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Awash in impressionist and early modernist masters like Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso and initially housed in Merion, Pennsylvania, Albert C. Barnes' art collection is unique. Following Barnes' death in an automobile accident in 1951, its governing foundation faced numerous restrictions on what could be displayed and where, opening times, staff salaries, endowment investment rules and more. These limitations eventually made it unsustainable in its suburban location and by 2012, the Barnes Foundation was relocated to a new, more centrally located home in Philadelphia. The trust's extensive provisions are just an example of Barnes' quirky and often cantankerous nature. In his newest book, The Maverick's Museum: Albert Barnes and his American Dream (Ecco), art critic and biographer Blake Gopnik—formerly a Newsweek reporter—brings Barnes and his collection to life. In this excerpt, Gopnik explores the beginning of Barnes' collecting, including the very first Vincent van Gogh painting to arrive and be displayed in the United States.
French peasants at work, rendered with maximum sentiment by the likes of Jean-François Millet. Forests near Paris captured at dawn, atwinkle with the light of the Barbizon school. Redheaded femmes fatales, glaring their way into men's hearts thanks to the paintbrush of Jean-Jacques Henner.
Out on Philadelphia's ritzy Main Line, pharmaceuticals millionaire Albert C. Barnes had empty walls to fill in his mansion, so he bought the art that any Gilded Age plutocrat was supposed to own. And then he found out that his dealers had sold him a bill of goods.
"They are just stinging you as they do everybody who has money to spend," explained his old classmate William Glackens. Even in America, let alone in Paris, the art Barnes was collecting hadn't been cutting-edge for a few decades.
Glackens was in a position to know. In the two decades since playing baseball with Barnes at Central High, he had become a leader of the American avant-garde, helping to found New York's . of painters. They promoted a messy, brushy realism dedicated to portraying the underside of American life, in contrast to the tidy styles and subjects favored by the reigning aesthetes and dealers of New York. The Ashcanners were about "art for life's sake" rather than for art's sake, as their leader Robert Henri put it. That left no room for poetic twinkle.
Making something like $200,000 a year from Argyrol, the gonorrheal antiseptic he'd invented, Barnes had decided to "do something with my life other than the pursuit of money." Thinking back to the artistic interests he'd had as a boy, and to the long-lost schoolmate who had helped kindle them, Barnes had reached out to Glackens. This renewed a friendship that lasted until Glackens' death, with little of the friction that came with Barnes' other relationships. If you were firmly enough lodged in the "friend" category—as only a handful of people ever were—Barnes could be loyal, generous, and forgiving. If you were lodged in his mind as an opponent, you might be in line for brutal treatment.
Vincent van Gogh's "Kaleidoscopic Hues"
In his ego-girding search for success, Barnes had set himself goals: "To make an important discovery, have a million dollars, work out my own ideals as to happiness, have an opinion on any subject that could compare with any man's no matter how educated or experienced that man would be."
He'd managed the discovery and the millions.
Happiness he would work on until his death, as most of us do. But the opinions—those he was in the process of figuring out. The only area where he had really achieved expertise was in selling drugs, and his interest in that had begun to fade. With help from Glackens, Barnes saw a chance to achieve an unrivaled level of opinionation in matters aesthetic—which, for good or ill, he certainly did.
At first Barnes had a hard time with the more modern styles that American art was at last attempting—with "why Glackens is painting pink cats," as Barnes put it.
But he soon came to trust that artists of this new breed saw "colors that for the ordinary person do not exist." Barnes was looking to Glackens to coach him in such extraordinary vision. It looks as if it took almost two years for Glackens to do it, but by 1912 he had persuaded Barnes to go for the truly contemporary, in both subjects and treatments.
In Pony Ballet, one of the Glackens paintings that Barnes began to buy, the image crops in so tightly on a single figure in vaudeville's latest chorus line that the dancer to her left becomes just a rear end; the one to her right is so brutally cut off by the picture's edge that only the tip of her elbow gets left. There's something daringly photographic about it, almost cinematic—as though Glackens had captured a single moment from one of the new panning shots used in movies. But reviewers were most in love with the painting's "kaleidoscopic hues" (shades of Barnes' "pink cats") or most in hate with its "puny and boneless arms too small for the girded figures." Barnes, always the contrarian, might have cared more about the pans than the praise.
Barnes soon realized that to get a really significant sample of the art of his times, he couldn't make do with New York artists or dealers. By early 1912, he was writing to Glackens about his desire to acquire "Renoirs, Sisleys and others of the modern painters"—to be bought in Paris, with Glackens as Barnes' buyer. Before long, Glackens was aboard the French steamer Rochambeau with a draft for $20,000. "I know the keenness with which Europeans look upon ready money," Barnes had told him, "and I am confident that you would be able to drive better bargains if you are in a position to say that you are ready to pay spot cash."
Within a very few days, Glackens realized this was not going to be all that easy, as he reported in another letter home: "Hunting up pictures is not child's play." Glackens had discovered that Barnes' budget would not stretch very far, with the most trivial Cézanne going for $3,000. But by the end of two weeks he had bought a total of 33 works.
It was "a fine collection of pictures," as Glackens informed Barnes, although lacking Degas and Monet ("too expensive") or any Gauguins and Matisses ("as I had seen better ones I thought it better to wait").
The most notable modern works, among the 33 that Glackens sent home, included the great Postman that van Gogh had painted back in 1889. You can see why Glackens chose it for Barnes: it has much the same "kaleidoscopic" colors and brushwork as Glackens' chorus girl did; its close-up on the working class hews closer to Ashcan art's urban ideals than many other, more bucolic van Goghs would have done. The portrait was the very first van Gogh to land in the United States—if Glackens had echoed its style, he'd got it at second hand—but word of the Dutchman's innovations was already spreading, so when the canvas arrived at his mansion, Lauraston, Barnes would have known that he'd snagged something special and uniquely modern.
One Cézanne and a few minor Renoirs joined the van Gogh on the trip from Paris, along with the only piece by an artist who the true avant-gardists of Paris would have counted as one of their own: a certain "Pèccaso." But even then, Glackens chose to buy a relatively approachable female portrait from a decade earlier, when Picasso had just barely begun to find his voice as a radical. It shows a redhead smoking in a café, and its fin de siècle, femme fatale feel is only a slight update on the redheads by Henner that Glackens had complained about to Barnes. It cost Barnes all of 1,000 francs—about $200, at the time—when he'd spent 13 times that on the Cézanne.
Tame as the Paris purchases might seem to jaded 21st-century eyes, they must have had a stupendous impact when they finally got unpacked. Even though Barnes had set Glackens in pursuit of modern French pictures, before the crates arrived, he'd have seen almost no examples in the flesh. He could only have quaked at the radically new colors and forms exploding around him. But Barnes enjoyed being rocked back on his heels. If, as he claimed, his first aesthetic experiences came from roaring fire trucks and ecstatic devotions, his art needed to have the same power.
The Birth of the Barnes Foundation
Ten years later, Barnes' collection had grown to more than 800 works, and he was still writing lists of his goals.
"Erect a building suitable to house a collection of paintings worth more than three million dollars," says one item in a kind of to-do list that Barnes scrawled in pencil on April 30, 1922. Another item describes the planned gallery as being "available to the public on certain days and under certain restrictions," on the model, Barnes wrote, of European house museums like the Wallace Collection in London. A third item calls for the creation of a foundation to run it, with an endowment of millions of dollars in government bonds. On that fair spring day, Barnes set in motion a plan that has borne fruit in the hundred years since, in what would soon become known as the Barnes Foundation.
By the end of October 1922, he was giving his new institution $7 million in bonds and stocks—based mostly on a transfer of his own shares in the drug company—along with his vast trove of artworks.
And then finally, on December 4, 1922, after endless lawyering, Albert Coombs Barnes could announce that the State of Pennsylvania had granted a grand, blue-sealed charter to the Barnes Foundation of Merion, Pennsylvania. Its aim: "to promote the advancement of education and the appreciation of the fine arts; and for this purpose to erect, found and maintain, in the Township of Lower Merion, County of Montgomery, and State of Pennsylvania, an art gallery and other necessary buildings for the exhibition of works of ancient and modern art."
Barnes' great adventure had begun—an adventure that far exceeded the mere "art museum" that the art world, and even Barnes himself, had imagined coming together from his first decade of art shopping.
▸ Adapted from The Maverick's Museum. Copyright © 2025 Blake Gopnik. Published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
