Today I got to tour the Barnes Museum, which houses an amazing collection of art with particular highlights of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Modernist works. The paintings reside in a relatively recent (2012) building in Philadelphia. The museum’s decor is spacious and allows for a great deal of outside lighting and comfortable seating in a glass-and-cement structure, but the individual rooms are arranged as Albert C. Barnes had originally intended in his home.
Shown here going clockwise from the top right are paintings by Van Gogh, El Greco, MirĂ³, Monet, Chirico, and Rodin.
The Barnes art collection consists of about 4,000 objects and in 2024 Wikipedia indicated the net worth as about $25 billion. Albert C. Barnes was an American businessman and chemist who got rich from his co-development of Argyrol, an antiseptic made partly out of silver — he sold off his company right before the stock market crash of 1929.
By that time, Barnes had been a serious art collector for a couple of decades, and he established the Barnes Foundation as an educational institution to promote artists and the study of art in 1925, and it is still running today.
