Standing like a Roman temple at the head of the broad, tree-lined Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Philadelphia Museum of Art looks every bit the archetypal museum that it is. Built in the neoclassical style in 1928, it’s the country’s third-largest art museum and one of its best, with a permanent collection of more than 225,000 objects housed in more than 200 galleries.
Its American collection is considered one of the finest in existence, with galleries devoted to the Colonial and Federal periods, Amish and Shaker crafts, works by early Philadelphia silversmiths and the foremost collection of paintings by 19th-century Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins. European galleries include masterpieces such as Van Gogh’s ‛Sunflowers’ and Cézanne’s ‛Large Bathers’. East Asian Art covers a vast period, from the third millennium B.C. to the present, with a fantastic collection of Oriental carpets, sculpture and paintings, and an entire 1917 Japanese teahouse. Other architectural transplants include a pillared 16th-century Hindu temple, a Chinese palace hall, a 13th-century French cloister and the stone entranceway from the 12th-century French abbey of Saint-Laurent. Modern and contemporary art includes works by Picasso, Dalí, Miró, Léger, de Kooning and Pollock, plus the world’s largest collection of works by Marcel Duchamp, including the huge ‛The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)’, still sitting exactly where the artist placed it in 1954.
Four blocks east, the gem-like Rodin Museum was a gift to the city from Philadelphia-born film mogul Jules Mastbaum, who spent three years amassing a huge collection of sculptor Auguste Rodin’s work and then commissioned French architect Paul Philippe Cret and landscape architect Jacques Gréber to design a beaux arts building and formal garden to display it—all for “the enjoyment of my fellow citizens”. The museum houses the largest collection of Rodin’s work outside Paris. Highlights include a cast of The Thinker outside the museum’s entrance and The Gates of Hell, a monumental 20-foot doorway decorated with scenes from Dante’s Divine Comedy.
In May of 2012, after a protracted legal battle, the Barnes Foundation will finalise its move 10 miles from the Main Line suburb of Merion to Philadelphia city centre, not far from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Dr. Albert C. Barnes was a ‘pull-yourself-up-by-your- bootstraps’ type, born in 1908 in a working-class Philadelphia neighbourhood. He left to study medicine, then founded a pharmaceutical company that made him very wealthy. Like many new millionaires, he began collecting art. But unlike many, he remembered where he had come from. First, he hung some of the paintings he had acquired in his factory, inviting his employees to discuss the works. Then he began offering them free educational seminars. Eventually, he came to share his passion with the wider world through the establishment of the Barnes Foundation, which has become one of the world’s premier private art collections. The foundation is home to more than 6,000 works, including one of the most important collections of French Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings anywhere—with 181 works by Renoir, 69 by Cézanne, 59 by Matisse and 46 by Picasso. Other major European artists include Van Gogh, Degas, Corot, Seurat, Monet, Manet, Goya and El Greco.
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