Background

He was born on January 2, 1872, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of John Jesse and Lydia A. Schafer Barnes. His father, who was badly wounded in the fighting at Cold Harbor, Va. , in the Civil War, held a variety of jobs, ultimately working in the circulation department of the Philadelphia Public Ledger. His mother, a fervent Methodist who took her children to camp meetings, was determined that Barnes should become a doctor.

Education

Albert entered Philadelphia's Central High School to study a rigorous traditional curriculum. After graduation in 1889, Barnes enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, supporting himself by tutoring and by playing semi-professional baseball. He received the M. D. degree in 1892 and interned at the State Hospital for the Insane at Warren, where he developed a profound interest in psychology and psychiatry.

Career

In the summer of 1893, Barnes took the first of many trips to Europe, and on returning to Philadelphia he began medical practice. Dissatisfied with medicine, however, he went to Europe again in 1896, and spent a year and a half in Germany studying chemistry and philosophy and selling American-made stoves. On reestablishing himself in Philadelphia, he took simultaneous jobs writing advertisements for a commercial tonic and serving as a consulting chemist to a pharmaceutical firm and became engrossed in chemical research, seeking to discover an antiseptic silver compound that would be less caustic than silver nitrate.

In 1899 he again returned to Germany for pharmacological studies, and later resumed his investigations in Philadelphia. Barnes undertook chemical experiments in Heidelberg. Following his marriage, working in his own laboratory in Philadelphia, Barnes and his partner, Herman Hille, a German chemist, finally perfected a silver protein compound, which they called Argyrol and which they began to market to doctors in 1902. The new antiseptic was widely used, particularly in the eyes of newborn babies, and the firm prospered immensely.

Barnes bought out his partner in 1907 and subsequently formed the A. C. Barnes Company. Although sales were large, the production operation continued to be small-scale and intimate: Barnes set up classes in philosophy and psychology for two hours a day for the dozen or more workers and encouraged them to use their leisure time for self-fulfillment. In 1928, Barnes sold the highly profitable business and with part of the proceeds established a trust fund for former workers and their widows. In 1905, Barnes built a mansion in Merion, a suburb of Philadelphia, and soon began collecting paintings for his home. Around 1910, he renewed his friendship with his high school classmate, the painter William Glackens, who purchased some modern works for him. Buying paintings soon became a passion for Barnes. His goal was to accumulate art works representing all the major traditions and provide a gallery where students might systematically study the history of art. Purchasing paintings in both Europe and the United States, Barnes himself bought astutely and built up what some critics considered the finest collection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French art in the world. The more than one thousand paintings of the Barnes collection eventually comprised 180 canvases by Renoir, sixty by Matisse, and fifty-nine by Cézanne.

More than a collector, Barnes also turned to aesthetics, and in April 1915 published "How to Judge a Painting" in Arts and Decoration. Shortly after, he read John Dewey's Democracy and Education and was greatly impressed by Dewey's theories of learning. At the age of forty-five, then, he enrolled in Dewey's graduate seminar at Columbia University and soon became closely associated with the educator. Dewey dedicated Art as Experience to Barnes, and Barnes dedicated The Art in Painting to Dewey. A forceful, hot-tempered, often acerbic person, Barnes frequently became involved in public disputes about art and his collection. An early battle arose when he lent some of his most striking canvases to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1923. The ridicule that art critics directed against the paintings angered Barnes so much that thereafter he restricted viewing of his collection considerably. The Barnes Foundation had already, on December 4, 1922, been chartered as an educational institution, and Barnes turned over to it his entire art collection, together with Barnes Company stock and a twelve-acre tract at Merion. To house the paintings, a twenty-six-room gallery designed by Paul Cret was built; it was dedicated in 1925. An instructional arboretum was developed on the grounds of the gallery. From its inception, the focus of the Barnes Foundation was educational. At first, courses in aesthetics were set up in conjunction with the University of Pennsylvania, but Barnes soon came to believe that the university students were insufficiently prepared and so the ties were severed. The independent, tuition-free classes at the Barnes Foundation - some taught by Barnes himself - were organized along lines laid down by John Dewey, who was named director of education. Learning was conceived of as active, moving out from the students' own interests, and involving reorganization of experience so that the learner was better able to deal with his own environment. Barnes believed that any person could learn to appreciate art, which he saw as linked to all of life. In painting, basic elements of color, line, and form in space were studied, and the continuity of aesthetic traditions was emphasized. For many years he lectured to advanced students in European galleries.

Barnes was accidentally killed on a rural highway in Chester County, Pa. , when he failed to heed a stop sign and his automobile was hit by a large truck. He had stipulated that on his death no additional paintings would be added to the collection; no pictures could be removed or copied; and the gallery would be open only for instruction. For many years he had limited access to his paintings to the students of the foundation and to an occasional favored visitor, and only in 1961, after extended litigation, was the gallery finally opened to the public.

Achievements

• Albert Coombs Barnes is remembered as an inventor of the antiseptic Argyrol (a mild silver protein anti-infective compound for mucous membrane tissues) and noted art collector, whose collection is a part of the Barnes Foundation Galleries.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation

    (From the front flap of this 317-page book: "The most eage...)

  • The French Primitives and Their Forms From Their Origin to the End of the Fifteenth Century

    (The Barnes Foundation studies French Primitive paintings ...)

  • The Art of Henri Matisse with 151 Half-Tone Reproductions

    (We sell Rare, out-of-print, uncommon, & used BOOKS, PRINT...)

  • The Art of Cezanne

    (456-pages; 171 illus.)

Connections

On June 4, 1901, he married Laura Leggett, the daughter of a prosperous Brooklyn wholesale grocer. They had no children.

Father:

John Jesse Barnes

Mother:

Lydia A. Schafer Barnes

Wife:

Laura Leggett

References

• The House of Barnes: The Man, The Collection, The Controversy (Memoir Vol. 266) (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge)
• Art Held Hostage: The Battle over the Barnes Collection
• Art, Education, and African-American Culture: Albert Barnes and the Science of Philanthropy
• The Devil and Dr. Barnes: Portrait of an American Art Collector