That's what Thomas Jefferson University president Robert L. Barchi said in November in explaining the university's decision to sell Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic after owning it for 129 years.

Jefferson may not be a museum, but commissioning and collecting art have long been central to its philosophy, and after decades of such endeavors, the school has thousands of pieces to show for it.

The collection's artistic capital took a big hit with the $68 million sale of The Gross Clinic, and Barchi says that the school intends to deaccession two other pieces in the multimillion-dollar collection: Its remaining Eakins works, Portrait of Benjamin H. Rand and Portrait of William S. Forbes.

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

American medical institutions have become a natural habitat for art in recent decades; landscapes and sculpture are now frequently encountered among the examining rooms and medical stacks.

Art and music have a high - and growing - profile at the Cleveland Clinic, which is in the midst of selecting seven site-specific commissions for its new heart center. The Mayo Clinic offers daily tours of its collection, which includes a large Rodin study, Warhol silkscreens, a sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly, and works of glass artist Dale Chihuly.

'Just endless'

Jefferson thought enough of its art to retain, in 1988, a curator, Julie S. Berkowitz, whose 725-page book on the collection, Adorn the Halls, is just a sampling of what the university owns, she says.

"It's just endless," said Berkowitz, a former Philadelphia Museum of Art employee who oversaw conservation, lending, insurance and organization of the collection for 15 years. "It's not only in the [Eakins] gallery but also in the hallways, in lecture halls, in auditoriums."

Berkowitz even found important documents and works in closets and other crannies.

"One time I was looking in the library of the anatomy department and I found the collotype [an early photographic reproduction] of The Gross Clinic. This was signed by Eakins."

But the future of at least some of the art at Jefferson is uncertain. Berkowitz retired in 2003 and has not been replaced. The university says it has no valuation on its art collection, though a spokeswoman says it is insured.

And now president Barchi says that The Gross Clinic might not be the last Eakins to go, which could leave Jefferson's Eakins Gallery strangely lacking in anything by Eakins.

"We might seek to sell another painting," Barchi said recently. "We said at the time we decided to sell The Gross Clinic that we certainly would entertain any opportunity to sell the other two."