Dr. Albert Barnes and The Barnes Collection - Marlene Barasch Strauss

Having developed eyedrops for newborns, Dr. Albert Barnes amassed a fortune, which he used to build the greatest private collection of Post-Impressionist and early Modern art in the world. Paintings by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, Matisse, and Picasso, among others—cherished names of 19- and 20-century French painting—were installed in the limestone mansion he established as a school, not a museum, for the purpose of study. How Barnes assembled that collection during the Great Depression and the subsequent relocation of the collection from Merion, Pennsylvania, to Philadelphia are the subjects of this lecture.