The Shopping Spree That Built a Museum

How the world-renowned Barnes Foundation's impressive trove of modern art was started on a shoestring

- BLAKE GOPNIK

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 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, REN- dered 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.