Thomas Eakins A Broader Vision for Denver Auction Action: 1989–1998 No Green Shoots at American Auctions in New York Two Hirshhorn Works By Eakins Net $461,000 at Christie’s Hirshhorn to Deaccession Nine Works, Including Three By Eakins AAMD Lets Denver’s Partial Deaccession Slide The Week That Was (July 4 – July 11, 2008)

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The money was raised through citywide fund-raising efforts and the sale of two paintings and two sketches. The Philadelphia Museum parted with Eakins's Cowboy Singing (1892), sold to the Denver Art Museum and the Anschutz Collection, also located in Denver, in a joint purchase. The work, which the museum owned since 1929, is the first Eakins painting to enter the collection of the Denver Art Museum.

The museum also sold two 1887 oil sketches by Eakins to the Denver Art Museum. Financial details of the Denver sale were not released, but it is believed that the museum was trying to raise $8 to $10 million.

The Pennsylvania Academy similarly gave up another Eakins work in lieu of The Gross Clinic: Art experts estimate that the academy raised $15 million in a private sale of a portrait by the artist, The Cello Player (1896).

The institutions first started their fund-raising efforts when Thomas Jefferson University, a Philadelphia medical school, announced in fall 2006 that it would sell The Gross Clinic, which it has owned since 1878. The university agreed to sell it jointly to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art for $68 million. The Philadelphia Museum and Pennsylvania Academy were given 45 days to match the price.

The deadline was extended as the quest to keep the work in Philadelphia became a citywide effort. The Gross Clinic, which depicts a Philadelphia professor, Dr. Samuel D. Gross, operating on a man's thigh, is currently on view at the Pennsylvania Academy and will go on view at the Philadelphia Museum starting August 2.