As anyone who reads ArtsJournal’s visual arts blogs well knows, the sale of Thomas Eakins’ The Cello Player by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is not sitting well with many in the local or national art scene. “The deal, some say, has soured what had been a heady community fund-raising effort to keep Eakins’ masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, in Philadelphia – because now a leader of that effort has done precisely what many donors were upset about in the first place: sold a treasured painting in a secret transaction.”