The story
Walk into the Barnes and the walls look wrong. Paintings by Renoir and Cezanne hang edge to edge with wrought-iron door hinges, African masks, and Pennsylvania Dutch furniture, arranged in tight symmetrical clusters by size, colour and shape rather than by artist or date. These groupings are called ensembles, and every one was fixed in place by the man who bought the art, Albert Barnes.
Barnes was a Philadelphia doctor who made a fortune around 1900 on Argyrol, a silver-based antiseptic sold worldwide. He spent it on modern French painting when almost no American museum wanted it, and he bought deep: roughly 180 canvases by Renoir and 69 by Cezanne, the largest groups of either anywhere, plus major works by Matisse, Picasso and Seurat. He even commissioned Matisse to paint a huge mural, The Dance, for the wall above the windows of his gallery.
He also wrote a trust meant to freeze all of it forever. The art was to stay in his suburban building in Merion, the ensembles were never to be rearranged, and nothing was to be lent out. After his death in 1951 the foundation ran short of money, and a long court fight followed over whether the collection could move at all. In 2012 it did, into a new building on Benjamin Franklin Parkway in central Philadelphia, where the galleries were rebuilt to reproduce the old rooms almost inch for inch. The ensembles he set a century ago hang as he left them.
