Either of the remaining two Eakins works would likely sell for a figure in the double-digit millions, Berkowitz said. The $68 million fetched by The Gross Clinic - now co-owned by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art - was the highest price ever paid for a pre-World War II American artwork. It will be used, Jefferson officials say, to establish a permanent fund for scholarships and endowed faculty positions.

Jefferson's Rand and Forbes portraits were still on display this week, along with a pale digital facsimile of The Gross Clinic stretched on a reproduction of the ornate gilt frame. The original is on view at the Academy of the Fine Arts through June 2008, installed in a gallery showing Eakins' influence on other artists.

(The other notable Eakins in Jefferson's Eakins Gallery is by Susan Macdowell Eakins, the artist's wife, and Jefferson does not own it. Portrait of a Soldier is on loan from the French Benevolent Society of Philadelphia.)

A Jefferson spokeswoman says the Eakins Gallery receives only about 500 visitors a year (with a spike in attendance after the sale of The Gross Clinic was announced). Access is not easy. A visitor must ask a guard to unlock the door, and during this week's visit by a reporter, Susan Eakins' painting and another gem in the collection, a second-century marble Athena, were seen in semidarkness, the staff unable to turn on lighting.

But the major part of the art experience at Jefferson is serendipitous. Walking up a staircase or out of an elevator, students and faculty are likely to encounter a row of portraits, which are everywhere and variable in quality. Though as artworks, portraits are necessarily bound to the mission of glorifying their subjects, these represent a remarkable lineage of artists associated with the enduring school of realism that started with Eakins at the Academy of the Fine Arts.

Among the realists or impressionists who are represented by portrait work at Jefferson and who studied or taught at the academy are, after Eakins, Chase, Daniel Garber, Walter Emerson Baum, Ben Solowey, Nelson Shanks, Bo Bartlett and Paul DuSold.

The portraits of doctors, nurses and administrators at Jefferson are the artistic evidence of a tradition, formalized in 1924, of having each year's graduating class honor its "most inspiring" professor.

Jefferson maintains an art committee that manages the collection. The body makes recommendations to trustees on whether to lend a painting, plans events centered on the art collection, considers offers of gifts, and decides where new artworks are displayed.

"Art was always a part of the institution," Berkowitz says.

More art was recently added to the life of Jefferson. In five workshops starting this month, 20 Jefferson students are exploring art and medicine at the Academy of the Fine Arts. The academy's new star tenant, The Gross Clinic, will be a focus of study.

The point, both institutions say, it to "launch a broader conversation about the role of art in medicine and clinical practice."

Art education, some might call it.

The Jefferson University Collection: Selected Works

PAINTINGS

Thomas Eakins, Portrait of Benjamin H. Rand

Thomas Eakins, Portrait of William S. Forbes

Thomas Sully, Portrait of Thomas D. Mütter

Dirk Stoop (attributed), Cavaliers in Battle (ca. 1650-75)

William Merritt Chase, Portrait of William W. Keen Jr.