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The Barnes Foundation is an educational art institution in a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1922 by an American physician Dr. Albert C. Barnes, who collected art after making a fortune by co-developing an early antimicrobial drug marketed as Argyrol.
With the enormous profits from the sale of the drug, Barnes accumulated a large collection of mainly French Impressionist art works, which today form the holdings of the Barnes Foundation, an educational art institution established by his will. The paintings were valued in March, 2010, at $25 billion.
Today, the Foundation possesses more than 2500 objects, including 800 paintings. Among its collection are
- 181 works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
- 69 by Paul Cézanne,
- 59 by Henri Matisse,
- 46 by Pablo Picasso,
- 21 by Chaim Soutine,
- 18 by Henri Rousseau,
- 16 by Amedeo Modigliani,
- 11 by Edgar Degas,
- 7 by Vincent Van Gogh,
- 6 by Georges Seurat,
- as well as numerous other masters, including Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Gauguin, El Greco, Francisco Goya, Edouard Manet, Jean Hugo, Claude Monet
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More facts about Albert C. Barnes:
- The son of a poverty-stricken Civil War veteran, he grew up in the verminous, squatter slums of Philadelphia, with a burning determination to get rich.
- Argyrol was an instant and worldwide success, and Barnes was a millionaire before he was 35. In 1928, with superb timing, Barnes sold out Argyrol for an estimated $4,000,000, not long before the discovery of antibiotics, which largely replaced it.
- Guided by his lifelong friend, Artist William Glackens, Barnes began to buy up French impressionist paintings by the boatload.
- Although many of his early purchases were mistakes, he showed taste and a fine instinct for good investment. He was one of the discoverers of Modigliani. In one moment of sound judgment he bought 60 Soutines for $50 apiece—long before Soutine was well known.
- In time Barnes assembled the world's greatest collection of Matisses, the largest group of Cezannes outside the Louvre, and over $50 million worth of art by Picasso, Braque, Gauguin, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe and Ben Shahn.
- When his collection outgrew his home and factory, Barnes built a marble temple to house it in suburban Merion, surrounded the place with ferocious police dogs and a ten-foot "spite wall."
Book - Art Held Hostage: The Battle over the Barnes Collection
