Beleaguered Delaware Museum Clears Its Debt with Sale of Homer & Wyeth

The Delaware Art Museum has had a rough time of it. An ill-conceived expansion plan left the museum with a crippling debt. Then another ill-conceived plan to sell works failed to meet expectations and retire the debts. So now the museum has finally retired its obligations but at a heavy cost. Earlier this week, the Museum’s president confirmed that it had sold an important work, Winslow Homer’s “Milking Time,” as well as Andrew Wyeth’s “Arthur Cleveland”:

Last year, the museum privately sold “Black Crescent,” a mobile by Alexander Calder, and the Pre-Raphaelite “Isabella and the Pot of Basil,” by William Holman Hunt, which brought $4.9 million in an auction at Christie’s in London, far less than the low estimate of $8.4 million the painting had been expected to bring. “Today, we close one of the most difficult chapters in the story of the Delaware Art Museum,” Michael Miller, the museum’s chief executive, said in a statement. “We reached our most important goal – keeping the museum open and thriving. We are very grateful for those who have understood the arduous and complex decisions that we encountered during this long and challenging phase.”

While the museum did not say how much the sales raised, it said in the statement that it had been able to fully repay its debt of $19.8 million without “significantly depleting its endowment.”

Delaware Art Museum Completes Sale of Artworks to Repay Debt (NYTimes.com)