The Character of an Art Collection: Isabella Stewart Gardner, Henry Clay Frick, Albert C. Barnes, David Lloyd Kreeger, and the Donor Memorial in the U.S.

Abstract

Donor memorial museums represent a unique group of American art collections. These museums, created by private art collectors to perpetuate their own legacies, are among the most interesting institutions in the American art world. House museums like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Frick Collection, and the Kreeger Museum are especially intriguing because each iconoclastic collector conceived and implemented a specific vision for how visitors would view the collection. These museums, along with one of the most controversial private art collections in the country, the Barnes Foundation, share many similarities in format and creation. Each is an anomaly in its respective setting and fully projects the force and personality of its creator. The architectural styles of the buildings especially convey the eccentricities of the donors, who chose ostentatious, incongruous architectural vocabularies for 20th century Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. Strong desires and wishes of the collection creators, coupled with virtually iron-clad legal wills, ensure constancy and permanence for these institutions. Although it no longer seems to be the fashion or convention of the wealthy to devote energies and resources to cultivating such private art collections, these institutions remain popular destinations for art lovers. Their continued existence allows us to understand how people of another age created monuments to themselves—museums that still fascinate and attract us today.