson University as an academic health center does not include the acquisition or display of artworks, we will continue to honor our tradition of commissioning portraits of Jefferson's distinguished faculty and maintain our current artworks."
And there are plenty of them.
Hanging without fanfare above an administrator's desk in Alumni Hall is Crowd at the Cattleman, a bright nightclub scene of watercolor, gouache, crayon and pastel by Humbert L. Howard, an important African American artist who worked for the Works Progress Administration in the Franklin D. Roosevelt years.
That painting in the corner of a conference room of the Medical College building is a delicate oil of the surgeon Thomas D. Mütter from 1842 by English-born Thomas Sully, the prolific, widely admired portraitist.
Alexander Stirling Calder's nearly nine-foot bronze statue of surgeon Samuel D. Gross presides over the construction site of a new education building at 10th and Locust Streets.
A natural habitat
Jefferson, in fact, has hundreds of paintings and pieces of sculpture - mostly, though not exclusively, relating to Jefferson, the history of medicine, or both. It owns tall case clocks, furniture, decorative arts and rare books. Prints, drawings and photographs alone number about 20,000, says Jefferson archivist F. Michael Angelo. The school also owns woodcuts from the 16th century, photographs from the 19th, architectural renderings from the 20th, busts and early medical instruments. Most of the items were donated.
