The Delaware Art Museum has announced the private sales of two of its works as part of its debt repayment efforts.
The two paintings are “Arthur Cleveland”by Andrew Wyeth, a portrait of a neighbor painted in 1946 and “Milking Time”by Winslow Homer, an 1875 image of a milkmaid and child overlooking cows in a pasture.
The sales mark the end of a process to protect the museum from closure by retiring its bond debt.
The Wilmington museum took on the loan in 2003 to finance the expansion of its historic Kentmere Park building.
The museum owed 19.8 million dollars. The bond agreement required it pay back the money by 2037, but increased regulation in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis accelerated the repayment terms.
In March 2014, the museum’s Board of Trustees voted to sell up to four works of art to meet the bank deadline. The Wilmington art organization last year sold “Isabella and the Pot of Basil” by William Holman Hunt and “Black Crescent” by Alexander Calder.
The decision to sells works triggered sanctions from two professional museum associations.
The American Alliance of Museums committee voted unanimously in 2014 to remove the Delaware Art Museum's accreditation and the Association of Art Museum Directors told its members to suspend all art loans to the Wilmington museum and halt any collaborations with it.
In a statement, the museum's CEO Mike Miller said, “Today, we close one of the most difficult chapters in the story of the Delaware Art Museum. We reached our most important goal, keeping the Museum open and thriving.”
This piece is made possible, in part, by a grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.