The Samuel H. Kress Collection: a cultural legacy of Italian Renaissance art in midcentury America

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THE SAMUEL H. KRESS COLLECTION:

A CULTURAL LEGACY OF ITALIAN RENAISSANCE ART IN MIDCENTURY AMERICA

by

Lauren Dodds

______________________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)

May 2019
ii

Table of Contents

Abstract iii

List of Illustrations iv

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Creating the Kress Collection of Italian Renaissance Art, 1927–1941 39

Chapter 2: Italian Renaissance Art for the Hinterlands 114

Chapter 3: Conserving the Kress Collection in Midcentury America 184

Chapter 4: Italian Renaissance Art from Coast to Coast: 247
The Kress Regional Galleries Program

Conclusion 314

Illustrations 322

Appendix I: Kress Acquisitions of Italian Paintings, 13
th
–18
th
centuries 383

Appendix II: Kress Acquisitions of European Paintings, Excluding Italian 444

Appendix III: Kress Acquisitions of European Sculpture 459

Bibliography 467

iii
Abstract

The Samuel H. Kress Collection represents the largest private collection of Italian
Renaissance art ever assembled in the United States, containing over three thousand works. In
this dissertation, the Kress Collection serves as a prism through which to examine how and why
mid-twentieth century Americans laid claim to Italian Renaissance art as part of their own
cultural heritage. The Kress Collection was created between 1927 and 1961, an era in which
Americans sought to redefine their national identity in the midst of global conflict and growing
interdependence. At times of great change, collections represent powerful opportunities to craft
narratives about the past and our connection to it. The Kress Collection presented a selective
vision of Italian Renaissance art to midcentury Americans, one defined by its commitment to
Christianity, capitalism, and republicanism. In doing so, it reflected and reinforced dominant
American cultural commitments. My project investigates the lasting effects of this intervention,
devoting particular attention to the Kress Collection’s exhibition and dispersal.
This dissertation offers the first systematic study of the development and distribution of
the Kress Collection—one that provides new insights regarding collecting practices, the cultural
legacy of Italian Renaissance art, and the importance of early modern artwork in midcentury
American museums and the public humanities more broadly. It challenges existing scholarship
on collecting and museum development in the United States, which downplays the centrality of
Italian Renaissance art in public and private collections after the Gilded Age. I contend that
Renaissance art had significant political, economic, religious, and cultural resonance in the
United States in the mid-twentieth century. Furthermore, this study examines larger questions
about how private individuals shape public institutions, crafting narratives through collections
that reflect their own ideological commitments.
iv
List of Illustrations

Fig. I.1 Giorgione, Adoration of the Shepherds, 1505/1510
Fig. I.2 Repository Map of the Kress Collection, Samuel H. Kress Foundation Website
Fig. 1.1 Simone Martini, Annunciation, reproduced in The Burlington Magazine for
Connoisseurs, 1903
Fig. 1.2 Simone Martini, Annunciation, 1333
Fig. 1.3 Titian, Portrait of Giacomo Doria, reproduced in The Burlington Magazine for
Connoisseurs, 1903
Fig. 1.4 Titian, Portrait of Giacomo Doria, 1530–5
Fig. 1.5 Pietro degli Ingannati, att., Madonna and Child with Female Saint and Donor, c.
1530–40
Fig. 1.6 Veronese School, The Annunciation and the Nativity, early 15
th
c.
Fig. 1.7 Veronese School, Legend of a Saint, early 15
th
c.
Fig. 1.8 Giambattista Tiepolo, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, c. 1760
Fig. 1.9 Circle of Giovanni Boccati, Madonna Enthroned with Angels, 1450–60
Fig. 1.10 Duccio, Madonna Rucellai, 1285
Fig. 1.11 Duccio, The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew, 1308–11
Fig. 1.12 Workshop of Domenico Fetti, The Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man,
1618/1628
Fig. 1.13 Drix Duryea, Photograph of Samuel H. Kress Residence, Entrance Hall, c. 1938–
40
Fig. 1.14 Drix Duryea, Photograph of Samuel H. Kress Residence, Entrance Hall, View of
Giorgione’s Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1938–40
Fig. 1.15 Drix Duryea, Photograph of Samuel H. Kress Residence, Venetian Sitting Room,
c. 1938–40
Fig. 1.16 Drix Duryea, Photograph of Samuel H. Kress Residence, Venetian Sitting Room,
c. 1938–40
Fig. 2.1 Follower of Lorenzo di Credi, Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist, c.
1500
Fig. 2.2 Burland Printing Company, front cover of An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent
by Mr. Samuel H. Kress, 1934
Fig. 2.3 Detail of the cover of An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H.
Kress, 1934
Fig. 2.4 Piero di Cosimo, Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels, c. 1520
Fig. 2.5 Detail of the cover of An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H.
Kress, 1934
Fig. 2.6 Burland Printing Company, Entry in An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr.
Samuel H. Kress, 1934
Fig. 2.7 Attributed to Sebastiano Mainardi, Madonna and Child with St. John and Three
Angels, c. 1500
Fig. 2.8 Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of a Gentleman, c. 1540
Fig. 2.9 Giuliano Bugiardini, Madonna and Child with Infant St. John, c. 1510
Fig. 2.10 Alessandro Moretto, Saint Jerome Penitent, 1530–40
Fig. 2.11 Italian Source Chart by Alfred Barr, inside Italian Masters, 1940
v
Fig. 3.1 1932 cradle on the verso of Giuliano Bugiardini, Madonna and Child with St.
John the Baptist
Fig. 3.2 Photograph of The Healing of Blind Bartimaeus, after cleaning
Fig. 3.3 Workshop of Fernando Gallego, The Healing of Blind Bartimaeus, 1480–88
Fig. 3.4 Vittore Carpaccio, Christ Blessing, c. 1510
Fig. 3.5 Paolo di Giovanni Fei, Christ on the Road to Calvary, c. 1385
Fig. 3.6 1925 photograph of Domenico di Bartolo, Madonna and Child with Saints, c.
1430
Fig. 3.7 Attributed to Ugolino di Siena, St. Margaret Holding the Cross, c. 1330
Fig. 3.8 Veneto Cassetta frame, mid-16
th
c.
Fig. 3.9 Drix Duryea, Photograph of the Samuel H. Kress Residence, Gothic Sitting Room,
c. 1938–40
Fig. 3.10 Drix Duryea, Photograph of the Samuel H. Kress Residence, Gothic Sitting Room,
c. 1938–40
Fig. 3.11 Green cut-velvet Florentine table and chest cover, 16
th
c.
Fig. 3.12 Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of a Married Couple, 1523–4
Fig. 3.13 Photograph of Bernard Berenson’s sitting room at Villa i Tatti, Settignano, c.
1910
Fig. 3.14 The Titian Room, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Fig. 3.15 Benozzo Gozzoli, Saint Ursula with Two Angels and Donor, c. 1455/1460
Fig. 3.16 Masolino da Panicale, The Virgin Annunciate, c. 1430
Fig. 3.17 Titian or Giorgione, Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman, c. 1510/1515
Fig. 3.18 Shadowgraph detail from Alan Burroughs, Art Criticism from a Laboratory
Fig. 3.19 Photographs of Filippo Lippi, Madonna and Child with the Young St. John after
cleaning
Fig. 3.20 Paolo di Giovanni Fei, The Assumption of the Virgin, c. 1385
Fig. 3.21 Lorenzo Lotto, The Nativity, 1523
Fig. 3.22 Fra Filippo Lippi, The Annunciation, c. 1435/40
Fig. 3.23 Miss Rheingold Beer Advertisement, New Yorker, 1960
Fig. 3.24 Sketch from Harper’s Magazine, 1956
Fig. 3.25 Thomas Campbell’s Instagram Post, November 15, 2017
Fig. 3.26 Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi, c. 1500
Fig. 4.1 Line drawing of a peacock by Enid Bell, Signs & Symbols in Christian Art, 1954
Fig. 4.2 Detail of Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi, The Adoration of the Magi, c.
1440/1460
Fig. 4.3 Line drawing of the eye by Enid Bell, Signs & Symbols in Christian Art, 1954
Fig. 4.4 Detail of Francesco del Cossa, St. Lucy, c. 1473/1474
Fig. 4.5 Photograph of the S.H. Kress & Co. in Meridian, Mississippi, 1933
Fig. 4.6 Photograph of the Huckleberry Hill storeroom, LIFE, 1953
Fig. 4.7 Photograph of Rush Kress at the Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1953
Fig. 4.8 Photograph of the Honolulu Academy of Art, Gallery no. 6: Renaissance, 1959
Fig. 4.9 Photograph of the Kress Reception at the De Young Museum, San Francisco
Chronicle, 1955
Fig. 4.10 Photograph of the Receiving line at the Kress Collection Opening Reception,
1954
Fig. 4.11 Photograph of the line outside the North Carolina Museum of Art, c. 1956
vi
Fig. 4.12 Proclamation of Samuel H. Kress Foundation Day from the City of New Orleans,
1953
Fig. 4.13 “El Paso Caterer”, National Geographic Magazine, 1961
Fig. 4.14 Students with Drawing Boards at the Birmingham Museum of Art, National
Geographic Magazine, 1961
Fig. 4.15 “Junior Art Critic in the Seattle Art Museum studies a tondo,” National
Geographic Magazine, 1961
Fig. 4.16 “Boy Scout in the El Paso Museum of Art,” National Geographic Magazine, 1961
Fig. 4.17 “Eye-filling spectacle…captivates young visitors to the El Paso Museum,”
National Geographic Magazine, 1961
Fig. C.1 Photograph of the Complete Catalogues of the Samuel H. Kress Collection
Fig. C.2 The Kress Collection homepage on the Kress Foundation website
Fig. C.3 Francesco del Cossa, Saint Lucy, c. 1473/1474
Fig. C.4 Reconstruction of Francesco del Cossa, San Petronio Altarpiece

vii
Acknowledgements

Researching and writing this dissertation has been one of the most rewarding experiences
of my life, in no small part because of the people and institutions that I encountered along the
way. I have been able to travel and dedicate time to writing thanks to grants and fellowships
from the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, USC Visual Studies Research Institute,
USC Graduate School, and the Department of Art History. I wrote this dissertation at my desk in
the Getty Research Institute, a “room of one’s own” for which I will always be grateful. The GRI
and its staff provide an invaluable service to the academic community by making their incredible
resources available.
My committee members have been unfailing in their support and guidance throughout the
dissertation writing process. My advisor Kate Flint stepped in enthusiastically when I proposed
this topic, and her insights strengthened my own thinking and writing. Amy Ogata helped me
sharpen my arguments as well. In addition, she offered critical advice about navigating the
dissertation writing process. Peter Mancall’s encouragement and counsel have also been
invaluable to me. I feel fortunate to have worked closely with these three scholars over the past
few years; I admire them all not only for their scholarship, but for their character.
The majority of my research took place in New York at the Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Archive. Fortuitously, the Kress Foundation completed a project to make the archive more
accessible to scholars during the same months that I began my research. I am grateful to the
Foundation for making these resources available, and particularly would like to thank Max
Marmor, Lisa Schermerhorn, and Chelsea Cates for making my time in New York pleasant and
productive.
viii
The Kress Collection exists in dozens of locations across the United States, so my
research required extensive travel. This was one of the highlights of my project thanks to the
many welcoming and knowledgeable curators, registrars, archivists, librarians, professors, and
conservators I met in the course of my research. They include: Helga Aurisch, Sofia Bakis,
Nancy Bateman, Lynn Boland, Michael Brown, William Brown, Ashleigh Crocker, Ilaria Della
Monica, Ann Forschler-Tarrasch, Melissa Gardner, Ellie Grebowski, Margaret Gregory, Hank
Griffith, Kurt Helfrich, Mary Kramer, Martha MacLeod, Olivia Miller, Dianne Dwyer Modestini,
James Moske, Gregory Most, Kirk Nickel, Melissa Pope, Perri Lee Roberts, Tod Ruhstaller,
Vanessa Schmid, Kristen Schmidt, Amber Schneider, Robert Schindler, David Steel, Dawn
Sueoka, Pauline Sugino, Michele Willens, Emily Willkom, Rose Wood, and Cory Woodall.
Special thanks to Missy Lemke for sharing her extensive work on the National Gallery of Art’s
images related to the Kress Collection. I am also grateful to Joyce Hill Stoner for making the
Foundation for Advancement in Conservation’s oral histories available to me.
As I wrote my dissertation, I benefitted from the help of many other teachers, colleagues,
and friends. Amy Braden of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute has been a
treasured mentor and friend. She helped me discover a happy second home at USC in the EMSI.
My former advisors Lisa Pon, Cynthia Colburn, and Michael Zakian structured my thinking
about the field of art history, and have been unstinting in their support. My fellow graduate
students infused my time at USC with joy. Thank you to Christopher McGeorge for reading
dozens of proposals and drafts over the years. Kay Wells and Karen Huang served as valuable
mentors. Emily Anderson and Jessica Brier enlivened the occasionally isolating process of
dissertation writing with countless lunches at the Getty. I am also grateful to Dina Murokh for
her feedback, and for all she has done to make departmental life lively. Outside of USC, I am
ix
thankful to Margarita Karasoulas, Jenny Parsons, Sarah Montross, Samantha Le, Michalle Gould,
and Aliya Reich for challenging and inspiring me.
Last but certainly not least, I could not have completed this project without the loving and
generous support of my family: my parents, William and Patricia; my sister, Alexandra; Penny;
and most of all, my husband, Gary Don Brophy. Thank you for cheering me on, reading drafts,
and celebrating all things Kress with me for the past few years.

1
Introduction

The Kress Collection is the largest private collection of fourteenth- to sixteenth-century
Italian art ever assembled in the United States, containing over three thousand works of art.
Using the fortune he developed through a chain of five-and-dime stores, Samuel Kress (1863–
1955) began collecting paintings in the mid-1920s and aimed to create the most comprehensive
collection of Italian Renaissance art outside of the Italian peninsula. In 1938, Kress abandoned
his original plans to establish a namesake museum, instead agreeing to donate the majority of his
collection to the nascent National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In the late 1940s, the Kress
Foundation extended Kress’s vision of providing Italian Renaissance art to the American public
by creating a Regional Galleries Program. Through this program, the Kress Foundation donated
the entirety of the Kress Collection by 1961.
Today the collection exists in over eighty locations across the United States, which may
explain why its impact has not been fully considered in extant scholarship. The decision to
unmoor the Kress Collection from a single institution transformed the cultural landscape for
midcentury Americans by bringing Italian Renaissance art into a diverse range of communities
and promoting cultural engagement as a key aspect of civic life. Furthermore, its dispersed
identity makes us reconsider: what is a collection?
My dissertation examines the formation, conservation, and ultimate dispersal of the Kress
collection in order to explore questions about collecting, cultural appropriation, conservation,
and the place of Italian Renaissance art in twentieth-century American museums and civic life.
Through a close study of the loans, tours, and donations that took the Kress Collection to diverse
communities across the United States, I contend that the creation and display of this collection
encouraged mid-twentieth-century Americans to embrace the Italian Renaissance and its material

2
culture as a critical element of their own cultural heritage. In doing so, the Kress Collection
invited Americans to envision themselves as inheritors of the traditions of Western Civilization,
while concurrently contributing to narratives about Italian Renaissance art that persist in popular
and scholarly conceptions of this historical period.

The Kress Collection & the History of Collecting
In December 1938, Samuel Kress purchased Giorgione’s Adoration of the Shepherds. He
decided to unveil the treasured sixteenth-century painting in the storefront window of the S.H.
Kress & Co. store on Fifth Avenue (Fig. I.1). This Christmas display represented a surprising
episode in the long and rich history of the painting. In the early nineteenth century, the Adoration
of the Shepherds adorned the wall of a cardinal’s palazzo in Rome. From the Eternal City, the
painting traveled to Paris and London. In 1847, Christie’s sold the Adoration at auction in
London to a wealthy British industrialist whose son would shortly become the first Lord
Allendale. Over the next ninety years, the Allendale Nativity, as it was then known, graced the
walls of many of the most significant exhibitions of Old Master paintings in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. In 1937, the second Viscount of Allendale sold the painting to art dealer
Joseph Duveen. The Nativity then played a critical role in unraveling the long-established
business relationship between Duveen and connoisseur Bernard Berenson when the latter refused
to recognize the painting as the work of Giorgione, an artist prized for his limited oeuvre.
Despite the disagreement, Duveen succeeded in selling the Nativity to Kress. After charming

3
holiday shoppers, Kress gave the Adoration of the Shepherds to the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C.
1

Tracing the provenance of Giorgione’s Adoration provides a succinct overview of the
modern history of collecting and displaying Old Master paintings: the Adoration followed a
predictable geographic route from Rome to Paris to London to New York; it hung in major
exhibitions held by the British Institution, the Burlington Fine Arts Club, and the Royal
Academy; and appeared for sale in the showrooms of Christie’s and the Duveen Brothers before
finding a permanent home in the National Gallery of Art.
2
With his purchase of the Adoration,
Kress stepped into this history. His decision to display the Giorgione in the window of a five-
and-dime is among the most often repeated stories about Kress.
3
More than a charming anecdote,
this story is part of the Kress Collection’s foundational narrative; it is illustrative of the cultural
and social values the Kress Collection would come to embody. This story directs us to consider
how Americans engaged with the art of the Italian Renaissance in the twentieth century.
The creation and donation of the Kress Collection represents a remarkable and under-
examined chapter within the history of collecting. There is a wealth of literature on the
Americans that developed collections of European art during the Gilded Age, but few extend
beyond the First World War. Though inspired by their achievements, Kress was not a Gilded

1
For the full provenance history of this painting, see Fern Rusk Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H.
Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XV–XVI Century (New York: Phaidon Press for the Samuel H. Kress
Foundation, 1968), 151.
2
For more information on important exhibitions of Old Master paintings, see Francis Haskell, The
Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2000).
3
This story appeared in Kress’s obituary in the New York Times (“Samuel H. Kress, Merchant, Dead,”
New York Times [September 23, 1955]). John Walker later also published it in his memoir (John Walker,
Self-Portrait with Donors: Confessions of an Art Collector [Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1972], 142).
Though many have searched, to date no one has found a photograph documenting the Giorgione painting
in Kress’s 1938 Christmas display. There is no reason to believe that the story is untrue, but in a certain
sense it would prove even more interesting if it were fabricated.

4
Age collector. He began collecting in the interwar years, when socio-economic and political
factors afforded him the opportunity to develop a large, broad collection of early modern Italian
art. In its creation and dispersal, the Kress Collection emerged from and responded to the
tremendous upheaval of the 1930s–50s. Studying this collection pushes our understanding of the
collecting of Old Master paintings beyond the Gilded Age, and provides insight regarding the
educational and cultural values midcentury Americans invested in Italian Renaissance works of
art.
Though the Kress Collection contains examples of Italian art beyond the chronological
and geographical boundaries we tend to associate with the Renaissance, I intentionally refer to
the collection as one of Italian Renaissance art—rather than early modern Italian art, or Italian art
of the twelfth to eighteenth centuries—because, as we shall see, the idea of the Renaissance
mattered to Samuel Kress and to the Kress Foundation.
For similar reasons, I describe the Kress Collection as one of Old Master paintings. “Old
Master” largely refers to European artists working from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. The
term emerged in the late eighteenth century in the context of European art auctions.
4
At present,
Old Masters continues to designate an important category within the art market. Art historians,
on the other hand, tend to avoid the term. It lacks historical specificity, as the eras and sites of
artistic production that qualify as Old Masters change according to fluctuations in taste. For
example, Francis Haskell notes that in England, it was more common to reserve the term Old
Masters to refer to continental artists.
5
Americans, on the other hand, traditionally included
eighteenth-century English artists like Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough in the

4
Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum, 3–4.
5
Ibid.

5
category of Old Master painters.
6
Over time, changes in taste and the art market redefine the
concept of the Old Master. For Kress and his contemporaries, the Old Masters represented the art
historical canon. In this project, I use the term Old Masters as much to describe an imagined
category of artwork desired by many American collectors as I do to denote their actual holdings.
The Kress Collection coalesced and found its way into dozens of institutions during a
period of intense growth in museum development and the study of the Italian Renaissance in the
United States. The first half of the twentieth century could be described as a golden age for
American museums.
7
Between the turn of the century and the Second World War, dozens of new
institutions emerged across the country; traditional urban cultural centers benefitted from the
opening of well-known art museums like the Cleveland Museum of Art (1916), the Museum of
Modern Art in New York (1929), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1930), the Frick
Collection (1933), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1937), and the National Gallery of Art
in Washington, D.C. (1941). Growing cities across the American South and West also celebrated
the opening of their own museums; examples include the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art in New
Orleans (1912), the Huntington Library and Art Collections in San Marino, California (1919),
and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri (1933).
8
During this period,

6
For example, eighteenth-century British paintings did not appear in the Old Masters portion of the 1857
Manchester Art Treasure Exhibition (Elizabeth A. Pergam, The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of
1857: Entrepreneurs, Connoisseurs, and the Public [Burlington: Ashgate, 2011]). However, when
Duveen opened his New York showroom, he hung the eighteenth-century British school with the Old
Masters (Barbara Pezzini, “Early English and Modern Americans: Buying, Selling, and Painting Portraits
in the United States, 1890–1920,” talk given January 18, 2018 at the Getty Research Institute Conference,
“Art Dealers, America, and the International Art Market, 1880–1930.”)
7
Nathaniel Burt, Palaces for the People: A Social History of the American Art Museum (Boston: Little,
Brown & Co., 1977), 169, 351; Anne Higonnet, A Museum of One’s Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift
(New York: Prestel Publishing, 2009), xii.
8
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, “Architecture & History,” accessed May 12, 2015, http://www.nelson-
atkins.org/art/HistIntro.cfm (accessed May 12, 2015); New Orleans Museum of Art, “Museum Timeline,”
accessed May 12, 2015, http://noma.org/pages/detail/21/Museum-Timeline. In the postwar period, many
more art museums opened across the American South and West, due in no small part to the Kress
Collection gifts.

6
established art museums also underwent important changes. Institutions like the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art altered their
collecting policies, expanded their physical sites, and made changes to carefully curate their
public image in the first half of the twentieth century.
9
In organizing and growing their
collections, newly opened museums and established institutions alike aimed to serve the
American public.
From the opening of the first art museums in the United States in 1870, debates arose
over how museums should use their collections to educate the public as well as who constituted
the “public” for the museum. Should the art museum display plaster casts replicating canonical
works of art history or restrict their halls to original art?
10
Would they highlight American or
European art? Were their exhibitions intended for the education of artists and connoisseurs, or
should they seek to entertain the masses? The tone and nature of these debates varied depending
on individual institutional circumstances, but they all centered on the museum’s responsibility to
provide public access to works of art.
By the 1930s, these discussions played out in an increasingly professionalized museum
world. In the previous decade, Paul Sachs trained many of the leading curators and directors in
the United States in his famous course at Harvard University’s Fogg Museum.
11
The desire for

9
The Detroit Institute of Arts moved to their current campus in 1927. Detroit Institute of Arts, “The
cultural gem of Detroit,” accessed May 12, 2015, http://www.dia.org/about/history.aspx.
10
Alan Wallach, Exhibiting Contradictions: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts, 1998), 38–56.
11
Edward M.M. Warburg, “An Undergraduate’s Experience of Fine Arts at Harvard in the 1920s,” in The
Early Years of Art History in the United States: Notes and Essays on Departments, Teaching, and
Scholars, ed. Craig Hugh Smythe and Peter M. Lukehart (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993),
44; Neil Harris, Capital Culture: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the
Museum Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 3; Sally Anne Duncan and Andrew
McClellan, The Art of Curating: Paul J. Sachs and the Museum Course at Harvard (Los Angeles: Getty
Research Institute, 2018).

7
this course—and similar ones offered elsewhere—indicates a shift towards training museum
professionals within sanctioned institutional settings like the university during this time period.
12

Studying the history of the Kress Collection sheds new light on the proliferation and
growth of American museums, their changing educational policies, and the shifting culture of
museum work in midcentury America. The Kress Foundation materially contributed to the
expansion of American museums through the donation of its collection; the dispersal of the
Kress Collection strengthened existing institutions and in several instances even led to the
creation of new museums, especially in the underserved South and West. I study this series of
gifts in order to understand how an array of widely differing art museums across the country
envisioned their relationship to the public.
A belief in the educational value of art lies at the heart of the Kress Collection; Samuel
Kress collected not only masterpieces, but also works by less-celebrated and even unknown
artists in order to narrate the history of Italian art through his collection. Furthermore, long
before he decided to donate his collection, Kress made concerted efforts to share his paintings
with the public in a traveling exhibition that ran from 1932 to 1935. This project analyzes the
shifting cultural and educational agenda that shaped the development and dispersal of the Kress
Collection between the 1920s and 1961. Though Samuel Kress began his career as a
schoolteacher, the Kress Foundation did not limit its educational outreach to children or
university students. Instead, it participated in larger cultural initiatives to encourage life-long
learning by inviting S.H. Kress & Co. employees to attend exhibitions of Kress paintings.
13
I

12
For more on the university’s role in shaping professional status, see Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of
Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 1976).
13
In November 1933, the Kress employees in Seattle were invited to attend a preview of the Kress
exhibition of Italian Paintings at the Seattle Museum of Art (Wallace Robbins to Samuel Kress,
November 6, 1933. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3: Exhibitions & Publications, Box 155,

8
explore how the Kress Foundation conceived of the varying “publics” that might benefit from
access to their collection and what kind of information they felt this audience should receive
about their artworks.
I also examine how plans for the Kress Collection shaped museum practices. The Kress
Foundation supported researchers and conservators working on their collection, and collaborated
closely with museum directors like John Walker at the National Gallery of Art. I contend that in
the process of developing their own best practices, the Kress Foundation influenced research and
conservation practices for museums across the United States. The Kress Collection’s role in
expanding the holdings of American museums at midcentury is widely acknowledged; my
project demonstrates that in addition to strengthening collections, the process of creating and
donating the Kress Collection contributed to the development of museums’ educational aims and
culture.
I argue that the Kress Collection’s emphasis on Italian Renaissance art is intentional,
historically specific, and significant to our understanding of this collection. The Kress Collection
contains examples ranging from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries, but it is largely comprised
of works of Italian art from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Furthermore, the Italian
Renaissance is the only art historical period that the Kress Collection aims to comprehensively
illustrate. Kress’s preference for Italian Renaissance art was far from unusual as many wealthy
American collectors prized the art of this period. However, the scope and scale of Kress’s
collection of Italian Renaissance art is unique in the history of collecting.
In examining the place of Italian Renaissance art in the Kress Collection, my dissertation
moves the discussion beyond the passions of an individual collector to consider the evolving

Traveling Exhibition: Correspondence: Robbins, Wallace], New York, New York). All citations of
archival material are organized according to the format preferred by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

9
nature of American appropriation of the Italian Renaissance in constructing a national cultural
identity. During the period of the Kress Collection’s formation and dispersal, the Italian
Renaissance assumed a place of unparalleled historical importance in American cultural and
historical thought.
Interest in the Italian Renaissance significantly predates the Kress Collection, of course,
in the nineteenth century, the vision of an Italian Renaissance defined by the rise of
individualism, capitalism, and the modern state in early modern mercantile centers like Florence
that was put forward by Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt in 1860 appealed greatly to American
audiences.
14
Gilded Age collectors fashioned themselves as modern-day Medici, turning their
fortunes into culture by amassing large art collections.
15
Within schools and universities, the
Italian Renaissance represented a cultural, intellectual, and ideological highpoint in the history of
Western Civilization. It also marked the birthplace of the modern Western world.
In the early twentieth century, “the revolt of the medievalists” (as named by historian
Wallace K. Ferguson) curtailed this triumphant narrative by stressing the continuities between
European cultures in the twelfth century and those of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy,
thereby denying the existence of the Renaissance.
16
This corrective scholarship briefly dislodged

14
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860; London: Phaidon Press Ltd.,
1950). S.G.C. Middlemore published the first English translation of this book in 1878 (Jacob Burckhardt,
The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (London: George, Allen & Unwin,
Ltd., 1878)). The Civilization of the Renaissance was widely read in the nineteenth century, but reached
the peak of its fame in the first decades of the twentieth century (James J. Sheehan, “The German
Renaissance in America,” in The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth-Century, ed. Allen J. Grieco,
Michael Rocke, Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi [Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2002], 47–64).
15
Nancy Einreinhofer, The American Art Museum: Elitism and Democracy (London: Leicester University
Press, 1997. For a definition of the Gilded Age, see Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America:
Culture and Society (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).
16
William Caferro, Contesting the Renaissance (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 8–12.

10
the Renaissance from its privileged position within the academy.
17
However, Renaissance studies
regained critical importance in the years surrounding World War II in part due to Hans Baron’s
concept of “civic humanism.”
18

According to Baron, civic humanism arose out of the Florentine struggle for
independence against the bellicose duke of Milan in 1401–1402. Florence emerged remarkably
intact from this conflict when a wave of the plague killed Giangaleazzo Visconti, the ruler of
Milan. After the danger passed, Florentine writers and historians forged a new civic identity for
their state, modeled on the Roman Republic. Humanists like the Florentine chancellors Coluccio
Salutati (1331–1406) and Leonardo Bruni (1371–1444) transformed the study of classical
antiquity from a literary movement into one concerned with political ideals, in which the study of
classical literature prepared elite citizens for active lives serving the Republic. Baron first
articulated his thesis in 1925, and though his book was not available in English until 1955, his
ideas entered American universities through the influx of German émigré scholars fleeing Nazi
persecution in Europe.
19
Baron’s thesis gave Renaissance studies a critical significance during an

17
Paul F. Grendler, “The Italian Renaissance in the Past Seventy Years: Humanism, Social History, and
Early Modern in Anglo-American and Italian Scholarship,” in The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth
Century: Acts of an International Conference, Florence, Villa I Tatti, June 9-11, 1999, eds. Allen J.
Grieco, Michael Rocke, and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2002), 3–6.
18
Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in
an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 3–75, 444–61.
19
On the dates of publication, see James Hankins, “Introduction,” in Renaissance Civic Humanism, ed.
James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1. European scholars emigrating to the
United States in the 1930s include noted scholars like Hans Baron, Erwin Panofsky, Paul Oskar Kristeller,
Felix Gilbert, Nicolai Rubinstein, and Ernst Gombrich. On this generation and their impact in the United
States, see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “American Voices. Remarks on the Earlier History of Art
History in the United States and the Reception of Germanic Art Historians,” Ars 42, no. 1 (2009): 128–
52; Eisler, Colin. “Kunstgeschichte American Style: A Study in Migration” in The Intellectual Migration:
Europe and America 1930–1960, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1969), 544–629; Christopher S. Wood, “Art History’s Normative Renaissance,” in The
Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, Acts of an International Conference, Florence, Villa I Tatti,
1999, eds. Allen J. Grieco, Michael Rocke, and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (Florence: Olschki, 2002), 65–
92; Erwin Panofsky, “Three decades of art history in the United States: Impressions of a Transplanted

11
age when liberal democracies feared the growth of fascism and communism. In the postwar
period, European and American scholars foregrounded the Renaissance as arguably the most
important moment in the history of European civilization—a moment that was also critical to the
formation of the United States.
20
This view of the Renaissance remained dominant until the
advent of social history in the 1960s. In the midst of the wider cultural impetus to question
authority and standard narratives, scholarship shifted away from studies of elite culture and key
figures to consider broader social and economic patterns, the lives of previously overlooked
people—especially women, the working classes, and people of color, and the cross-cultural
exchange of objects and ideas.
The historiography of the Italian Renaissance is well known; studies reviewing the
shifting stakes of European and American scholars of this period will soon constitute a sub-field.
Yet the role of museums is largely absent in these accounts. Historians like Anthony Molho
acknowledge that the Renaissance always possessed a popular appeal in part due to museum
collections, but beyond this acknowledgement discussion focuses solely on the scholarly
contributions of academics.
21
Paula Findlen’s research is the exception; she has written
extensively on the role of museums in creating our cultural and historic conceptions of the Italian
Renaissance. Findlen primarily examines early modern Italian collecting practices as important
precursors to later institutions like museums and universities.
22
More recently, she has written on

European,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City: Doubleday & Co.,
1955), 321–47.
20
William James Bouwsma, “The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History,” American Historical
Review 84 (February 1979): 1–15; The American Council of Learned Societies started a Committee on
Renaissance Studies in 1940, which would ultimately grow into the Renaissance Society of America. In
1948, RSA launched their journal (Anthony Molho, “The Italian Renaissance, Made in the USA,”
Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood
[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998], 277).
21
Molho, “The Italian Renaissance, Made in the USA,” 263–94.
22
Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy

12
the Uffizi Gallery’s transformation in the eighteenth century from a collection resembling an
early modern cabinet of curiosities to something much closer to modern museums.
23
Findlen
acknowledges the continued role of museums in shaping our conceptions of the Renaissance
through displays of the art and material culture of this period, but her studies do not extend into
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Through its examination of the Kress Collection, my dissertation reinserts the museum
into the historiography of the Italian Renaissance. My project brings twentieth-century
scholarship on the Renaissance from art history, history, and museum studies into dialogue in
order to create a fuller picture of the history of Italian Renaissance art in American culture. I
contend that the Kress Collection—for its size and diffusion across the United States—played a
significant role in twentieth-century American conceptions of the Italian Renaissance. In my
dissertation, I seek to understand how the Kress Collection shaped and was shaped by prevailing
ideas about Renaissance art and culture and how the creation and dispersal of this collection
aimed to democratize Renaissance art for the American public.

The Kress Collection in Art Historical Studies
Despite its great size, the Kress Collection has not been discussed extensively in
scholarly literature. The only publications dedicated to studying the development of the Kress
Collection emerge either directly from the Kress Foundation, the National Gallery of Art, or one
of the many museums across the country that benefitted from Kress’s beneficence. The first, and

(Berkeley: University of California, 1994); Paula Findlen with Kenneth Gouwens, “The Persistence of the
Renaissance,” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 51–4; Paula Findlen, “Possessing the Past: The
Material World of the Italian Renaissance,” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 83–114; Paula
Findlen, “The Renaissance in the Museum,” in The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, Acts of
an International Conference, Florence, Villa I Tatti, 1999 (Florence: Olschki, 2002): 93–116.
23
Paula Findlen, “The 2012 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: The Eighteenth-Century Invention of the
Renaissance: Lessons from the Uffizi,” Renaissance Quarterly 66, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 1–34.

13
in many ways still the fullest, scholarly account of the Kress Collection’s history appears in Art
Treasures for America: An Anthology of Paintings and Sculpture in the Samuel H. Kress
Collection. Published in 1961, this volume accompanied the exhibition of the same title at the
National Gallery of Art, which celebrated the completion of the Kress Regional Galleries
Program. Art Treasures for America opens with two prefaces, one by National Gallery director
John Walker and the other by Kress Foundation director Guy Emerson, that both discuss Samuel
Kress’s activities as a collector. In his preface, Emerson focuses on Kress’s remarkable
biography and on the activities of the Kress Foundation. Richly detailed with personal anecdotes,
this account primarily stresses Kress’s vision of developing an art collection that would allow
Americans to study Italian art at home.
24
Walker’s preface, which appears second, is focused
entirely on the National Gallery’s work with Samuel Kress, his brother Rush Kress, and the
Kress Foundation.
25

Though the body of the text, written by Charles Seymour, Jr., largely focuses on the
Kress Collection, it opens and closes with reflections on Kress’s place in the history of collecting.
Seymour opens Art Treasures in America with a discussion of James Jackson Jarves, a Bostonian
dealer-critic who strove to develop an appreciation (and market) for early Italian Renaissance
paintings among his fellow citizens in the mid-nineteenth century. Though he ultimately failed to
find a buyer for his own large collection, Jarves appears in histories of collecting for his attempt
to create the kind of dealer-connoisseur role for himself that Bernard Berenson successfully
inhabited a generation later. Seymour describes Jarves as a “prophet”—one whose vision Samuel

24
Guy Emerson, preface to Charles Seymour, Jr., Art Treasures for America: An Anthology of Paintings
& Sculpture in the Samuel H. Kress Collection (London: Phaidon Press for the Samuel H. Kress
Foundation, 1961), vii–xviii.
25
John Walker, preface to Charles Seymour, Jr., Art Treasures for America: An Anthology of Paintings &
Sculpture in the Samuel H. Kress Collection (London: Phaidon Press for the Samuel H. Kress Foundation,
1961), xix–xxii.

14
Kress made real in his collection several generations later. After then discussing the Kress
Collection itself at length, Seymour returns to this idea in the conclusion of the book, stating:
At the beginning of this essay I suggested a close parallel between the ideal of a
nineteenth century American as a collector of art for the American people and the
program of the Kress Foundation. But to the reader who has come this far it must be
abundantly evident that the Kress Collection is of such vastly greater magnitude in all
respects that further comparison soon loses all point. It would be, in a way, to compare
the acorn with the oak.
26

In Seymour’s text, as in Emerson and Walker’s prefaces, Kress emerges as a collector
noteworthy for his specific interest in Italian Renaissance art, and for his commitment to share
his collection with the public. Like Walker, Seymour concludes that the Kress Collection is
indeed “unique in the history of collecting,” but he acknowledges a historical precedent exists for
Kress’s vision as a collector.
In the early 1990s, two publications—again linked to the National Gallery of Art and the
Kress Foundation—revisited the history of the Kress Collection. Philip Kopper dedicated a
chapter to Samuel Kress in his book America’s National Gallery: A Gift to the Nation, published
in 1991 as part of the National Gallery’s half-centennial celebration.
27
In this chapter, Kopper
focuses primarily on Kress’s biography, comparing his remarkable career to that of Horatio
Alger. This essay is representative of the larger body of introductions or short essays located
within catalogues of Kress Collection art. These publications tend to explain the development of
the collection largely through a carefully curated story in which Samuel Kress’s life epitomizes
the American dream. Born on the same day that his namesake uncle died at Gettysburg, Samuel
Kress grew up in a large Lutheran family in Pennsylvania. He saved the money he earned
working as a schoolteacher to open a general store in the 1890s. This single store did well, and

26
Charles Seymour, Jr., Art Treasures for America: An Anthology of Paintings & Sculpture in the Samuel
H. Kress Collection (London: Phaidon Press for the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1961), 195–6.
27
Philip Kopper, America’s National Gallery of Art: A Gift to the Nation (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1991), 174–89.

15
over the next twenty years he would develop a national chain of five-and-dime stores. Most of
the Kress stores targeted underserved communities in the American South and West. From their
carefully planned architecture to the products marketed, S.H. Kress & Co. stores aimed to
contribute to their communities.
The five-and-dime stores made Samuel Kress very wealthy, but those writing on him
usually note that he eschewed the personal luxuries normally associated with great wealth.
Kopper and others present Kress’s enormous expenditure on art collecting as philanthropic, for
his collection was always intended for the American public. However, it is in fact clear from his
apartment inventory that Kress filled his home with lavish possessions and enjoyed a lifestyle
similar to that of other incredibly wealthy people of his era.
28
In and of themselves, these details
are not especially important, but they indicate the intentional crafting of an official narrative of
Samuel Kress’s life. The blend of fact and fiction in Kress’s biography as a collector contributes
significantly to the public identity of the Kress Collection itself.
Kopper’s chapter concludes with a quote by Kenneth Clark, who states that Kress’s great
achievement lay in his creation of a collection that was “very comprehensive” in addition to
containing “real masterpieces.”
29
In this respect, the chapter is very similar to the account in the
National Gallery’s earlier Art Treasures for America. Yet Kopper also spends a considerable
portion of this brief chapter discussing the National Gallery of Art’s reticence in accepting the

28
Apartment Inventory, May 10, 1941. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection,
Box 117, Collection: Inventories and Valuations], New York, New York. His sister-in-law, Virginia
Kress, remembered Samuel Kress often traveled in a private railroad car (A.C. Viebranz, Notes taken
during an interview with Mrs. Rush Kress, December 12, 1988, New York, New York. National Gallery
of Art Archive [National Gallery Oral History Program], Washington, D.C.).
29
Kopper, America’s National Gallery of Art (1991), 189. Like John Walker, Kenneth Clark worked with
Bernard Berenson as a young man. Clark became the director of the National Gallery in London in 1933.
He may be best known today as the presenter and co-creator of the popular BBC series, Civilisation. This
show aired in Great Britain in 1969, it was rebroadcast in the United States the following year (Morgan
Meis, “The Seductive Enthusiasm of Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation,” New Yorker [December 21, 2016]).

16
Kress Collection due to its inclusion of many works by “lesser masters.”
30
In the end, this
chapter leaves one with the sense that Kress was an enthusiastic but naive collector of Italian art.
Unsurprisingly, former Kress Foundation President Marilyn Perry wrote a more generous
account of the Kress Collection’s history. Her essay, the longest piece written on the Kress
Collection to date, opens the 1994 exhibition catalogue entitled A Gift to America: Masterpieces
from the Samuel H. Kress Collection. Perry also highlights Kress’s biography, but her more
detailed narrative includes discussions of the many scholars, dealers, and friends surrounding
Kress that helped shape his collection. However, Perry does not stress Kress’s focused collecting
of Italian Renaissance art. She acknowledges this field represents a particular strength of the
Kress Collection, but reminds readers throughout that the collection is not limited to Italian art.
31

Kopper’s and Perry’s discussions of the Kress Collection largely reinforce the narrative
crafted by their respective institutions thirty years earlier. Abbreviated versions of their
accounts—especially Perry’s—frequently appeared in museum catalogues for the Kress
Regional Galleries. However, until recently none of these accounts placed Kress’s interest in
Italian Renaissance art into a larger historical framework, as Charles Seymour had done.
In January 2015, the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Collection included
a brief essay on Samuel Kress’s collection within the edited volume A Market for Merchant
Princes: Collecting Italian Renaissance Paintings in America. The title of this publication plays
on James Jackson Jarves’s article, “A Lesson for Merchant Princes.” Written in 1883, Jarves
extolled American elites to model their behavior after the fifteenth-century Florentine Giovanni
Rucellai, who spent his fortune on the arts and architecture in order to make his native city more

30
Kopper, America’s National Gallery of Art (1991), 183–5.
31
Marilyn Perry, “The Kress Collection,” in A Gift to America: Masterpieces of European Painting from
the Samuel H. Kress Collection, ed. Chiyo Ishikawa, Lynn Federele Orr, George T.M. Shackelford, and
David Steel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 12–40.

17
magnificent. Within A Market for Merchant Princes, Jarves provides the starting point for a
series of essays that explore how Gilded Age American collectors like J.P. Morgan, Isabella
Stewart Gardner, and Henry Walters grew to appreciate and accumulate Italian Renaissance art.
The essay dedicated to Samuel Kress as a collector of Italian paintings appears at the end
of this volume. Editor Inge Reist wrote in the foreword that the study of Samuel and Rush Kress
provides “a fitting conclusion for the story of collecting Italian Renaissance painting in
America.”
32
A half-century later, A Market for Merchant Princes echoes Seymour’s comparison
between Jarves and Kress. In this volume, the Kress Collection’s history represents the
culmination of a particular story of collecting Italian Renaissance art in America—one that is
strong and historically rooted, but, in large part due to its format as an edited volume, too neat to
encompass the particular history of this collection.
Reist’s suggestion, that Kress represents the full realization of Jarves’s vision, is made
entirely through the placement of the essay dedicated to Kress within this volume. The essay
itself discussed Kress without touching upon these issues. Though this volume emerged from the
Frick Center for the History of Collecting, Edgar Peters Bowron—the essay’s author—was once
again someone deeply connected with the Kress Collection. Over the course of his career,
Bowron served as curator of European paintings at the National Gallery of Art and the Houston
Museum of Fine Arts, and as director of the North Carolina Museum of Art. Between these three
institutions, he has worked closely with well over half the paintings that make up the Kress
Collection. Bowron’s essay displays his familiarity with the Kress Collection and its rich history.
However, this eight-page study could hardly be expected to describe the history of the Kress
Collection in depth. Bowron acknowledges this in the introduction to his essay, in which he

32
Inge Reist, foreword to A Market for Merchant Princes: Collecting Italian Renaissance Paintings in
America, ed. Inge Reist (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), xvi.

18
states that the creation and donation of the Kress Collection remains “….a remarkable story that
still lacks a full and definitive account.”
33
In this piece, Bowron provides a compelling
introduction to Kress as a collector, but he does not depart from the narrative presented by
Emerson, Walker, Perry, and Kopper.
34

Throughout this project, I endeavor to place the Kress Collection within its larger
historical context. In partnership with his advisors, Kress developed a vision for the contents and
purpose of his art collection. However, over time, and through the involvement of many
individuals, the Kress Collection grew beyond its founder’s plan. My study examines how
opportunities in the art market, evolving ethics of conservation, and urgent calls for art
collections to serve the public all contributed to the Kress Collection’s final shape and form.
Finally, I attend carefully to the movement of the Kress Collection, arguing that the unusual
distribution of Kress art to dozens of American museums represented an attempt to create a truly
national collection of art, one that would contribute to a shared cultural life.

The History of Collecting
Beyond literature directly related to the Kress Collection, my study engages with and
builds upon scholarship on the history of collecting, museum studies, and studies of twentieth-
century engagement with the Italian Renaissance. The history of collecting has long constituted

33
Edgar Peters Bowron, “Samuel H. Kress and His Collection of Italian Renaissance Paintings,” in A
Market for Merchant Princes: Collecting Italian Renaissance Paintings in America,” ed. Inge Reist,
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 106.
34
Bowron also briefly discussed the Kress Collection in Buying Baroque: Italian Seventeenth-Century
Paintings Come to America. He described the Kress Collection as one of the most significant American
collections of Italian Baroque painting. The Frick Collection Center for the History of Collecting
published this edited volume in 2017 as the third in their series on the history of collecting in the United
States. Despite Bowron’s claim, it does not include an essay dedicated to the Kress Collection (Edgar
Peters Bowron, ed., Buying Baroque: Italian Seventeenth-Century Paintings Come to America
[University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017]).

19
an integral aspect of the history of art, but it only recently emerged as a field of study. In 1983,
the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford hosted an exhibition and conference on early modern
curiosity cabinets and the origins of museums. These events stimulated further research on the
history of collecting and gave rise to an important publication, The Origins of Museums. The
Ashmolean conference also provided the context from which the Journal of the History of
Collections emerged; when the journal began to print issues in 1989, it provided an official
publication for the new field of the history of collecting.
35

The Ashmolean conference, the journal, and the flurry of publications that followed in
the 1980s and 1990s represented a shift in the scholarly discourse on collecting. In the preceding
generation, Marxist and psychoanalytic theories heavily shaped studies of collecting. Scholars
like Jean Baudrillard described collecting as a form of commodity fetishism, associated with
social isolation and sexual dysfunction.
36
In contrast, the Journal of the History of Collections
and newer scholarship viewed collecting in a more positive light; the history of collecting shifted
focus to consider the role of physical collections in shaping taste, producing knowledge, crafting
identity, and managing social relations.

35
The exhibition and conference at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford celebrated the museum’s three-
hundredth anniversary. The exhibition highlighted the history of the Tradescant Collection, and the
conference examined similar collections. The Origins of Museums, the volume emerging from this
conference, discussed cabinets of curiosity in an array of contexts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Europe (Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, ed. The Origins of the Museum: The Cabinet of Curiosities
in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985]). See also
Malcolm Baker, foreword to Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern
Atlantic World, ed. Daniela Bleichmar and Peter Mancall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania,
2011), xvi. Of course, there are studies on the history of collecting that predate the Origins of Museums.
For example, Julius von Schlosser’s 1908 study of early modern curiosity cabinets in Die Kunst und
Wunderkammern der Spätreenaissance could be viewed as an incipient text for the field (Julius von
Schlosser, Die Kunst und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance [Leipzig: Klinckhardt & Biermann,
1908]).
36
See, for example Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John
Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 8. This is a translation of Baudrillard’s “Le
système marginal,’ a chapter in Le Système des objets (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1968).

20
The history of collecting further benefitted from the rise of the new art history in the late
twentieth century. As the academy became more interdisciplinary, art historians incorporated
approaches drawn from the fields of anthropology, sociology, economic history, and cultural
history in order to think about their objects of study. Cultural anthropologists Arjun Appadurai
and James Clifford particularly inspired scholars in many fields to think critically about the
social life of objects, that is to say, how objects move and come to carry value.
37
The influence
of these ideas is evident in art historical studies since the late 1980s by academics writing on the
history of collecting.
Nonetheless, for reasons that are both practical and ideological, the majority of research
on collecting occurs within museums. Histories of art collections within the United States tend to
focus on collectors who founded their own museums: Isabella Stewart Gardner, Henry Clay
Frick, Henry and Arabella Huntington, Peggy Guggenheim, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and
Mildred and Robert Bliss among others.
38
Publications discussing the history of private
collections often emerge from their namesake institutions; as a result, the literature on these
private collections is rich in archival detail, but often fails to place the collection in a wider
historical context or pose critical questions regarding the nature of the collection’s formation and
subsequent display.
Studies dedicated to understanding American collecting practices on a broader scale often
perpetuate this focus on prominent individual collectors. For example, Aline Saarinen’s popular

37
Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century
Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
38
Shelley M. Bennett, The Art of Wealth: The Huntingtons in the Gilded Age (San Marino: Huntington
Library, 2013); James N. Cardner, ed., A Home of the Humanities: The Collecting and Patronage of
Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection,
2010); Anne Higonnet, A Museum of One’s Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift (New York: Periscope
Publishing, 2009).

21
book The Proud Possessors examined evolving taste and approaches to art collecting in the
United States through the lives of twenty wealthy collectors.
39
Details regarding the individual
motivations and passions of collectors drive Saarinen’s account. Frequently (though incorrectly)
described as the first history of American collecting, The Proud Possessors was a bestseller.
Partially in response to Saarinen’s text, W.G. Constable, the first director of the Courtauld
Institute and later paintings curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, published Art Collecting
in the United States of America: An Outline of a History. This survey of the history of American
collecting aimed to trace the development of collecting in the United States from the years
following the Revolutionary War up until the Armory show in 1913. Constable argued that
American collectors differed from their European counterparts in that their collections were
rarely inherited and were likely to be dissembled upon their deaths, and so they were always in
flux. He identified historical trends that shaped American collecting: the academies in New York
and Philadelphia that organized exhibitions of European paintings for sale in the early
nineteenth-century; the cultivated sense of the past created by the opening of art museums in
New York and Boston in the 1870s; and the two impulses to collect Old Masters and modern art
in the first decades of the twentieth century.
40
Individuals like Isabella Stewart Gardner figure
prominently in Constable’s history of collecting, but he aimed to place their stories within a
larger historical framework.
Both Saarinen and Constable acknowledged their studies revisited ground already
masterfully examined in René Brimo’s book, L’évolution du goût aux États-Unis d’après
l’histoire des collections. Brimo’s text offered a thorough discussion of American collecting
from the colonial era through the end of World War I. In L’évolution du goût, Brimo used richly

39
Aline B. Saarinen, The Proud Possessors (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959).
40
W.G. Constable, Art Collecting in the United States of America: An Outline of a History (London:
Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964).

22
detailed studies of public and private collections to explore connections between America’s
evolving artistic taste and larger cultural transformations. This text is still heralded as a
foundational text for the history of collecting; however, because it was published in French,
received limited publicity, and came out in 1938 as war broke out, Brimo’s text was not widely
known outside of specialist circles.
41

Lately, there has been an uptick in publications on the history of collecting. The 2016
translation of Brimo’s work into English is an indication of the growing interest among art
historians and cultural historians in the history of collecting. The Center for the History of
Collecting at the Frick Collection—established by the Frick Art Reference Library in 2007—also
recently began a publishing a series on the history of art collecting in America.
42
Each book in
the series emerged from a symposium planned at the Center. Three of the four texts published to
date examine the evolving taste for and collection of, respectively, seventeenth-century Dutch
painting, Italian Renaissance art, and Baroque Italian painting in the United States.
43
Though all
three books include discussions of collections created before and after the Gilded Age, essays
addressing collections created between the 1870s and 1920s dominate the narrative.

41
Kenneth Haltman, “Making Sense of an Unusual Contribution to Art History,” in René Brimo, The
Evolution of Taste in American Collecting, trans. and ed. Kenneth Haltman (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 50–5.
42
The Frick Collection Center for the History of Collection, “About the Center,” accessed May 17, 2015,
http://www.frick.org/research/center.
43
Esmée Quodbach, ed. Holland’s Golden Age in America: Collecting the Art of Rembrandt, Vermeer,
and Hals (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press for the Frick Collection, 2014); Inge
Reist, ed. A Market for Merchant Princes: Collecting Italian Renaissance Paintings in America
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press for the Frick Collection, 2015); Edgar Peters
Bowron, ed. Buying Baroque: Italian Seventeenth-Century Paintings Come to America (University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State University Press for the Frick Collection, 2017). The newest publication in this
series represents a shift in focus for the Frick Center for the History of Collecting. The latest book focuses
on American collections of Latin American art, and considers examples primarily drawn from the second
half of the twentieth century (Edward J. Sullivan, ed. The Americas Revealed: Collecting Colonial and
Modern Latin American Art in the United States [University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University
Press for the Frick Collection, 2018]).

23
This series provides a useful introduction to a host of central concepts and figures in the
history of collecting and display. However, it is a collection of edited volumes, and the brief
essays rarely extend beyond introducing histories that might be told more fully elsewhere.
44

Nevertheless, the three Frick Center for Collecting books raise interesting questions about
American appropriation of European art in the twentieth century for constructing a narrative
about cultural heritage in the United States.
In the twenty-first century, scholarly histories of collecting have increasingly aimed to
expand discussions of art collecting as a cultural practice beyond the motivations of the collector
by tracing networks of exchange, both of ideas and objects. These kinds of studies are possible in
no small part due to extensive provenance research. Provenance refers to the history of
ownership for an object; it has traditionally served as a method to authenticate artwork and
understand evolving taste. At the urging of the Washington Declaration in 1998, museums began
to engage in more proactive provenance research to discover whether objects within their
collections had been acquired through forced sales or theft under the National Socialists between
1933 and 1945.
45
Many museums hired researchers specifically to conduct provenance research.
At the same time, existing programs like the Getty Research Institute’s Provenance Index grew
more extensive. The databases of the Getty Provenance Index hold well over a million records
drawn from auction catalogs, dealer stock books, and other archival materials.
46
Advances in

44
For example, Edgar Peters Bowron calls for the writing of a definitive account of the Kress Collection
in his eight-page essay on its history within A Market for Merchant Princes (Bowron, “Samuel H. Kress
and His Collection of Italian Renaissance Paintings,” 107).
45
Tilmann von Stockhausen, “The Failure of Provenance Research in Germany,” in Provenance: an
alternate history of art, ed. Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute,
2012), 124. See also Nancy H. Yeide, Konstantin Akinsha, and Amy L. Walsh, The AAM Guide to
Provenance Research (Washington, D.C.: American Association of Museums, 2001).
46
“Collecting and Provenance Research,” accessed November 26, 2018,
http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/provenance/.

24
technology now permit scholars to mobilize this data; digital tools make it possible not only to
track a single object, but also to gain a sense of larger trends in collecting practices.
My own research is indebted to the Kress Provenance Research Project, a recent
collaborative effort of the National Gallery of Art and the Kress Foundation. Nancy Yeide, an
expert on provenance research, worked closely with Fulvia Zaninelli, an authority on Alessandro
and Vittoria Contini Bonacossi, to update the provenance records for all works of art in the Kress
Collection. The Kress Foundation finished publishing their findings online in October 2016. The
Foundation made the records public to support “best practices in the field of provenance research
and transparency in museum collection information” and to promote “centralized provenance
research.”
47
Yeide and Zaninelli’s research—aided by archivists across the United States and
Europe—provided me with ample opportunities to study trends and exceptions in the Kress
Collection’s development. Many of my insights in this project would have been difficult, if not
impossible, to deduce without their efforts.
Histories of collecting require an interdisciplinary approach. My project engages with and
advances scholarship about how collections serve to narrate the past, and draws its methodology
from art history, cultural history, and museum studies. My project brings original archival
research into conversation with extant scholarship on collecting practices to examine how the
Kress Collection emerged and functioned to address the perceived need for Italian Renaissance
art in communities across the United States in the mid-twentieth century.

47
“Kress Provenance Research Project,” accessed November 26, 2018,
http://www.kressfoundation.org/provenance/.

25
Museum Studies
Histories of collections formed after 1793 differ from those created during the early
modern period. Though certain other European art collections had been open to the public before
this date—for example in Vienna and Florence—1793 often marks the birth of the modern art
museum with the opening of the Louvre to the public.
48
From that point forward, the history of
art collecting is almost inseparable from this set of institutions. Histories of collecting are thus
intertwined with museum studies. As a field, museum studies encompasses both histories of the
museum and critical analyses of its cultural role.
Histories of museums are almost as old as the institutions themselves; scholars—often
working within the museum field—produce studies driven by their archival research that explain
the historical development of museums across the Western world. Exemplary of this kind of
publication, Germain Bazin’s The Museum Age traced the history of museums from the princely
Kunstkammern of the early modern period through the many art institutions opening in
midcentury America.
49

It was not until the late 1970s and the advent of the new art history that critical histories
of the museum appeared.
50
Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach’s 1980 article “The Universal
Survey Museum” is a seminal example of this era of scholarship on museums. Using methods
from anthropology and Marxist theory, Duncan and Wallach analyzed the ways in which
museums create ideological meaning through the spaces and rituals of viewing they create for
their visitors. Their study only addressed universal survey museums—that is, public museums,

48
Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in
Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.)
49
Germain Bazin, The Museum Age, trans. Jane van Nuis Cahill, (New York: Universe Books, 1967).
50
Arguably, the first of these pieces published in the United States was Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach’s
“The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis,” Marxist Perspectives
4 (1978): 28–51.

26
which employ ceremonial architecture (reminiscent of ancient Greece) and collections spanning
the breadth of art history from classical antiquities to the dawn of modernism—of which the
Louvre is the best example. Duncan and Wallach argued that universal survey museums create a
ritual experience for visitors, encouraging them to align the ideals of culture with those of the
state in a way that will make them better citizens.
51
In this article, Duncan and Wallach raised
two themes that reverberate throughout critical museum studies to the present: the museum as a
ritual site that reinforces social identity and the museum’s role in shaping national identity.
Studies concerned with the museum as a ritual space frequently point to the art museum
as an important form of middle-class cultural capital. In The Love of Art: European Art Museums
and Their Public sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel studied the practices of dozens
of European art museums and surveyed their visitors in order to learn more about how the
museum constitutes its own public. Their study demonstrated that cultivated taste is not innate,
but learned through forms of cultural education that are not equally available to all. Bourdieu and
Darbel published this study in France in 1969, though it was not translated into English until
1990.
52
After The Love of Art, Bourdieu further explored the tastes and pretensions of the French
bourgeoisie in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.
53
Bourdieu’s writing
invigorated studies of the museum by insisting that questions of aesthetic judgment are
inseparable from class and that as a public institution the museum structures its spaces and rituals
of viewing in order to reinforce a sense of class identity among the bourgeoisie.

51
Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Universal Survey Museum,” Art History 3, no. 4 (December
1980): 448–69.
52
Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, with Dominique Schnapper, The Love of Art: European Art
Museums and their Public, trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merrimen (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1990). Duncan and Wallach cite this text in “The Universal History Museum,” so American
scholars were already aware of the book before its translation.
53
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Abingdon: Routledge, 1984).

27
Bourdieu and Darbel’s findings describe a particular set of European art museums. In
Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, Carol Duncan extended their conclusions, arguing
that art museums are part of an international bourgeois culture.
54
Through her description of
museums as sites of secular rituals replacing those of the church in a non-religious age, Duncan
stressed the art museum as critical site for controlling the representation of community.
55

Chapters on the Louvre and Metropolitan Museum of Art explore how, through their practices of
collecting and display, those in charge of the museum decided not only which objects the
museum would exhibit, but which historical narratives the collection would illustrate.
56

Duncan’s conclusions risk categorizing the museum as a monolithic institution. In a
critique directed toward “The Universal Survey Museum,” Daniel J. Sherman wrote that Duncan
and Wallach failed to account for the constructed nature of the art museum—which, in each case
emerges from its own complicated and unpredictable local history.
57
Sherman advocated for
studies of provincial museums and other exhibitionary sites to gain a fuller sense of museum
culture and practices.
In Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill echoed Sherman’s
call for greater attention to the local and historical cultural conditions shaping museum display
practices. She employed Michel Foucault’s ideas about classificatory systems in The Order of
Things to examine the relationship between shifting strategies of display and structures of
knowing.
58
In this book, Hooper-Greenhill reviewed familiar sites with few new insights, but her

54
Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995).
55
Ibid, 7–8.
56
Ibid, 21–68.
57
Daniel J. Sherman, “The Bourgeoisie, Cultural Appropriation, and the Art Museum in
Nineteenth-Century France,” Radical History Review no. 38 (1987): 38–58.
58
Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992).

28
argument that museums constantly change—not only in their contents, but also in their modes of
conveying knowledge to visitors—is a valuable one.
Cultural studies scholar Tony Bennett’s influential book The Birth of the Museum:
History, Theory, Politics also belongs to museum studies’ Foucaultian turn.
59
Bennett argued that
the modern museum emerged as one of many new institutions (including fairs, exhibitions, and
department stores) that used culture to transform the public into a “voluntary, self-regulating
citizenry.”
60
Rather than employing the taxonomic approach common to organizing collections
in the early modern curiosity cabinet, modern museums ordered objects and knowledge
according to the evolutionary model of new disciplines like anthropology, art history, and
archaeology. In doing so, Bennett stated that the museum invited the public to view themselves
and their culture as the culmination of a narrative of progress. Bennett’s approach continues to
resonate in the field, though critics contend that the idea of the exhibitionary complex can prove
limiting.
61

As already discussed in the work of Duncan and Wallach, museums’ modes of collecting
and display in the service of strengthening national identity is an important theme within the
field of museum studies. The Louvre, the first national art museum, marked the beginning of a
wave of national galleries opening in Europe during the long nineteenth-century. These newly
formed institutions came into being during the same period of time that nationalism emerged in
the continent. National identity requires citizens to envision themselves as part of what Benedict
Anderson described as an “imagined community” consisting of people who feel bound together

59
Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995).
60
Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 63.
61
For example, see Lara Kriegel, “After the Exhibitionary Complex: Museum Histories and the Future of
the Victorian Past,” Victorian Studies 48, no. 4 (Summer 2006): 681–704; Randolph Starn, “A Historian’s
Brief Guide to New Museum Studies,” American Historical Review 110, no. 1 (February 2005): 68–98.

29
by shared political and cultural values.
62
In the years immediately following World War II,
postwar and post-colonial nationalism encouraged a second set of national galleries to open
around the world.
63
National art museums can take a number of forms, but they rarely only
feature art of their own nation. Yet paradoxically, their organization reinforces a nationalist
understanding of the world; in separating its collections into national schools, the art museum
visually argues for the historically unique identity of each nation. This arrangement also provides
national galleries the opportunity to highlight the contributions of their own nation. Institutions
like the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
D.C. display collections illustrating the history of art from ancient Greece and Rome up until the
near present—collecting and displaying art of the Western world in a manner that suggests art
history culminates in their own national traditions of making and appreciating art.
In the context of my dissertation, literature regarding art museums in the United States is
especially relevant. In 1939, Lawrence Coleman published a three-volume set on the history of
museums in America, which provided a wealth of detail but little theoretical commentary.
64
In
1977, Nathanial Burt published Palaces for the People: A Social History of the American Art
Museum, which declared itself the first social history of the art museum in America. Though this
text is filled with colorful commentary about how museums came together, it failed to question
the social and cultural role of art museums in American society.
65
Twenty years later, Nancy
Einreinhofer raised many of these questions in The American Art Museum: Elitism and

62
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verso, 1991). The following texts also contributed to my understanding of nationalism: Ernest
Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and
Nationalism Since 1780: programme, myth, reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
63
M. Prösler, “Museums and Globalization,” in Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity
in a Changing World, ed. S. Macdonald and G. Fyfe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 21–44.
64
Laurence Vail Coleman, The Museum in America: A Critical Study, 3 vols. (Washington, 1939).
65
Burt, 1–12.

30
Democracy. According to Einreinhofer, American art museums emerged in imitation of the
Louvre and thus celebrate democracy and cultural prestige in the United States. The American
Art Museum looks especially closely at the educational programs, which were developed in the
United States prior to their development in Europe, as an example of the democratic tendencies
of the American museum.
66
As the title suggests, Einreinhofer explored the tensions that arise
between the museum’s responsibility to the public and their interactions with precious
collections and wealthy donors. Almost contemporaneously to the release of The American Art
Museum, Alan Wallach published a collection of essays on art museums in the United States. His
book, Exhibiting Contradictions: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States, consists of a
series of case studies, but moves towards creating a critical history of the American art
museum.
67

It is especially significant for my study that the collecting of Old Master paintings often
disappears from larger narratives of the development of American museums at the midcentury.
In 1929, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened, and this was the event both Einreinhofer
and Wallach highlight in their considerations of midcentury museums in the United States.
68
As
MoMA represented a new kind of museum in the United States—one initially intended to
function without a permanent collection—it makes sense to highlight this new development. Yet
it is not as if the collecting and display of art of the past remained static within American
institutions; there are also evolving patterns within museums possessing early modern art that
should be addressed.

66
Einreinhofer.
67
Wallach, Exhibiting Contradictions.
68
Einreinhofer, “The development of American modernism and its influence on the American art
museum,” 79–101; Wallach, Exhibiting Contradictions, Part II begins with an essay on MoMA’s history,
73–87.

31
The collecting of Old Master paintings also fails to emerge within discussions of how
midcentury museum developed because it tends to appear antimodern. Anthony Molho, for one,
argued that mid-twentieth-century American collections of Italian Renaissance art were
profoundly conservative and functioned as a rejection of modern art and modern social values.
69

I find this reductive. Though he collected Old Masters, Kress did not oppose modern art. In 1936,
the Kress business tried to hire Fernand Léger to design displays for the same Fifth Avenue Store
windows that would present the Adoration of the Shepherds to the public in a few years’ time.
70

Furthermore, though the content of the Kress Collection is clearly not modern, I contend the
project of the Kress Foundation to donate collections of Italian Renaissance art to dozens of
museums across the country is a modern one, in that it celebrates progress and education as a
socially transformative process. My dissertation reinserts the Kress Collection—and the
collection of Old Master paintings—into narratives of modern museum development in
midcentury America.
Inevitably, histories aiming to comprehensively describe the development of art museums
in America miss important parts of this story. Wallach described his study as providing a “rough
sketch” of the history of art museums in the United States, and in reviewing the existing
literature on the American art museum it seems this may be the best a comprehensive study can
hope to accomplish. Alternatively, recent publications—like Neil Harris’s Capital Culture: J.

69
Anthony Molho, “The Italian Renaissance, Made in the USA,” 267, 287.
70
Léger declined Kress’s offer. The artist wrote his friend that while the window-design job paid well, it
was “le métier de chien par excellence.” (Fernand Léger, Lettres à Simone [Paris: Skira, 1987], 166) as
cited by Bernice L. Thomas, America’s 5 & 10 Cent Stores: The Kress Legacy (New York: John Wiley &
Sons for the National Building Museum, 1997), 131, 184. Kress’s request reflected a contemporary
interest in bringing modern art into commercial spaces. This was especially popular in Japan, where
prominent artists designed window displays and advertisements for the department stores (Younjung Oh,
Art into Everyday Life: Department Stores as Purveyors of Culture in Modern Japan, PhD diss.
[University of Southern California, 2012]).

32
Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience
(2013)—provide insights into the development of the American museum through studies of
individual museums or sites.
My project adopts neither the comprehensive nor individual model of studying American
museums. Instead, I offer a new approach by focusing on the history of a single collection, which
is dispersed but not disbanded. The Kress Collection has always been a collection in flux—
constantly being added to and moved between physical sites. Attending to the history of this
collection raises questions about the relationship between collections and their sites of physical
display, how works of art come to constitute a collection, and the ways in which art collections
differ from and contribute to the development of individual museums. This approach permits me
to explore questions central to the development of American museums without becoming rooted
in the history of a single institution or overwhelmed by the demands of a comprehensive survey.
Thus, though a project addressing the entirety of the Kress Collection cannot reasonably be
considered a micro-history, as the collection encompasses thousands of works of art, nearly a
hundred institutions, and dozens of important figures, I believe that—like a micro-history—my
study is richer for its close consideration of the particular circumstances and cultural conditions
that shaped this collection.
Debates surrounding the production of knowledge through museums’ collecting practices,
exhibition design, and educational programming are lively and ongoing. There are also active
discussions on the role of museums in shaping national identity. The Kress Collection’s history
provides ample opportunity to consider these issues while also asking how American
appropriation of Italian Renaissance art shaped our thinking about the history, art, and material
culture of this period.

33
Finally, in the histories of collecting and display, museum studies, and reflections on the
importance of the Italian Renaissance in twentieth century museums and scholarship, most
publications emerging from these fields exist as anthologies. My dissertation moves away from
this model and instead devotes sustained attention to the story of one collection, and in doing so,
provides a fuller picture of the role of Italian Renaissance art in the shifting debates about
education, research, and conservation in midcentury American art museums.

Anglo-American Appropriation of Italian Renaissance Cultural Patrimony
My project also engages with a growing body of literature about Anglo-American
appreciation and appropriation of Italian Renaissance culture. From the eighteenth-century
tradition of the Grand Tour onward, Northern Europeans visited Italy to admire the remains of
classical and Renaissance culture. The tradition of the Grand Tour essentially ended with the
conflicts of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, but by 1814 tourism revived,
albeit in a different manner.
71
British travelers continued to visit Italy and Americans
increasingly did as well. With Baedekers in hand, this new generation of tourists “rediscovered”
the Italian Renaissance primarily through its rich architectural, artistic, and material remains.
There is now an established body of literature addressing the varied responses of Anglo-
Americans to the Italian Renaissance through the course of the long-nineteenth century.
72
The
panel, “Brahmins & their Botticellis: Italian Renaissance Art & Boston in the late 19
th
Century,”

71
Jeremy Black, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
72
Hilary Fraser, The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992); Lillian B.
Miller, “Celebrating Botticelli: The Taste for the Italian Renaissance in the United States, 1870–1920,” in
The Italian Presence in American Art, 1860–1920, ed. Irma B. Jaffe, 1–22 (New York: Fordham
University Press, 1992); J.B. Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Marcello Fantoni, ed., Gli anglo-americani a Firenze: Idea e
costruzione del Rinascimento (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2000); John E. Law and Lene Østermark-Johansen,
eds. Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

34
at the 2015 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, and ongoing scholarship on this
issue by scholars like Jacqueline Marie Musacchio and Jeremy Melius demonstrate that this is an
active area of scholarly research.
Yet overwhelmingly, these studies only extend to the period of the First World War. A
handful of more recent studies address British and American appropriation of the Renaissance
throughout the twentieth century. Williams James Bouwsma, Anthony Molho, Paul Grendler,
and Christopher Wood have written on the ways in which Italian Renaissance historiography
bears the mark of twentieth-century cultural and political contexts like the rise of fascism and
communism.
73
Fewer studies address how the larger public engaged with the cultural legacy of
the Italian Renaissance. In 1983, the National Gallery of Art dedicated the exhibition, “Raphael
and America” to exploring and celebrating the attachment of the American public to one
Renaissance master. In this exhibition marking the five-hundredth anniversary of Raphael’s birth,
David Alan Brown demonstrated how from the eighteenth century onward, Americans admired
the work of Raphael through reproductions and strove to acquire works by his hand for their own
institutions. Brown concluded that by the twentieth century, Raphael’s name was equated with
art and culture in the minds of most Americans.
74

My project builds upon the existing literature by addressing a significant example of
American appropriation of Italian Renaissance cultural patrimony in the twentieth century.
Appropriation means, simply, to take something for oneself. In defining this term, art historian
Robert Nelson noted that it can carry “more sinister connotations, implying an improper taking
of something,” though it need not be limited to such instances. Appropriation does not erase the
earlier connotations attached to cultural objects, but rather reframes these associations to create

73
Bouwsma, “The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History,” 1–15; Molho, “The Italian
Renaissance, Made in the USA,” 277; Grendler, 3–6; Wood, 65–92.
74
David Alan Brown, Raphael and America (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1983).

35
new meanings. At its best, this process appears natural, belying the fact that appropriation is—in
Nelson’s words—always “active, subjective, and motivated.” Appropriation is a useful concept
for art historians, Nelson argued, because it acknowledges the importance of art in the past and
present, highlights how context determines meaning, and encourages us to ask questions about
the social utility of art.
75
Nelson’s definition of appropriation enables me to examine the cultural
connotations midcentury Americans invested in Italian Renaissance art.

Chapter Overview
My dissertation consists of four chronological-ordered chapters, each focused on a
particular aspect of the Kress Collection. The first chapter examines Samuel Kress’s collecting
practices. During the first decade that he collected early modern art, Kress acquired over a
thousand works, primarily fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Italian paintings. The Kress
Collection grew quickly because, unlike the Gilded Age collectors that preceded him, Kress did
not primarily pursue masterpieces. Though his collection eventually included canonical artists
like Donatello, Giorgione, Raphael and Titian, Kress prioritized acquiring paintings by unknown
masters and minor artists like Giovanni Boccati, Raffaellino del Garbo, and Lorenzo Costa. By
highlighting the work of these lesser-known artists, the Kress Collection sought to provide a
representative survey of the history of Italian Renaissance art. Studying the development of the
Kress Collection provides a more richly textured picture of how private collecting practices
evolved in the interwar years in response to professionalizing museums, political and economic
instability in Europe and the United States, and the increasingly global art market.

75
Robert S. Nelson, “Appropriation,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard
Shiff, 2
nd
ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 116–28.!!

36
My second chapter examines how and why Kress sought to make Italian Renaissance art
accessible to the American public in the 1930s. In these years Kress experimented with a variety
of methods to bring his collection to the American public: he donated artwork to museums across
the United States, developed a traveling exhibition, lent art to World’s Fairs and exhibitions, and
discussed opening his own museum. I contend Kress pursued these differing avenues in response
to contemporaneous debates about how art could serve the American public. In the 1920s and
1930s, cultural reformers and museum workers held on to the Progressive Era conviction that art
museums should teach and inspire the public; furthermore, they embraced this as an essential
element of healthy civic life. To fulfill the museum’s responsibilities, many reformers advocated
for an expanded definition of the museum, one that could reach larger and more diverse
audiences. Through traveling exhibitions and other formats, they attempted to find new ways to
share artwork with the public. Kress actively participated in these debates by circulating his
private collection in the 1930s. Following the Kress Collection’s movement in the 1930s
demonstrates the significant place early modern European art occupied in interwar American
discussions about the role of art in civic life.
Kress decided to commit his collection to the National Gallery of Art in 1938. As war
broke out in Europe, even established cultural centers and institutions felt vulnerable. In donating
his collection to the National Gallery of Art, Kress hoped to help safeguard the culture of
Western Civilization. In the years that followed, the National Gallery spurred Kress on to more
ambitious collecting. The second half of my dissertation addresses the Kress Collection’s
evolution following this gift.
To prepare the Kress Collection for public display, Samuel Kress and the Kress
Foundation hired conservator-restorers to clean, repair, and reframe the art they acquired.

37
Virtually none of the Kress Collection went untouched. My third chapter examines the practices
of conservation and restoration that reshaped the Kress Collection. From the late 1940s, the
primary Kress conservator-restorer, Mario Modestini, worked closely with curators at the
National Gallery and Dr. Robert Fuller, a research chemist at Carnegie Mellon University, to
bring studio practices of restoration into harmony with the newest scientific techniques for
studying and conserving early modern European paintings. Their experiments formed the way
the Kress Collection looks today. Furthermore, the dialogue between art historians, conservator-
restorers, and scientists around the conservation of the Kress Collection contributed significantly
to mid-twentieth century debates about the ethics and practices of art conservation.
In the late 1940s, the Kress Foundation returned to Kress’s vision of bringing art into
communities with limited cultural resources by establishing the Regional Galleries Program.
Originally planned to redistribute hundreds of paintings in storage at the National Gallery, the
program quickly grew in ambition. Throughout the 1950s, the Kress Foundation purchased
heavily to provide collections of Italian Renaissance art to eighteen regional galleries and
twenty-three university museums. By 1961, the Kress Foundation completed this series of gifts
and ceased further acquisitions. Through this program, dozens of museums across the United
States received their own surveys of Italian Renaissance art.
The ambition of the Kress Regional Galleries Program is remarkable; it represented a
new approach to arts philanthropy. The fourth and final chapter of this study examines the
program in detail, closely attending to the Cold War cultural context from which it emerged. I
contend that the reticence of the federal government to fund cultural initiatives in this
environment led the Kress Foundation to innovatively use private philanthropy to extend the
cultural reach of the National Gallery of Art. In creating the Kress Collection, Kress and his team

38
had long sought to make early modern art an important component of American cultural
patrimony. Collecting Italian Renaissance art was an especially powerful way to do this, for the
Italian Renaissance offered not only the content of the Kress Collection, but also a model of how
to define one’s own cultural moment in relationship with the past. The political climate in the
postwar United States only intensified the Kress team’s sense of purpose; under these
circumstances, the Kress Collection acquired a new valence.
Today, vast in scope and scale, the Kress Collection is spread across thirty-three states,
from Hawaii to Maine (Fig. I.2). My dissertation offers the first systematic study of the
development and distribution of the Kress Collection of Italian Renaissance art, one that provides
new insights regarding collecting practices, the cultural legacy of Italian Renaissance art, and the
importance of early modern artwork in midcentury American museums and the public
humanities more broadly. Furthermore, this project examines larger questions about how private
individuals shape public institutions, crafting narratives through collections that reflect their own
ideological commitments. As Americans continue to struggle to separate fact from fiction in our
representations of the past, these issues are extremely timely.

39
Chapter 1
Creating the Kress Collection of Italian Renaissance Art, 1927–1941

Of the fourteen hundred paintings within the Kress Collection, slightly over eleven
hundred—fully 80 percent—are works of Italian art from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries.
1

Thus, the Kress Foundation describes the Kress Collection as one “distinguished for its
abundance of Italian Renaissance paintings.”
2
This claim does not go far enough. Studying the

1
Within the Kress Collection, there are either 1,129 or 1,184 early modern Italian paintings. The differing
approaches to counting diptych panels and disassembled altarpieces produces the two distinct sums.
Chronologically, the Kress Collection’s Italian paintings break down as follows: 403 (or 429) are twelfth–
fifteenth-century, 410 (or 431) are fifteenth- and sixteenth-century, and 316 (or 324) are sixteenth–
eighteenth-century. There are also 276 (or 282) non-Italian European paintings and 31 drawings in the
Kress Collection. Beyond paintings, the Kress Collection also holds 151 works of sculpture, only 39 of
which are not early modern Italian. Finally, the Kress Collection also has approximately 130 statuettes
and utensils in bronze, 459 reliefs and plaquettes (many from the Dreyfus Collection), 700 medals, and a
few other items including tapestries and fine furniture (David Dubon, Tapestries from the Samuel H.
Kress Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: The History of Constantine the Great designed by
Peter Paul Rubens and Pietro da Corona [Aylesbury: Phaidon Press for the Samuel H. Kress Foundation,
1964]; Carl Christian Dauterman and James Parker and Edith Appleton Standen, Decorative Art from the
Samuel H. Kress Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Tapestry Room from Croome Court,
Furniture, Textiles, Sèvres Porcelains and Other Objects [Aylesbury: Phaidon Press for the Samuel H.
Kress Foundation, 1964]; John Pope-Hennessy, Renaissance Bronzes from the Samuel H. Kress
Collection: Reliefs, Plaquettes, Statuettes, Utensils and Mortars. [London: Phaidon Press for the Samuel
H. Kress Foundation, 1965]; Fern Rusk Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian
Schools, XIII-XV Century [London: Phaidon Press for the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1966]; G.F. Hill
and Graham Pollard, Renaissance Medals from the Samuel H. Kress Collection at the National Gallery of
Art [London: Phaidon Press for the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1967]; Fern Rusk Shapley, Paintings
from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XV-XVI Century [London: Phaidon Press for the
Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1968]; Fern Rusk Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection:
Italian Schools, XVI-XVII Century [London: Phaidon Press for the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1973];
Ulrich Middeldorf, Sculptures from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: European Schools, XIV-XIX Century
[London: Phaidon Press for the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1976]; Colin T. Eisler, Paintings from the
Samuel H. Kress Collection: European Schools excluding Italian, [Oxford: Phaidon Press for the Samuel
H. Kress Foundation, 1977]).
2
“Browse the Collection,” Kress Foundation, accessed October 10, 2016,
http://www.kressfoundation.org/collection/repositorymap.aspx?id=72.

40
development of the Kress Collection makes it clear that this collection—particularly in the first
and final decades of its creation—is fundamentally dedicated to Italian Renaissance art.
3

The Kress Collection stands apart as the largest private collection of Italian Renaissance
art ever assembled in the United States. Social, political, and economic factors allowed Samuel
Kress, working in conjunction with his brother Rush and a team of advisors, to develop this
impressive collection between the early 1920s and late 1950s. Rather than primarily pursue
masterpieces, Kress purchased hundreds of works of art—often by minor masters—to create a
comprehensive collection of Italian Renaissance art.
Though the Kress Collection is unmatched in terms of its size and diverse range of Italian
Renaissance art, Kress’s aims as a collector were not unique. A small but prominent number of
American collectors in the first decades of the twentieth century dedicated themselves to creating
comprehensive art collections. Furthermore, a remarkable number of these collectors focused
primarily on Italian Renaissance art. This trend was not repeated among American collectors of
Dutch and English Old Master paintings, fields that Americans prized more highly during this
period.
4

3
Furthermore, this collection is primarily dedicated to Italian Renaissance painting. The Kress Collection
contains one hundred and fifty-one works of sculpture, one hundred and eight of which are Italian.
Simply in terms of proportion, sculpture represents a much smaller part of the collection. Furthermore, the
best pieces of sculpture in the Kress Collection were largely purchased under Rush Kress in the late
1940s–50s, on behalf of the National Gallery and the Kress Foundation’s Regional Galleries Project. See
Appendix III. For this reason, this chapter will focus on Kress’s collecting patterns as they relate to the
paintings he collected between 1924 and 1941.
4
Annette Stott, “Collecting Dutch Old Masters: Originals, Interpretations, Copies, and Reproductions,” in
Holland’s Golden Age in America: Collecting the Art of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hals, ed. Esmée
Quodbach (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), 44.

41
The French theorist Jean Baudrillard identified a desire common among collectors to
assemble “a whole succession of objects, and, at the extreme, a total set.”
5
Though the theoretical
literature dedicated to collecting discusses this impulse, the history of collecting has not
dedicated sufficient attention to this particularly focused approach to collecting art in the early
twentieth century. Too often scholars ascribe a collector’s motivations to their individual
personalities. The concurrent, though individual, decision of a number of American collectors to
devote their resources to building comprehensive collections of Italian Renaissance art suggests
instead a larger cultural trend.
Finally, though Kress shared the same cultural impetus to create his collection of Italian
art as other collectors of his age, only he succeeded. I shall go on to make a case for this success
depending on both Kress’s approach to collecting and on the economic and political climate in
which his collection took shape. The Kress Collection represents the largest and most fully
realized comprehensive collection of Italian Renaissance art created during this period. Studying
its development provides a rich opportunity to consider how this systematic approach to private
collecting emerged and evolved in the face of changing museum practices, political and
economic instability in Europe and the United States, and the increasingly global art market of
the first half of the twentieth century. Samuel Kress was one of a small number of collectors
bringing early modern European paintings into the United States in the 1920s and 30s; studying
his collecting practices not only elucidates the history of the Kress Collection, but also provides
insight into American collecting of Old Masters as a cultural practice beyond the Gilded Age.

5
Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger
Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 8. This is a translation of Baudrillard’s “Le système marginal,”
a chapter in Le Système des objets (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1968).

42
American Collecting of Italian Renaissance Art
Kress was hardly the first American collector to attempt to bring the riches of Italy to the
United States. In the colonial era and early years of the Republic, Americans prized copies after
Renaissance artists long before any true examples of early modern Italian art could be found in
the country. As few Americans could travel to Europe, most people would experience Italian art
through copies and reproductive prints.
6
However, in the second half of the nineteenth century,
the country’s growing industrial wealth paired with improved modes of transportation made it
possible for more Americans to travel to Europe and view Renaissance paintings firsthand. This
experience inspired a number of the wealthy Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
to collect the artwork of early modern Italy, often in order to share it with their compatriots at
home.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Bostonian art critic and dealer James Jackson Jarves
brought into the United States the first large collection intended to provide a survey of Italian art
to an American audience. Jarves created the collection while living in Florence. He had moved
there in 1852, and developed close relationships with ex-patriots living in the city including the
Hawthornes, Barrett Brownings, and George Eliot. Jarves learned a great deal about Italian art
and the Florentine art market from Walter Savage Landor, a poet and art collector; art historian
Alexis Rio; and Giorgio Mignaty, an artist and restorer. The collection he created featured a
great number of Italian “primitives,” a period term for Italian artists working from the thirteenth
through fifteenth centuries—roughly, Cimabue to Raphael. This earlier view of Italian
Renaissance art was not entirely fashionable yet among American audiences in the 1860s.

6
David Alan Brown, Raphael and America (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1983), 15–24;
David Alan Brown, foreword to A Market for Merchant Princes: Collecting Italian Renaissance
Paintings in America, ed. Inge Reist (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2015), xii.

43
Jarves did not create this collection solely for his personal enjoyment. As a critic and
dealer, he hoped to create an appreciation (and market) for early Italian Renaissance paintings
among his fellow citizens. He tried to entice the largest American art institutions to acquire his
collection, but was unsuccessful. Ultimately, Yale University acquired Jarves’s collection in
1871 when he was unable to repay a loan they had extended to him. The collection survives
today in Yale’s art gallery, but this had not been Jarves’s vision for the future of his paintings.
Despite his failure, Jarves often appears in histories of collecting as one who tried to create the
kind of dealer-connoisseur role that Bernard Berenson successfully inhabited a generation later.
7

By the end of the nineteenth century, Gilded Age collectors eagerly acquired examples of
art by the Old Masters, that is, European (almost exclusively male) artists working from the
fourteenth to eighteenth centuries. Examples by the Old Masters flooded into the United States
between 1890 and the onset of World War I as changing political and economic conditions made
once firmly ensconced collections of Old Master paintings available again.
For example, in Britain, the source of many of the works of art sold to Americans during
this period, a confluence of economic factors pushed collections back onto the art market
beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1846, partially in response to famine in Ireland, the
British Parliament repealed the Corn Laws, a set of measures that protected domestic agriculture
products by imposing tariffs and restrictions on imported grain.
8
Following the repeal, the price
of grain dropped precipitously, directly cutting into the fortunes of many landed British
aristocrats. While struggling to deal with diminishing returns on their land, British landowners

7
On Jarves, see Francis Steegmuller, The Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1951); Clay M. Dean, “James Jackson Jarves and the ‘Primitive’ Art Market in
Nineteenth-Century America,” in A Market for Merchant Princes: Collecting Italian Renaissance
Paintings in America, ed. Inge Reist (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 16–27.
8
Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey, From the Corn Laws to Free Trade: Interests, Ideas, and Institutions in
Historical Perspective (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006).

44
also faced new taxes in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1853, the United Kingdom passed the
Succession Duty Act, the first of a series of new estate taxes.
9

This combination of factors, further exacerbated by a series of economic crises in the
third quarter of the nineteenth century, placed great financial pressure on many British estate
holders. In order to help British landowners maintain ownership of their ancestral estates,
Parliament passed the Settled Lands Act of 1882. This act permitted families to break trusts in
order to sell assets—like valuable works of art—to raise capital. In the wake of the Settled Lands
Act, many private British art collections long considered inalienable suddenly re-emerged on the
art market.
10

For American collectors, the timing was propitious. In the years following the Civil War,
the United States, once a primarily agricultural state, became a major economic power due to
rapid industrialization. A small group of American tycoons developed enormous fortunes during
this period by manufacturing steel, producing oil, and building railroads.
11
By the late nineteenth
century, businessmen like J.P. Morgan, William and Henry Walters, and Henry Clay Frick used
their vast wealth to fill their mansions with Old Master paintings and objets d’art.
12
For the first
time, works of art by canonical artists like Raphael and Titian entered American collections.
13

9
Lesley Hoskins, Samantha Shave, Alastair Owens, Martin Daunton, and David R. Green. “The Death
Duties in Britain, 1859–1930: evidence from the Annual Reports of the Commissioners of the Inland
Revenue,” in History of Wealth: Inheritance, families and the market in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Britain, working paper 1 (University of Cambridge: September 2014).
10
Peter Watson, From Manet to Manhattan: The Rise of the Modern Art Market (New York: Random
House, 1992), 42.
11
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York:
MacMillan, 1982); William G. Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in
America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
12
Albert Boime, “America’s Purchasing Power and the Evolution of European Art in the Late Nineteenth
Century,” in Gallerie, musei, e loro influenza sullo sviluppo dell’arte nei secoli XIX e XX. Francis Haskell,
ed. (Bologna: Editrice C.L.U.E.B. 1981), 123–39.
13
Isabella Stewart Gardner brought the first (still largely accepted) painting by Raphael to the United
States in 1898 when she purchased his Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami. In the coming decades, J.P.
Morgan, Henry Walters, and many others would also obtain examples of the master’s work (Brown,

45
Yet none of these Gilded Age collectors focused exclusively on Italian Renaissance art.
Instead figures like Isabella Stewart Gardner, J.P. Morgan, and Henry Clay Frick pursued works
of art of high quality from widely disparate periods, cultures, and media. In his seminal text on
the history of American collecting, René Brimo described this approach to collecting as
“eclectic.” His study placed eclectic collecting in contrast with the “specialist” approach, which
circumscribed collecting to a particular set of objects.
14
Italian Renaissance art often played a
central role in the eclectic collections of individuals like Gardner, Morgan, and John G. Johnson,
but their art interests were wide-ranging.
A few eclectic Gilded Age collectors tried to provide a survey of Italian art within their
larger collections, without success. Most famously, in 1902, Henry Walters purchased the
massive Massarenti collection—consisting of nine hundred paintings and hundreds of additional
objets d’art—in order to convey the history of Italian painting in his eponymous museum in
Baltimore.
15
Walters knew this collection contained many copies and works of art with
suspicious attributions, but wrote to Bernard Berenson that he had hoped nonetheless “to retain a
sufficient number of pictures to present fairly a history of Italian art, it being my intent to add,
from time to time, a few important Italian pictures to improve the collection.”
16
Yet following
harsh criticism of his purchases, Walters discarded, sequestered to storage, and ignored many of
the works of art he had acquired, never truly developing his collection of Italian art in the manner

Raphael and America). Of course, this desire to obtain Old Master artwork was not limited to Italian art.
See for example, Quodbach, 2014; George S. Keyes, Tom Rassieur, and Dennis P. Weller, Rembrandt in
America: Collecting and Connoisseurship (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2011).
14
René Brimo, The Evolution of Taste in American Collecting, trans. and ed. Kenneth Haltman
(University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2016), 171–94. Despite naming this distinction, Brimo
argued that all American collectors “have been and remain eclectic, every last one of them. Despite
occasional concentrations of objects, highly developed, exclusive specializations have been all but
unknown” (Brimo, 192).
15
Stanley Mazaroff, Henry Walters and Bernard Berenson: Collector and Connoisseur (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2010).
16
See Mazaroff, 175, nn. 12.

46
he had intended. By the time of his death in 1931, few would have considered the neglected
Walters Art Gallery a significant site for viewing Italian Renaissance art.
17

By the 1920s, the failure of Jarves, Walters, and a half dozen other collectors on a smaller
scale to develop survey collections of Italian Renaissance art inspired Edith Wharton’s novella,
False Dawn. In the story, a wealthy New Yorker sends his son to Europe with the task of
purchasing works of art for their private gallery. Instead of acquiring paintings by Raphael or
Giotto, the son returns to New York bearing an array of copies and works by minor masters.
Disgusted, the father rejects this collection, which his son only displays publicly after his father’s
death. Once open, the private gallery remains devoid of visitors, and proves a source of pain for
the young man. It is only years later, after his own death, that the public comes to realize the
value of this unusual collection.
18
Published in 1924, this story reflects a sense among a set of
wealthy Americans from Eastern urban centers like Wharton that American collectors should
strive, despite the obstacles, to bring Italian Renaissance art and culture to the United States.
This impulse emerged from the belief that Italian Renaissance art could play an important
role in strengthening American cultural identity in the early twentieth century. From the era of
the Grand Tour in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Italy represented a place where elites
went to study art and architecture, and refine their taste.
19
In the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, privileged Americans devised their own variants of the Grand Tour, but this
opportunity was not available to the masses. With the advent of industrialization, intellectual
elites believed exposing people to great works of art would combat a growing culture of

17
Of course, this estimation changed in the intervening decades. In 1976, Federico Zeri commended the
Italian art in the Walters Art Gallery for “offering a balanced and uninterrupted survey of the history of
Italian painting” (Mazaroff, 142–147).
18
Edith Wharton, Old New York (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1924).
19
Clare Hornsby, ed. The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond (London: the British School at
Rome, 2000), introduction, 1–12.

47
materialism.
20
Creating museum collections could control this materialism on two fronts by
encouraging wealthy Americans to direct their conspicuous consumption into channels that
benefitted their fellow citizens.
21
Of course, collectors need not restrict themselves to acquiring
Italian art in order to serve the public in this manner—they could, and did, achieve similar ends
by buying up paintings by artists like Rembrandt, Rubens, or Vermeer.
However, Americans felt a strong connection to the culture of Renaissance Italy. In the
words of Jacob Burckhardt, as “the firstborn son of modern Europe,” the Italian Renaissance
represented the starting point that led to the founding of the United States, according to the
dominant view of the increasingly popular Western Civilization courses and narratives.
22

Selective studies of early modern Italy—largely focusing on urban centers like Florence—cast
early modern Italian culture as the forebear of prized American values like capitalism, humanism,
and democracy. In the 1920s, as communism and fascism acquired greater power in Europe,
Americans increasingly viewed Italian Renaissance art as reflecting their own ideals.
Americans envisioned parallels between their own culture and other key periods of
European history as well of course; for example, many connected strongly to the culture of the
seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. However, in terms of collecting, the American affinity to
Renaissance Italy differed from all others because the Italian Renaissance offered a model for
how to define one’s own cultural moment in relationship with the past. As Paula Findlen argued,
one of the key features of the Renaissance was its investment in “the collection, creation, and

20
John Brewer, The American Leonardo: A Tale of Obsession, Art and Money (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 21.
21
This also of course, reinforces capitalism as a positive system in an era with few social programs to
benefit those who were not wealthy.
22
Anthony Molho, “The Italian Renaissance, Made in the USA,” in Imagined Histories: American
Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1998), 263–294.

48
celebration of objects.”
23
Through the careful study, display, and imitation of antiquities, early
modern Italians declared their connection to the ancient past.
24
Ignoring the continental shift,
early twentieth-century collectors aimed to assert the centrality of the Italian Renaissance to
American cultural identity. Through the collection of Italian Renaissance art, twentieth-century
American collectors fashioned themselves and their culture as perpetuating the classical tradition.

In False Dawn, part of the tension between father and son lies in their anxieties about
how best to represent the Renaissance. While the father wants to purchase a painting by Raphael,
the son chooses instead to buy works by artists pre-dating the sixteenth-century. Wharton’s story
reflects the vogue for Italian primitives in the early twentieth century. Though sixteenth-century
Italian art had always been prized by Americans and Europeans as a highpoint in the history of
Western art, the work of these earlier artisans gained new appreciation in the nineteenth century.
Influenced by John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and others, the well-connected Harvard professor of
Fine Arts Charles Eliot Norton, and his student, Bernard Berenson, encouraged Americans to
value, study, and collect the previously undervalued work of early Italian Renaissance artists.
25

In no small part, their efforts helped redefine Italian primitives as Old Masters for an American
audience. The circulation of reproductive prints and photographs of these earlier paintings in
newspapers and art journals also aided the Italian primitives. They reproduced well in black-and-
white and maintained their form even in low resolution images since their compositions usually
consisted of well-delineated forms and strong, simpler color blocks (disegno rather than colorito).

23
Paula Findlen, “Possessing the Past: The Material World of the Italian Renaissance,” The American
Historical Review 103, no. 1 (February 1998): 86. This paper is part of the AHR Forum: The Persistence
of the Renaissance.
24
Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences (New York: Icon Editions, 1972); Roberto Weiss,
Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (New York: Humanities Press, 1969); Patricia Fortini
Brown, Venice & Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
25
Brimo, 200–210.

49
For example, compare two illustrations printed in Burlington Magazine in 1903: Simone
Martini’s Annunciation fares much better than Titian’s Portrait of Giacomo Doria in black and
white (Fig. 1.1–4).
26
In reality, both paintings possess luminous, saturated color, but Simone’s
crisp, sinuous lines translate more clearly in reproduction than Titian’s gradated tones.
Conveniently, dugento to quattrocento Italian paintings were also more readily available
on the art market, and by 1900 paintings by the Italian primitives began entering American
collections in larger numbers.
27
Eclectic collectors like Gardner, Morgan, Henry Walters, and
John Johnson participated in this trend by adding paintings by Italian primitives to their
collections. Helen Clay Frick greatly strengthened the Italian holdings of her father’s collection,
adding nearly all the pre-sixteenth century Italian paintings in the Frick Collection today in the
1920s and 30s.
28

There was also a subset of American collectors that focused primarily on Italian
primitives. For Brimo, this “less eclectic” group of collectors came the closest to developing
specialist collections. Among the half-dozen men Brimo lists, Dan Fellows Platt (1873-1937)
emerges as the exemplar of this kind of collector.
29
Once the mayor of Englewood, New Jersey,
Platt studied archaeology and art history, he wrote books about his travels in Italy and even
served as a visiting professor of art history at Princeton. Platt developed a large collection of
fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian paintings in his Englewood, New Jersey home. His

26
F. Mason Perkins, “Andrea Vanni,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 2, no. 6 (August 1903):
323; Herbert Cook, “Three Unpublished Italian Portraits,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 1,
no. 2 (April 1903): 184.
27
In the 1920s, one could still find “underpriced Italian primitives.” The prices did not significantly rise
for these early Italian paintings until the mid-1930s (Gerald Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste: The Rise
and Fall of Pictures Prices, 1760–1960, vol. 1 [London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1961], 202–17).
28
Martha Frick Smyinton Sanger, Helen Clay Frick: Bittersweet Heiress (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2008).
29
Brimo states that Dan Fellows Platt, Frank Lusk Babbott, Cyrus W. Hamilton, Samuel H. Kress, Frank
J. Mather, and Henry W. Cannon all developed collections focused on Italian Renaissance art. Brimo
208–10.

50
collection excelled in fourteenth-century paintings from Tuscany, but also contained well-chosen
examples of Italian painting from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Platt’s collection also
included antiquities and modern European art. Nonetheless, Brimo argues that Platt
demonstrated a specialist approach because his carefully composed collection of Italian Primitive
paintings went far beyond the fashion of the day.
30

Platt stands as an exemplar of a small but established group of collectors focused on the
paintings of Italian primitives. In the midst of his discussion of these like-minded collectors,
Brimo highlighted the collection of Samuel H. Kress. He noted that like Platt, Kress began by
collecting fourteenth-century Italian painting. He praises Kress’s collection both for its “fine
workshop paintings” as well as “works of considerable importance” by artists like Duccio and
Agnolo Gaddi.
31
Brimo assessed the Kress Collection in the mid-to-late 1930s as he prepared his
study. His comments provide a rare example of the art world’s perception of the Kress Collection
before it began to dramatically transform as Samuel Kress (and from mid-1930s onward, the
Kress Foundation) began collecting more aggressively.
32
Had Brimo written The Evolution of
Taste a few years later, he might have discussed Kress, rather than Platt, as the exemplar of a
specialist collector of Italian primitives.
In identifying the specialist impulse in American collectors of the early twentieth century,
Brimo offered a new layer of nuance in his discussion of Gilded Age collecting practices. He

30
Brimo, 208–10 In 1938—the publication year of The Evolution of Taste—Platt died and his heirs sold
of many Italian paintings from his collection. Over a series of sales beginning in 1939, Kress acquired
over two-dozen Italian paintings from Platt’s estate. He would continue to purchase paintings from the
Platt Estate, ultimately owning 27 paintings formerly in the Platt Collection. For provenance records see
the Complete Catalogue of the Samuel H. Kress Collection (London: Phaidon, 1964–77) and the Kress
Foundation’s provenance research project, accessed September 12, 2016, http://www.kressfoundation.
org/provenance/.
31
Brimo, 209.
32
Brimo’s categorization of the Kress Collection relies largely on his study of the 1934 catalogue, An
Exhibition of Italian Paintings Lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress of New York to the Los Angeles Museum of
History, Science, and Art, Exposition Park, Los Angeles, California (Brimo, 324, n. 49).

51
compellingly argued that specialization emerged in American collecting in response to the rise of
museums and universities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Disciplines like art
history and archeology reframed the collecting of art and antiquities by making complete sets
and unusual rarities desirable in new ways. He traced the strong interest in Italian Renaissance
art in particular to the publication of a number of strong academic studies in the late nineteenth
century by scholars like Jacob Burckhardt, Giovanni Morelli, Eugène Müntz, Sir Joseph Archer
Crowe, and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle.
33
Yet for Brimo, all American Gilded Age collectors
of Old Master paintings—whether eclectic or specialist in their approach—collected primarily to
distinguish themselves and to develop art collections in the United States that might compare
favorably with those in Europe.
Though Brimo wrote The Evolution of Taste in the latter half of the 1930s, his study does
not extend past 1919. In his estimation, an important era in American collecting concluded with
the end of the Great War, and all important collections formed in the intervening two decades
represented a mere continuation of earlier practices in American collecting.
34
Yet conversely,
Brimo writes that Old Master paintings had already declined in importance for American
collectors by the onset of World War I.
35

He is not alone in noting a shift in patterns of American acquisition of Old Master
paintings around World War I.
36
Flaminia Gennari Santori chose to conclude her study of the
role of the media in managing public perception of American collecting of Old Master paintings
in 1914. She argues that prior to this date, American newspapers and journals (particularly the

33
Brimo, 220–1.
34
Ibid, 87.
35
Ibid, 210.
36
This is at least in part generational. Around World War I, the generation of great Gilded Age collectors
like J.P. Morgan (1837–1913), Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924), Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919),
began to decline and pass away.

52
New York Times) used coverage of the acquisition of Old Master paintings by private American
collectors to debate issues like capitalism, economic inequality, consumerism, cultural heritage
and relations between the United States and Europe. After 1914, in part due to the growth of art
museums in the United States, Santori argues that private collections ceased to function as
important sites for debate about American cultural heritage.
37

Though collecting as a cultural practice in the United States changed after the Gilded Age,
the acquisition and display of Old Master paintings remained a powerful national and cultural
practice well into the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 30s, Andrew Mellon, Joseph Widener,
Philip Lehman and others acquired prized examples of Italian Renaissance art as well as Dutch,
English, French, and Spanish art. In addition, the aforementioned specialist collectors like Dan
Fellows Platt, Samuel Kress, and—to a degree—John Ringling, all created collections dedicated
(more or less) to Italian art. This new generation of collectors of Old Master paintings
necessarily differed from their Gilded Age predecessors; the influx of early modern paintings
into the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century began to exhaust some corners
of the art market, while stimulating sales in others—including previously underappreciated fields,
like Baroque art.
38
Far from declining in importance, Old Master paintings remained among the
most highly desired sales for art dealers in the 1920s and 30s.
39

In this context, collecting Old Master paintings continued to function as a significant
nationalist practice. All the collectors mentioned above—and many more—left their collections
to the public, and envisioned doing so even as they developed them. This generation of collectors

37
Flaminia Gennari Santori, The Melancholy of Masterpieces: Old Master Paintings in America, 1900–
1914 (Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2003), 267–9.
38
Edgar Peters Bowron, ed. Buying Baroque: Italian Seventeenth-Century Paintings Come to America
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017).
39
Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Legend (Cambridge: Belknap Press for Harvard
University Press, 1987), 295.

53
worked closely with famed dealers like Joseph Duveen and Charles Carstairs in order to create
collections worthy of contributing to the ever-stronger art museums in the United States. In this
environment, a specialist collector could substantially enrich the existing collections of American
art museums by creating collections that went beyond a desire to collect art by major names.
Too often, the existing literature on the history of collecting follows Brimo’s lead and
fails to distinguish this latter generation of collectors from their Gilded Age predecessors.
Collecting Old Master paintings during the interwar years provided unique challenges and
opportunities as Europe and the United States underwent significant social, economic, and
political upheaval. In discussions of his collecting practices, Samuel Kress is too often described
as a kind of belated Gilded Age collector. His desire to create a survey collection of Italian art
from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries was long-rooted in American culture, but his historical
moment provided him with the opportunities that actually made specialization possible.

The Collector’s Earliest Purchases: Kress’s Collecting before the Kress Collection
Kress collected artwork in a casual fashion before embarking on the creation of the Kress
Collection as it exists today. However, the history of the Kress Collection in its present form
arguably begins in 1924. Samuel Kress made his first documented purchases of Italian
Renaissance art that year in Munich, from a well-known German art dealer named Julius Böhler.
On August 8
th
, Kress bought the panel painting Madonna and Child with a Female Saint and
Donor (Fig. 1.5). Böhler sold this painting as the work of Previtali, an artist who primarily
worked in Bergamo in the early sixteenth-century after training in Giovanni Bellini’s

54
workshop.
40
At some point during the same year (possibly in the same sale), Kress also
purchased a small set of fifteenth-century panel paintings from Böhler depicting The
Annunciation and Nativity and an unidentified Legend of a Saint (Fig. 1.6–7).
41
Though Kress
had not yet conceived of building a representative collection of Italian Renaissance art in 1924,
these early purchases were a good way to begin; like most of the art produced during the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy, these three paintings are religious scenes produced by
relatively minor artists.
Histories of the Kress Collection do not highlight the Madonna and Child with Female
Saint and Donor, Annunciation and Nativity, and Legend of a Saint as the earliest examples of
Kress’s passion for Italian Renaissance art. In part, this is due to the lack of firm documentation
on many of Kress’s early purchases—it is possible there are other works of art in the Kress
Collection today that he purchased before these three paintings.
42
One might also hesitate to trace
the origins of the Kress Collection from this set of works because of their shallow provenance
and poor quality. As evidenced by their flat, abraded surfaces, all three paintings were heavily
cleaned and restored at least once.
43
Drawing too much attention to these paintings would only

40
“Andrea Previtali,” accessed March 4, 2017, http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/3252 /andrea-
previtali-italian-about-1480-1528/. Fern Rusk Shapley instead attributed this painting to Pietro degli
Ingannati, another sixteenth-century Venetian artist influenced by the work of Giovanni Bellini and
Giorgione (Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XV–XVI, 175).
41
Though Fern Rusk Shapley attributed these paintings to the Veronese School, she acknowledged that
the authorship of the works is uncertain. She noted that a related work in the Accademia, Venice, had
been attributed to the Bolognese, Ferrarese, and Venetian schools as well as that of Veronese. Today,
these works are not particularly celebrated examples of the Kress Collection; they were excluded from the
Kress Collection’s ultimate donation and remained in the private collection of Rush Kress’s widow,
Virginia (Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XIII–XV, 78).
42
For example, it seems likely Kress also purchased a painting attributed to Pinturicchio in 1924 from an
unknown person in Volterra (Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools,
XV–XVI, 102).
43
For more on the condition of the Madonna and Child, see Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress
Collection: Italian Schools, XV–XVI, 175. Kress’s apartment inventory indicates Pichetto restored the
panels attributed to Veronese, but they likely underwent earlier cleaning and restoring campaigns as well.
See the section “Items Removed from Inventory,” in “1020 Apartment Inventory (secretary’s copy),”

55
contribute to a long-standing dismissal of the Kress Collection as one composed largely of minor
works of questionable quality. Finally, I contend that histories of the Kress Collection rarely
begin with these works because their acquisition complicates the clearly established narrative
built up around Samuel Kress’s collection.
Most accounts state that Samuel Kress began collecting Italian Renaissance art while
traveling in Italy in the late 1920s. Studying the three catalogues dedicated to Italian paintings in
the Kress Collection demonstrates the veracity of this claim. Between 1927 and 1930, Samuel
Kress purchased one hundred and four Italian paintings dating from the thirteenth to eighteenth
centuries. He purchased the vast majority of these paintings from the Italian dealer and collector,
Alessandro Contini Bonacossi.
44
In 1927 alone, Samuel Kress purchased twenty-five Italian
Renaissance paintings. Yet between this date and the aforementioned purchase from Böhler in
1924, Kress did not acquire any other Italian Renaissance works of art that exist in his collection
today. The purchases from Böhler in 1924 evidence that Kress’s interest in Italian Renaissance
art predated his friendship with Contini.
Kress’s purchases in 1924 provide an important node connecting the Kress Collection as
it exists today and Kress’s earlier collecting activities. Understandably, accounts of the Kress
Collection’s history usually begin in the latter half of the 1920s, when Kress began purchasing
large numbers of Italian Renaissance paintings. Marilyn Perry, largely echoing the account in
LIFE Magazine in 1953, explained that after a lifetime of labor, Kress began collecting art—
particularly Italian art—with the encouragement of his companion, Delora Kilvert, while the two

May 10, 1941. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 115, 1020
Apartment Inventory], New York, New York.
44
See Appendix I.

56
traveled in Italy during this period.
45
Kress’s purchases from Böhler in 1924 complicate this
narrative, though they do not entirely undermine it. Kress could well have met Böhler while
travelling in Italy or in Germany, where he spent time visiting the Kress ancestral lands and
attending to his health in spa towns like Baden. Böhler sold artwork to an international market
and traveled himself.
46
Wherever they met, a purchase from Böhler does not preclude developing
an interest in Italian art initially while traveling in Italy.
However, there is evidence to suggest Kress began collecting artwork before the 1920s.
Brimo wrote that Kress created his collection around 1914, almost a decade earlier than the
current accounts suggest.
47
The Kress Foundation’s recent provenance research project provides
no documentation to support Brimo’s claim.
48
However, the Kress Collection catalogues and
provenance research project only contain information related to the Kress Collection in its final

45
Marilyn Perry, “The Kress Collection,” in A Gift to America: Masterpieces of European Painting from
the Samuel H. Kress Collection, ed. Chiyo Ishikawa, Lynn Federele Orr, George T.M. Shackelford, and
David Steel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 16; Edgar Peters Bowron, “Samuel H. Kress and His
Collection of Italian Renaissance Paintings,” in A Market for Merchant Princes: Collecting Italian
Renaissance Paintings in America, ed. Inge Reist (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press
for the Frick Collection, 2015), 109; John Walker, Self-Portrait with Donors: Confessions of an Art
Collector (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969), 135; “The Great Kress Giveaway: Dime store
founder disperses $75 million art collection to U.S. museums,” LIFE (November 16, 1953): 159.
46
“Julius Böhler (firm),” Frick Collection Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America,
http://research.frick.org/directoryweb/browserecord.php?-action=browse&-recid=6054.
47
Brimo, 209. Unfortunately, Brimo provides no citation for this claim. Brimo may have heard this from
Edward Forbes and Paul J. Sachs, with whom he studied at Harvard from 1933–35. Forbes and Sachs
must have known Kress, since from 1929 until 1940, Kress lent the Fogg Museum his painting The
Adoration of the Magi, attributed to Domenico Moroni. For an account of Brimo’s experience at Harvard,
see Kenneth Haltman’s introduction to his translation of The Evolution of Taste in American Collecting.
Brimo, 19–34. Shapley documents Kress’s loans of the Adoration of the Magi (Shapley, Paintings from
the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Paintings, XV–XVI, 11). A series of letters between Kress and
Forbes in the Kress Foundation Archive further attest to their friendship. The letter can be found in
Samuel H. Kress Foundation [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 148, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art
Museums], New York, New York.
48
The results of the Kress Provenance Research Project were published between May 2013 and October
2016, and are now available on the Kress Foundation website. Based out of the National Gallery of Art,
this project produced more complete provenance information for Kress Collection artwork than the earlier
printed catalogues. The program was also intended to serve as a model of “best practices in provenance
research and transparency in museum collection information.” (Kress Provenance Research Project,
accessed March 29, 2017, http://www.kressfoundation.org/provenance/).

57
iteration. Brimo’s comment instead supports claims that have been made over the years about
Kress’s collecting before the Kress Collection.
Though the Kress Collection began to acquire its present form in 1924, it is clear Kress
collected art well before this date. Collecting differs from mere accumulation in its purpose;
collections reframe objects, which have been removed from their original context, as things that
belong in dialogue with one another, things that will accrue richer meaning in the aggregate. Yet
it is important to recognize that collections rarely begin in a deliberate manner, though they
appear to have done so in hindsight. This is true of Kress’s collecting career. In a 2007 interview,
Jocelyn Kress stated that her uncle owned “paintings stacked up to the ceiling” by 1915. Kress
gradually disposed of this earlier collection–which his niece described as consisting of “really
bad art”—as he developed the Kress Collection as it exists today.
49
Jocelyn Kress refrained from
describing the nature of her uncle’s “really bad art,” and today the Kress Foundation’s archives
contain no records related to this earlier collection.
However, in his 1970 history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Calvin Tomkins
claimed that Kress offered the Metropolitan Museum of Art his collection of “mostly mediocre
French Salon pictures” in the mid-1920s. Tomkins stated that the museum rejected Kress’s offer,
but he provided no evidence to support this account.
50
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s
archives neither record this offer nor its refusal, though this does not necessarily disprove
Tomkins. Lacunae abound within the archived correspondence between Kress and the
Metropolitan Museum; in the extant papers, there are gaps and omissions between letters

49
Geoff Gehman, “Friendship brought Old Masters treasure trove to Allentown,” Tribune Digital
Morning Call October 7, 2007, accessed March 16, 2015, http://articles.mcall.com/2007-10-
07/entertainment /3783510_1_samuel-h-kress-foundation-quarter-store-paintings
50
Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York: E.P. Dutton, 1970, 316–7. Tomkins wrote this (unauthorized) text in conversation with museum
officials to celebrate the Metropolitan Museum’s centenary.

58
suggesting conversations occurred either in person or in lost letters that moved negotiations
forward in ways not recorded in the written record.
Historically, it would make sense for Kress to have developed a collection of late
nineteenth-century French Salon pictures. From the 1870s onward, American collectors favored
French artists of the academy and of the Barbizon school. Newly wealthy industrialists—
including notable art collectors like J.P. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick—built up strong
collections of paintings by artists like Jean-Baptiste-Théodore Géricault, Camille Corot, Constant
Troyon, Théodore Rousseau, Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, Charles-François Daubigny,
Théodule Ribot, and Jean-Baptiste Millet.
51
After initially emerging in cities along the east coast,
this trend spread across the United States. Though a few prominent collectors shifted their focus
to Old Master paintings in the 1890s, collecting the work of French academicians and Barbizon
school artists remained popular into the early twentieth century. When Knoedler & Co. opened
their gallery in Pittsburgh in 1897 the paintings of the Barbizon school remained in high
demand.
52
Had Kress collected artwork for his residence between 1890 and the second decade of
the twentieth century, French Salon and Barbizon school paintings would represent a natural
choice for someone of his socioeconomic position.
If this was the case, Kress disposed of this earlier collection by 1941. During that year,
his staff prepared an inventory of the contents of his 1020 Fifth Avenue apartment, the only

51
E. Durand-Gréville, “La peinture aux Etats-Unis. Les galeries privées,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 36, no.
2 (1887): 68-75; Earl Strahan, Art Treasures of America, 3 vols. Philadelphia: Gebbie & Barrie, 1879–
1881. On Morgan: see Boime. On Frick, see DeCourcy E. McIntosh, “Demand and Supply: The
Pittsburgh Art Trade and M. Knoedler & Co.,” in Collecting in the Gilded Age: Art Patronage in
Pittsburgh, 1890–1910, ed. Gabriel P. Weisburg, DeCourcy E. McIntosh, and Alison McQueen (Hanover:
University of New England Press, 1997), 107–78.
52
Alison McQueen, “Private Art Collections in Pittsburgh: Displays of Culture, Wealth, and
Connoisseurship,” in Collecting in the Gilded Age: Art Patronage in Pittsburgh, 1890–1910, ed. Gabriel
P. Weisburg, DeCourcy E. McIntosh, and Alison McQueen (Hanover: University of New England Press,
1997), 60.

59
record that contains any traces of an earlier Kress collection. The inventory itself is over a
hundred pages long; along with hundreds of paintings and sculptures, it lists items as mundane as
the staff’s cleaning supplies. Before the proper inventory begins, there is a section listing “Items
Removed From Inventory” that provides a glimpse of Kress’s early collecting habits. On a trip to
Egypt, he purchased an array of antiquities, including a “Blue Schaptel” and “Granite Head”
both dated to the “18
th
Dynasty (1500 B.C.).”
53

In addition to these “ornaments” and antique laces, this list of items removed from the
inventory includes nearly three-dozen “Paintings and Pictures.” Half of these items are works on
paper: drawings, prints, and watercolors. Writing in 1938, Brimo had noted Kress’s “extensive”
collection of drawings “acquired in an extremely eclectic spirit, including works by American,
Italian Renaissance, English Romantic, French, and even German artists.”
54
The sixteen works
on paper listed in this inventory hardly constitute an extensive collection, but they are diverse in
the manner Brimo describes. There are a half-dozen sixteenth-to-eighteenth century European
drawings—many of which are now in the National Gallery of Art’s collection.
55
However, the
inventory also lists more popular items—like a wood carving acquired from the American Art
Association and a set of three prints from Oberammergau.
56
Likewise, the paintings listed

53
“1020 Apartment Inventory (secretary’s copy),” May 10, 1941. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive
[Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 115, 1020 Apartment Inventory], New York, New York. For evidence of
Kress’s trip to Egypt, see photographs in the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 5: Kress
Family, Box 175, Kress Family: Samuel H. Kress: Photos and Portraits (2/2)], New York, New York.
54
Brimo, 209.
55
Kress’s small collection of drawings is seldom discussed. The drawings—mostly eighteenth-century
French and Venetian works—are neither included in the Kress Collection catalogues nor listed on the
Kress Foundation’s website. To learn more about these drawings, see The Collection of French and
Venetian Drawings of Mr. Samuel H. Kress of New York, MSS 32, National Gallery of Art Library,
Washington, D.C.
56
The “three prints from Oberammergau, 1922” relate to the passion play performed once every decade in
this small Bavarian town. The people of Oberammergau began performing this daylong play in 1634, as
an act of thanksgiving after being spared the worst of the bubonic plague. It is now performed every year
ending with a zero. The play in 1922 is the only modern instance of delaying the performance—in 1920,
the community was still struggling with the aftermath of the First World War and decided to postpone

60
include examples that exist in the Kress Collection today (the two panels attributed to Veronese
purchased in 1924 as well as a Madonna and Child attributed here to a student of Francisco
Francia) alongside items we would not associate with Kress’s collecting habits, such as a
Portrait of a Nude Woman and a Dutch landscape scene.
57

This brief inventory does not allow us to reconstruct Kress’s early collection. It does not
answer the question of whether or not Kress collected Barbizon, French Academic, or modern
works of art prior to developing his passion for Italian Renaissance art. However, it provides
hints about the approach Kress took to collecting art before he committed to creating the Kress
Collection. This list of items removed from the inventory includes modern and early modern
works of art from a variety of regions, whereas the paintings listed in the inventory proper reflect
a more focused commitment to the artwork of the Italian Renaissance.
Comparing the lists also makes it clear that Kress developed differing relationships with
dealers while building the Kress Collection as it exists today. The works of art removed from the
inventory came from a wider range of dealers. Some, like Julius Böhler in Munich and Luigi
Grassi in Florence, are remembered today as prominent art dealers of the time, while others, like
Rosenberger in Bad Kissingen and Annivitti in Rome, are virtually unknown today.
58

their production. From the late nineteenth-century onward, people have traveled from all over the world
to view this passion play. The interwar years witnessed a spike in American Protestant interest and
attendance of the play. See Sonja E. Spear, “Claiming the Passion: American Fantasies of the
Oberammergau Passion Play, 1923–1947,” Church History 80, no. 4 (December 2011): 832–62; Claire
Sponsler, Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 2004), 125.
57
“1020 Apartment Inventory (secretary’s copy),” May 10, 1941. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive
[Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 115, 1020 Apartment Inventory], New York, New York. Like the panels
attributed to Veronese, the Madonna and Child by a pupil of Francia remained in the home of Virginia
Kress after the collection’s dispersal. Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian
Paintings, XV–XVI, 72.
58
The dealers listed include: J. Böhler; J.S. Goldschmidt; Rocci Mariano, Rome; Rosenberger, Bad
Kissingen; Grassi, Florence; Salvadori, Venice; Galassi, Montecatini; Knapp; American Art Association;
Rocchi, Rome; Busse, 1918; Annivitti, Rome; and Gimpel and Wildenstein. “1020 Apartment Inventory

61
Finally, the two inventories document collections of disparate value. The inventory
regularly assigns figures in the thousands—and even tens of thousands—of dollars for the
paintings listed, while the paintings and pictures removed from the inventory rarely exceed one
hundred dollars. Equally telling, the inventory lists the “value” of paintings included—indicating
they represent investments—while only noting the “cost” of works removed from the inventory.
Together, a general sense of Kress’s early collecting practices emerges from this inventory—he
acquired works of art at a relatively low cost, from a variety of dealers, without a defined
program.
Lacking a concrete account about the content of Kress’s earliest, erased collection, we
might best define it as a collection defined by economy. We could read claims about Kress’s
“mediocre” or “really bad art” as a way to perpetuate a narrative about Samuel Kress’s
parsimony—a keynote in the Kress biography, promoted by Samuel Kress himself. Kress
successfully promoted images of himself as a frugal man throughout his life; this story
reverberates throughout discussions of him in the press. For example, in a 1953 article dedicated
to the “Great Kress Giveaway”, LIFE magazine wrote: “In his late 50s, Samuel Kress paid his
first visit to an art gallery and was shown a painting tagged at $300. Studying this picture in
silence for a few minutes, he turned to the dealer and asked, “Are they paying that kind of money
for these things?” Less than 20 years later Kress himself was to pay almost a million dollars for a
single painting.”
59
By stressing Kress’s natural bent for thrift, these anecdotes cast his later
actions as a collector and benefactor in a more dramatic light.

(secretary’s copy),” May 10, 1941. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box
115, 1020 Apartment Inventory], New York, New York.
59
The painting was The Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi, now in the
National Gallery (“The Great Kress Giveaway,” 159).

62
The rhetorical value of these stories does not undercut their veracity, however. Jocelyn
Kress and Calvin Tomkins’ comments both suggest Kress purchased works of art of lesser
quality in his earlier stages of collecting in the interest of price. The inventory for Kress’s
apartment supports their claims; reviewing the costs outlined for works of art removed from the
official Kress inventory reveals that Kress purchased a good number of inexpensive paintings,
prints, and drawings between 1918 and 1941.
In summary, acquiring examples of Italian Renaissance painting in 1924 did not
immediately transform Kress’s approach to collecting. Instead these purchases conformed to his
existing approach to collecting artwork. For Italian Renaissance paintings, the Annunciation and
Nativity and Legend of a Saint were inexpensive; Kress paid two hundred and fifty dollars for
each in 1924. It is possible Kress had already purchased examples of Italian Renaissance art prior
to this date that are not part of the collection today. Likewise, he may have continued to buy
Italian Renaissance paintings between 1924 and 1927 that were later removed from the Kress
Collection. For example, the “items removed from inventory” list refers to a panel painting
depicting the “Madonna with Christ Baby” and “two seraphims” attributed to Lorenzo de
Pietro.
60
Unlike the 1924 purchases from Böhler—also listed on the “items removed from
inventory” list—this painting does not appear in the Kress Collection catalogues.
61
Though it

60
According to the inventory, Kress acquired this painting from “Rocci Mariano, Rome”. This is likely
Chev. Prof. Mariano Rocchi. “1020 Apartment Inventory (secretary’s copy),” May 10, 1941. Samuel H.
Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 115, 1020 Apartment Inventory], New York,
New York.
61
The Kress Collection catalogues do not include any artwork attributed to this artist. They do include
two paintings attributed to Vecchietta, the name more commonly associated with Lorenzo di Pietro, but
neither of these works matches the description of the painting in the inventory. They instead depict a
judgment scene and St. Bernardine (Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian
Paintings, XIII–XV, 151–2). Finally, although the Kress Collection today includes no fewer than eighteen
paintings that could be described as scenes of the Madonna and Child with angels, their respective
provenances rule them out as the work noted in the “items removed from inventory.” The 18 works
featuring the Madonna and Child with angels are: K1, K2044, K2158, K1028, K1294, K1716, K563,

63
seems this work was ultimately deemed insufficiently important to be placed in the public eye in
the Kress Collection, Kress appreciated it enough to keep it hanging in his apartment as late as
1941—long after he shifted his collecting goals. I contend that rather than marking a turning
point, Kress’s purchases from Böhler in 1924 serve as traces of Kress’s earliest mode of
engaging with works of art—of the Renaissance and of other times and cultures as well—which
was eclectic and personal. Kress’s purchases from Böhler in 1924 therefore give an important
indication of his long-standing interest in Italian Renaissance art, one that would become more
focused later in the decade.

The Continis & the Emergence of the Kress Collection
Kress embarked on a career as a more serious collector in 1927, when he acquired
twenty-five Italian paintings dating from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries. From this point
forward, Kress consistently added works of Italian Renaissance art to his collection every year
until his death in 1955.
62
The Kress Collection as it exists today began to take shape in 1927, but
at the time Kress did not envision creating this kind of specialist collection of Italian Renaissance
art. The plan for the Kress Collection developed over the course of the next decade in response to
economic, political, and cultural transformations Kress could not have foreseen in the late 1920s.
The confluence of Kress’s growing personal fortune, a widespread depression, the rise of fascism

K1085, K1179, K535, K241, K387, K528, K250, K440, K1053, K1370, K168. See Appendix I for more
information on these works.
62
In the last years of his life, Samuel Kress was not personally involved in purchasing works of art for the
Kress Collection. He suffered a series of strokes—the first on June 15, 1941, and the second on April 27,
1946—that left him increasingly incapacitated. After the second stroke, Kress remained bedridden until
his death in 1955. However, as long as possible, he remained actively engaged in making decisions about
his collection. By the late 1940s, Kress relied on his brother Rush to build and maintain his collection in
his place. Rush Kress and the Kress Foundation continued making purchases of Italian art until 1957.
“Memorandum for the Record.” Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 5: Kress Family, Box 172,
Kress Family: Correspondence: General], New York, New York.

64
in Italy, and the transformation of the museum landscape in the United States in the 1920s and
1930s worked together in a manner that allowed Kress to develop the kind of specialist
collection of Italian Renaissance art that many American collectors had envisioned in the past.
Kress began to shift from casual to more committed art collection after meeting the
Italian collector-dealer, Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, and Contini’s wife and business partner
Vittoria, 1927. The Continis sold Kress all twenty-five early modern Italian paintings he
purchased in 1927. Until the mid-1930s, he would purchase artwork from them almost
exclusively. By the year of both men’s deaths in 1955 (Vittoria died in 1949), Contini had sold
Kress, and subsequently the Kress Foundation, over eight hundred works of art.
63
Undoubtedly,
Alessandro Contini Bonacossi played an important role in Kress’s transformation into a serious
collector of art.
In a manner consistent with his earlier collecting practices, Kress met the Continis in the
context of furnishing his home. In 1925, he purchased a new, expansive penthouse located across
the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
64
Kress’s longtime girlfriend, Delora Kilvert,
invited Alessandro and Vittoria to advise them how best to furnish and decorate Kress’s home.
65

Kilvert had purchased furniture from the Continis in the past for her own home. It seems likely
the she—and perhaps Kress as well—first met the Contini Bonacossi couple on one of their
annual trips to Italy.
66

63
See Shapley and Kress Provenance Research Project.
64
For more details on Samuel Kress’s 1020 Fifth Avenue penthouse, see Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Archive [Series 5: Kress Family, Boxes 172–173], New York, New York.
65
Vittoria Contini Bonacossi kept a diary during her time in New York between 1926 and 1929. She
records visiting the Kress apartment with Mrs. Kilvert on February 10, 1926. Vittoria Contini Bonacossi,
Vittoria Contini Bonacossi Diario Americano, 1926–1929, transcribed and annotated by Fulvia Zaninelli
(Prato: Gli Ori, 2007), 141.
66
There is no concrete evidence for such a meeting prior to 1927. However, Eva Toffali argues that
Vittoria Contini Bonacossi would not have failed to comment on a new acquaintance in her diary had they
been meeting Kress for the first time in 1927 (Eva Toffali, “Alessandro Contini Bonacossi tra le due

65
In the decades to come, many who knew Samuel Kress acknowledged Delora Kilvert’s
vital role in cultivating Kress’s interest in collecting art.
67
John Walker, Bernard Berenson, and
the writers of LIFE Magazine all described her as a beautiful and sophisticated woman, the ex-
wife of the Canadian-American illustrator, B. Cory Kilvert. Though Delora Kilvert and Samuel
Kress never married, she was his trusted companion for many decades. Her role in forming and
shaping the Kress Collection must be significant, but unfortunately it is impossible to trace. The
near complete absence of correspondence to or from Kilvert in the Kress Foundation Archives
suggests her letters were intentionally excluded from the official record as personal documents.
68

Nonetheless, a partial picture of Kilvert’s taste emerges from the few fragmentary records
that refer to her. Vittoria Contini Bonacossi does not specify what kind of furniture they sold to
Kilvert, but they tended to sell European antiquities—both real, pastiche, and reproduction—that
would appeal to the goût Rothschild.
69
In the 1930s, Kilvert purchased a set of Louis XV
cabinets from French & Co., which now decorate the Palace of Versailles.
70
She paid attention to

guerre: Kress e gli altri. Novità dagli archive fiorentini e romani (1929–1939).” Gazzetta Antiquaria.
April 18, 2016, accessed April 11, 2017,
http://www.antiquariditalia .it/it/gazzetta/articolo/2/138/alessandro-contini-bonacossi-tra-le-due-guerre-
kress-e-gli-altri.-.).
67
Walker, Self Portrait with Donors, 135; Samuels, Bernard Berenson, 437. Perry, “The Kress
Collection,” A Gift to America, 16; Gehman; “The Great Kress Give-Away; Federico Zeri, Confesso che
ho sbagliato: Ricordi autobiografici (Milan: Tascabili degli Editori Associati, 2009), 68.
68
This is not to suggest that the Kress Foundation at any point sought to erase her contributions from the
official record. Even after Samuel Kress’s death in 1955, the Kress Foundation continued to invite Delora
Kilvert to events related to the Kress Collection. Her name even appears on the guest list for a dinner
organized by the National Gallery of Art in honor of the final dissemination of the Kress Collection in
1961. She had attended similar events at the National Gallery in the past, but sadly she died six weeks
before this grand finale celebration (National Gallery of Art Archive [Series 16A-4—Box 1, Record
Group 16, Records of the Department of Special Events, Special Events Files, 1957–1983], Washington,
D.C.).
69
Contini Bonacossi, Diario Americano.
70
In the mid-1950s, Kilvert sold the cabinets to the Kress Foundation. The Foundation then donated them
to Versailles. The receipt for Kilvert’s purchase can be found in the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive
[Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 150, Versailles, France: Chateau de Versailles], New York, New York.
Kilvert also purchased a painting by the British artist John Samuel Paul from M. Knoedler & Co. J.D.

66
auction catalogues and publications related to art, a point that emerged in a note she wrote to
Bernard Berenson after they met in the autumn of 1937. After visiting Villa i Tatti with Samuel
Kress, Kilvert thanked Berenson for a memorable visit to his home. In this note, she praised a
painting he owned by Domenico Veneziano, noting that she “had seen photographs of [the work],
but always under the name ‘Baldovinetti, private coll. Florence.’ And it was a joy to really see it
hung in its house.”
71
Kilvert’s attention to the artwork within Villa i Tatti stands in marked
contrast to Kress’s own note following this visit, which is restricted solely to commenting on the
weather and medical treatments he and Berenson had discussed.
72
Over the years, Kress gifted
Kilvert several Old Master drawings, including Giambattista Tiepolo’s Rest on the Flight into
Egypt (Fig. 1.8).
73
This lovely eighteenth-century drawing—with its curving lines and intimate
scene—emerges from a different moment in the history of Italian art than the trecento Italian
paintings Kress purchased early in his years as a collector. Her collections and comments
indicate that Kilvert either inspired or, at the minimum, shared Kress’s passion for early modern
European art. Yet without further evidence, it is difficult to make any conclusive statements
about how Kilvert’s taste contributed to the development of the Kress Collection.
Nonetheless, it is clear that Kilvert helped initiate the Kress Collection in 1927. After
introducing Kress to the Continis, Kilvert created a working relationship between them. On
February 10, 1927, the couple came to survey Kress’s apartment; they rearranged furniture and

Paul Stock book, Getty Research Institute [Dealer Stock Books, Knoedler Collection, Book 8, Stock no.
A174, page 40, row 29], Los Angeles, California.
71
Delora Kilvert to Bernard Berenson, October 7, 1937. Villa i Tatti Archive [76.10 Kress, Samuel Henry
1937–1939], Florence, Italy.
72
Samuel Kress to Bernard Berenson, October 7, 1937. Villa i Tatti Archive [76.10 Kress, Samuel Henry
1937–1939], Florence, Italy.
73
Samuel Kress purchased this drawing and gave to it Mrs. Kilvert. Her daughter, Audrey Cory de Ayala,
inherited the drawing and sold it in 1968. It now belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago (“About this
Artwork,” Art Institute of Chicago, accessed April 12, 2017,
http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/29416/print).

67
took note of items missing in his décor—among these, Vittoria Contini Bonacossi wrote in her
diary that Kress needed paintings—a situation “così speriamo rimediare.”
74
Three days after this
initial visit, the Continis met Kilvert to continue redecorating. Vittoria’s diary makes it seem
Kress was either not present or not engaged in this visit, which seems to have been handled
primarily by Kilvert. In addition to resituating the furniture again, Alessandro and Vittoria placed
two new carpets, and discussed the most suitable plants and flowers to enhance the space. Last
but not least, they brought eight paintings to Kress’s apartment for his consideration, hoping that
he might keep at least one. In her diary, Vittoria exclaims—with some dismay—that in New
York, one must act as an interior designer in order to sell fine and decorative art.
75

Of the eight pictures, Kress and Kilvert responded enthusiastically to one painting in
particular—a primitive painting, Madonna and Child Enthroned with Angels, attributed to the
school of Piero della Francesca (Fig. 1.9).
76
Although the Continis were Italian, it should be
noted that they did not restrict their sales to Italian art. Kress could have chosen to purchase
examples of non-Italian art from the couple, but the Madonna and Child Enthroned with Angels
spoke to Kress’s affinity for Italian primitives, which he seems to have shared with Kilvert.
77

Though Kress did not speak Italian, he and Kilvert traveled throughout different regions of Italy

74
Contini Bonacossi, Diario Americano, 141.
75
See the entry for February 13, 1927. Contini Bonacossi, Diario Americano, 148.
76
Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Paintings, XV–XVI, 7. Long identified
in the Kress Collection catalogues as the work of an Umbrian Master, the Birmingham Museum of Art
now attributes this painting to the circle of Giovanni Boccati. “Birmingham Museum of Art,” Kress
Foundation, accessed January 12, 2018,
http://www.kressfoundation.org/collection/ViewCollection.aspx?id=72&repoID=18362.
77
Later, Kress purchased examples of non-Italian art from the Continis as well, including paintings by
Corot and John Singer Sargent (both in 1936) (Eisler, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection:
European Schools Excluding Italian, 381–3).

68
every year by car, exploring new cities and sites.
78
Perhaps, for Kress and Kilvert, this altarpiece
evoked memories of their travels.
Alessandro claimed that this large panel painting—which stands over five feet tall—came
from the convent of Santa Marta, near Orvieto. He dated the work to around 1400, approximately
a half-century earlier than current scholarship suggests. The composition of the Madonna and
Child Enthroned with Angels recalls earlier dugento and trecento Maestà images like Duccio’s
Madonna Rucellai (Fig. 1.10). The starry blue field behind the figures in the Madonna and Child
Enthroned with Angels functions in a manner similar to the traditional gold ground. The darker
ground on which the Madonna’s throne rests is almost indiscernible from the rest of the
background, making the throne and angels seem suspended in space. As a Maestà, this is a
devotional image. Due to its large size and deeply Catholic nature, the Madonna and Child
Enthroned with Angels was an unusual choice for a private Protestant American collector in the
first half of the twentieth century, which in many ways must have enhanced its striking presence
within Kress’s apartment.
On March 1, Kress purchased the Madonna and Child Enthroned with Angels from the
Continis, a little over two weeks after first seeing the painting.
79
Though Kress reportedly liked
the work as soon as he saw it, he required coaxing to make the purchase. Between first bringing
the painting to his apartment on February 13 and its sale on March 1, Alessandro visited Kress to
discuss the picture on eight separate days. Two days before the sale, Vittoria wrote her children
complaining that the long and frequent talks with Kress about the picture left “papà poveretto”

78
Zeri, Confesso che ho sbagliato, 66–7.
79
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 110, Contini-Bonacossi,
Alessandro: Bills of Sale (1 of 3)], New York, New York.

69
exhausted. However, once the painting sold, she proudly proclaimed that they had created a new
collector.
80

The Continis were in the business of creating collectors in the 1920s. In addition to
selling artwork from within their well-appointed villa on Via Nomentana in Rome, the Continis
travelled regularly to Paris and London to attend auctions and visit other dealers and private
collectors. They had long sought good examples of art to sell to other European collectors, and
by the 1920s they began seeking out clients in the United States as well.
Before selling artwork, Alessandro had worked as a stamp dealer. Marco Grassi, the
present-day restorer and descendent of the Florentine gallery owner of Luigi Grassi & Sons
colorfully describes Alessandro’s success in this trade as stemming from his travels as a young
man in South America, where he obtained rare examples of Spanish and Spanish-colonial stamps
that he was able to sell at higher prices upon his return to Europe.
81
Alternatively, Federico Zeri
stated a dying priest—who had been a loyal customer of Vittoria’s newspaper kiosk—donated
his rare collection of stamps to Contini.
82
However he initially developed a collection, from 1902
onward, the young Italian Alessandro and Vittoria lived in Spain, where they engaged profitably
in stamp collecting. In the years surrounding the First World War, the Continis began selling
works of art.
83
By the time they moved to Rome in 1918, the Continis primarily considered
themselves dealers of art and antiquities.

80
Contini Bonacossi, Diario Americano, 171–2.
81
Marco Grassi, “The American View of the “Forgotten Century” of Italian Painting: Reminiscences of a
Conservator and Art Dealer,” in Buying Baroque: Italian Seventeenth-Century Paintings Come to
America, Edgar Peters Bowron, ed. (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University
Press for the Frick Collection, 2017), 50.
82
Zeri, Confesso che ho sbagliato, 63–4.
83
Eva Toffali, “Alessandro Contini Bonacossi tra filatelia e commercio antiquario. Acquisti, vendite e
contatti nei primi anni di attività mercantile (1913-1928),” Gazzetta Antiquaria.
February 24, 2016, http://www.antiquariditalia.it/it/gazzetta/articolo/2/131/alessandro-contini
bonacossi-tra-filatelia-e-commercio-antiquario.

70
In the midst of this transition from stamps to artwork, the Continis developed their first
steady client, the Italian shipping magnate Achille Chiesa.
84
Chiesa contacted Contini as a stamp
dealer, but Alessandro encouraged him to also consider collecting paintings. Together, they
worked to build a fine collection of Old Master paintings. Chiesa intended to leave this collection
to the city of Milan. After his death in 1921, his son Achillito continued building the Chiesa
Collection to honor his father’s legacy. However, he quickly ran into financial difficulties, in part
due to estate taxes. In 1925, after many attempts by the Italian government to keep the Chiesa
Collection in Italy, Achillito Chiesa presented the majority of the collection for sale at the
American Art Association in New York.
85
Presented in four parts between 1925 and 1927, the
Chiesa Collection sales were ongoing when the Continis arrived in New York in late 1926. They
visited the American Art Association on numerous occasions in the winter and spring of 1926–7
and repurchased a number of the paintings that they previously sold to the Chiesa family.
86

After losing Chiesa as a client, the Contini needed to develop new clientele. The value of
the lira declined sharply in the mid-1920s, falling from roughly twenty-one lire per American
dollar in 1922 to twenty-five lire per American dollar in 1926.
87
In this economic environment,
the Continis naturally sought to do business with American collectors who could pay higher
prices in a more stable currency. As in Rome, the Continis did not open a gallery in New York.

84
According to Elsa De’ Giorgi, Alessandro met Achille through his younger brother (Elsa’s father-in-
law), Oscar Contini. Though he was from Milan, Achille’s business, Chiesa Hermanos, shipped goods to
and from Argentina—where Oscar happened to be living in the early twentieth century (Elsa De’ Giorgi,
L’Eredità Contini Bonacossi (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1988), 14–6).
85
Dana H. Carroll, foreword to The Collection of Achillito Chiesa, Esq. of Milan: Part I, Flemish and
Dutch Paintings of the XV-XVI-XVII Centuries, Italian Primitives and Renaissance Examples, A Small
Group of Canvases by English, French, and Spanish Artists of the XVI–XIX Century, (New York:
American Art Association, 1925); “Chiesa Art Gems, Whose Sale Italy Forbade, Bought by Americans
and Now in New York,” special cable to The New York Times, page 1, October 7, 1925.
86
Zeri, Confesso che ho sbagliato, 65.
87
In June 1927, Mussolini succeeded in achieving the quota novanta, which reset the exchange rate to 90
lire/1 pound British sterling (approximately 19 lire/U.S. dollar) (John Pollard, The Fascist Experience in
Italy (London: Routledge, 1998), 76).

71
Instead, they invited potential buyers to their luxurious suite at the Plaza Hotel.
88
They were well
connected in the international art world. While in New York in 1926–7, they socialized and
conducted business with many of the most prominent collectors, dealers, art historians, and
museum officials active in New York at the time, including Colin Agnew, Jules Bache, the
Guggenheims, and Paul Sachs. Even in the midst of this milieu, their introduction to Samuel
Kress in February of 1927 must have felt propitious.
After anxiously waiting in February 1927 to conclude their first sale to Kress, the
Continis invested a great deal of energy in cultivating him as a client. Alessandro—often
accompanied by Vittoria—spent a portion of no fewer than eleven days in March 1927 with
Samuel Kress. During their visits, he often presented additional works of art for Kress’s
consideration. However, they spent time together socially as well. They dined together
frequently, and also seem to have spent a great deal of time exploring New York. In late
February, Kress took the Continis to visit the Fifth Avenue headquarters of S.H. Kress & Co. —
showing them the offices, employee lounges, and services within the building, as well as its shop
floors. Two weeks later, the Continis invited him to their suite at the St. Regis Hotel, where
Vittoria personally prepared their dinner.
89
Vittoria’s diary makes it clear that she and
Alessandro worked hard to develop a relationship with Kress in the first months after their initial
meeting. Within this diary—written as a long letter to her children in Italy—Vittoria frankly
described Kress as a lonely man, whom she believed would be charmed with their company and
become a faithful client.
90
Vittoria did not always find this an easy task; she complained about

88
This manner of conducting business also helped them avoid taxes.
89
Contini Bonacossi, Diario Americano, 172–88.
90
Ibid, 180–2.

72
the “ore ed ore” they spend at his home, and remarked that presenting artwork to him required a
great deal of patience.
91
Nonetheless, like Alessandro, she believed their efforts to be worthwhile.
Though they spent a great deal of time rearranging his furniture, the Continis treated
Kress as a potentially serious collector. Once Kress displayed an appreciation for one Italian
primitive painting, the Continis encouraged Kress to consider additional examples. Within five
weeks of purchasing Madonna Enthroned with Angels, Kress purchased a dozen other thirteenth-
to sixteenth-century Italian paintings from the Continis. As in the case of Madonna Enthroned,
over half of these paintings feature religious scenes: there were three paintings of the Madonna
and Child, three images of saints, and one double-sided Crucifix.
92
The remaining five paintings
constitute a set based on Petrarch’s triumphs, which Contini listed as the work of Andrea
Mantegna.
93
Although this set is now given instead to Mantegna’s contemporary, Girolamo da
Cremona (a manuscript illuminator working in the court of Ferrara), the strong provenance for
this series of paintings—including once belonging to Munich’s Alte Pinakothek—makes the
earlier attribution understandable.
94
Most of the paintings Kress purchased in the first months of
his association with Contini were Tuscan, but there were examples of early modern Venetian and
Milanese art included as well.
95
With this series of purchases, Kress began developing his
collection of Italian Renaissance art.

91
Contini Bonacossi, Diario Americano, 178.
92
See Appendix I.
93
Kress purchased the Triumph of Love, Triumph of Chastity, Triumph of Death, Triumph of Time, and
Triumph of Divinity from Alessandro Contini Bonacossi in March 1926. Two years later, he also acquired
the Triumph of Fame from Drey’s, New York (Shapley, Paintings from Samuel H. Kress Collection:
Italian Paintings, XV–XVI, 27).
94
“Girolamo da Cremona,” The J. Paul Getty Museum, accessed May 4, 2017,
http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/3302/girolamo-da-cremona-italian-active-about-1450-1485/.
95
Appendix I

73
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
As is often the case for collectors, Kress began collecting art in earnest once he
envisioned his art collection as a part of his legacy. In 1927, Kress was in his early sixties and
had largely retreated from managing the S.H. Kress & Co. business. Alessandro encouraged him
to consider reinventing himself at this later stage of his life as an “amatore d’arte.” By mid-
March of 1927, Kress contemplated donating artwork to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Encouraging Kress along this path benefitted the Continis financially, but they also
believed that developing art collections for the public was a noble endeavor. In her diary,
Vittoria described Kress’s desire to donate to the museum, stating that the “extraordinary”
generosity of those who “give to their country” moved her.
96
For Vittoria and Alessandro,
enhancing art collections within one’s state was as much a patriotic act as it was philanthropic. It
was, in part, their own similar mission that brought the Continis to New York in 1926.
Alessandro pledged to refurnish the papal apartments of Paul III in Castel Sant’Angelo at his
own expense. In New York, he acquired many pieces for this project.
97
In addition to his
donations to Castel Sant’Angelo, Contini intended for his personal art collection to go to the
Italian state upon his death.
98
This was a common course of action for prominent art collectors in
the early twentieth century, especially in the United States where museums, which had no state
funding, had to rely upon private donations to build their collections. Through his conversations
with the Continis in 1927, Kress began to conceive of creating his own cultural legacy.

96
On March 15, Vittoria wrote, “Per questo qui sono straordinari…cosa regalano al loro paese…è una
cosa commouvente.” Contini Bonacossi, Diario Americano, 197.
97
Toffali, “Alessandro Contini Bonacossi tra filatelia e commercio antiquario.”
98
Upon Alessandro’s death, the Uffizi Gallery received part of the Contini Bonacossi collection. Many
other works were sold (Mario Salmi, “La Donazione Contini Bonacossi,” Bollettino d’Arte 32, no. 4
(1967): 222–32).

74
Kress initially envisioned building a namesake collection for the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, as Henry Marquand, J.P. Morgan, Benjamin Altman, and others had done in the past.
Living directly across the street from the Metropolitan Museum, it was natural Kress would think
first of donating to this institution. Issues of proximity aside, the Metropolitan Museum’s
prestige attracted many donors in the early twentieth century, as continues to be the case.
Founded in 1870, it is the oldest universal survey museum of art in the United States.
99
Though it
competed for preeminence with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, in the late 1920s the
Metropolitan Museum’s collection—in terms of breadth and quality—greatly surpassed other
American art institutions. For Kress, presenting paintings to this respected institution would
greatly enhance his reputation as a collector and philanthropist.
The Continis encouraged Kress in this respect as well. Alessandro and Vittoria visited the
Metropolitan Museum of Art repeatedly while they were in New York, studying its holdings
closely. They praised the museum’s collection effusively, but found its galleries of Italian art
underwhelming.
100
In 1926, the Metropolitan Museum of Art owned roughly one hundred and
fifty early modern Italian paintings.
101
In addition to the famed Raphael altarpiece purchased by
J.P. Morgan, the Metropolitan Museum possessed a good collection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-
century paintings that included the work of Fra Angelico, Lorenzo Lotto, and Bronzino. Their
Italian galleries also displayed a strong array of eighteenth-century paintings by Francesco
Guardi and Tiepolo. However, the museum owned far fewer examples of early Italian

99
Charter of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, State of New York, Laws of 1870, Chapter 197, passed
April 13, 1870 and amended L.1898, ch. 34; L. 1908, ch. 219.
100
Contini Bonacossi, Diario Americano, 177 and 199.
101
By comparison, the 1925 catalogue for the National Gallery in London lists over seven hundred early
modern Italian paintings. Their collection included numerous works by major masters like Raphael and
Titian (seven paintings per artist in 1925) and a rare panel painting by Leonardo da Vinci (National
Gallery Trafalgar Square Catalogue. London: Printed for the Trustees by the National Gallery of Art,
1925.). It is no surprise that the Continis, used to even richer collections in Italy, were underwhelmed by
the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s holdings.

75
Renaissance painting; only about a dozen of the works they owned predated the fifteenth
century.
102
Less than a quarter of the works on display in the galleries dedicated to “Italian
Paintings, 14
th
–15
th
Centuries” were created before 1400.
103
In the lacunae of the Metropolitan
Museum’s collection, the Continis perceived an opportunity for Kress to serve as a significant
donor.
In October 1927, Kress purchased a number of paintings from Alessandro Contini
Bonacossi with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in mind. He did not discuss the department’s
needs or wishes with Bryson Burroughs, the curator of paintings, before making his selections.
104

On the bill of sale for these works, Alessandro Contini Bonacossi promised that he would
exchange any paintings rejected by the museum.
105
On December 13, Kress wrote Burroughs and
formally offered four early modern paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Madonna and
Child attributed to Guidoccio Palmerucci (c. 1330s), a double-sided Crucifixion attributed to
Giotto (c. 1390s), a tondo Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist attributed to Raffaellino
del Garbo (c. 1500), and Melchior Hondecoeter’s Peacocks (1670s–80s). He also offered a long-
term loan of The Triumph of Death, one of the panels attributed to Mantegna (c. 1460s).
106
Kress
and Burroughs must have discussed the potential gifts shortly after he sent this letter, because

102
Bryson Burroughs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Catalogue of Paintings, 8
th
edition (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1926).
103
However, there were a few additional examples of fourteenth-century art in the galleries dedicated to
Benjamin Altman and Michael Dreicer’s bequests (Burroughs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art).
104
For more on Burroughs, particularly his efforts to build up the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of
Northern Italian paintings, see Andrea Bayer, “Collecting North Italian Paintings at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art,” in A Market for Merchant Princes: Collecting Italian Renaissance Paintings in
America,” ed. Inge Reist, 84–95 (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press for
the Frick Collection, 2015).
105
Receipt dated October 14, 1927, signed by A. Contini, Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series
1: Kress Collection, Box 110, Contini-Bonacossi, Alessandro: Bills of Sale (1 of 3)], New York, New
York.
106
Acceptance letter of Kress’s gift, December 21, 1927. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 7:
Oversize Material, Box OS 020, Gifts to Museums: New York, Memphis, Houston, New Orleans, San
Francisco scrapbook], New York, New York.

76
Kress removed the tondo from the list when he sent it along to the museum’s President, Robert
de Forest, on the sixteenth.
107
The Metropolitan Museum’s Board of Trustees quickly accepted
Kress’s offer in 1927.
108
A year later, after accepting another painting—this time a Madonna and
Child by Luca di Tommé (c. 1370)—the Board named Kress a benefactor of the museum.
109

The works of art Kress selected for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1927–8 enhanced
the museum’s collection while simultaneously conveying a sense of Kress’s taste as a collector.
Four of the five paintings he donated were trecento Italian paintings. As late as 1931, Kress’s
three trecento paintings would have represented close to twenty percent of the fourteenth-century
paintings on view in the Metropolitan Museum’s galleries dedicated to early Italian art.
110
Kress
further demonstrated his dedication to collecting this subfield by donating another trecento
painting, an Italo-Byzantine Crucifixion scene, in 1932.
111
Through these early gifts, Kress
sought to present himself as a collector of Italian primitive paintings of high quality and
historical importance.
However, the Metropolitan Museum of Art did not fully embrace Kress’s vision in 1927–
8. As discussed above, Kress had only recently begun to buy early modern works of art. He did

107
Samuel Kress to Robert de Forest, December 16, 1927. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series
2: Kress Institutions, Box 145, New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art: Correspondence: General
(1 of 2): 1927–1950], New York, New York.
108
Acceptance letter of Kress’s gift, December 21, 1927. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 7:
Oversize Material, Box OS 020, Gifts to Museums: New York, Memphis, Houston, New Orleans, San
Francisco scrapbook], New York, New York.
109
The Board of Trustees unanimously voted to name Samuel Kress a benefactor of the museum on
December 17, 1928 (Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 145, New
York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art: Correspondence: General (1 of 2)], New York, New York).
110
Burroughs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Catalogue. This does not account for fourteenth-century
Italian paintings in the wings displaying the Altman and Marquand Collections, which received their own
dedicated spaces.
111
At the time Kress donated The Crucifixion to the Metropolitan Museum, scholars including Roberto
Longhi, William Suida, and Alessandro Venturi stated that this work dated to the fourteenth century. Fern
Rusk Shapley instead described the painting as a sixteenth or seventeenth century piece created in
retairdaire fashion (Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XIII–XV,
12).

77
not yet possess a known reputation as a collector. Kress did not lend the artwork he owned to
public institutions until 1929, so few would have been aware of his collection. Only a few of the
Metropolitan Museum’s employees seem to have seen Kress’s collection prior to his donations.
The restorer at the Metropolitan Museum, Stephen Pichetto, knew Kress’s collection since his
friends, the Continis, hired him to clean and repair the paintings they sold to Kress.
112
It is
unclear whether Burroughs visited Kress at this early date.
In 1927–8, Kress’s collection consisted of uneven, inexpensive works that have since
been discarded, and the twenty-nine paintings he had purchased from the Continis. These latter
purchases are almost all the work of minor masters, anonymous artists, and their associated
schools. Many were in fair or even poor condition, some displaying significant repainting.
Moreover, the content of the paintings was somber. Kress did not yet own portraits of elite
Italians, paintings of beautiful Madonnas, or the kind of classicizing imagery often associated
with the Renaissance. Instead, 90 percent of these newly purchased works were devotional
religious works: stiff panel paintings of the Madonna and Child, crucifixion scenes, and images
of saints. This set of stern paintings, lacking both impressive names and complete provenance
records, would not likely have inspired enthusiasm in Burroughs.
Furthermore, the Metropolitan Museum of Art had recently suffered a scandal about
forgeries in their collection. In 1923, an employee of the Parisian antiquities dealer Georges J.
Demotte claimed that Demotte had sold forgeries to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The New
York Times closely followed the story, in which Jean Vigouroux, Demotte’s employee, stated

112
In a letter on March 1, 1927, Alessandro Contini Bonacossi informed Kress that he would send the
painting he just purchased to Stephen Pichetto to be “cradled and put into good condition.” (Alessandro
Contini Bonacossi to Samuel Kress, March 1, 1927. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1:
Kress Collection, Box 110, Contini-Bonacossi, Alessandro: Bills of Sale (1 of 3)], New York, New York).

78
that Demotte had “inundated America with false art.”
113
The accusations centered on a number
of pieces of Gothic art in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection, including a sculpted Virgin and
Child that he claimed was entirely invented.
114
Henry Walters, the vice president of the
Metropolitan’s board of trustees, promised the charges would be investigated and all spurious
pieces would be removed.
115
The press covered the charges against Demotte closely until his
untimely death in September 1923. This event tarnished the museum’s reputation at the time and
remains one the greatest forgery incidents in the Metropolitan Museum’s history. Kress’s
proffered gifts in the late 1920s, restored somewhat heavily and presented with little to no
provenance history, likely worried Burroughs, who undoubtedly feared he might encounter
questionable works in Kress’s collection.
The gifts that the Metropolitan Museum accepted from Kress enriched their existing
galleries of Italian art, but could not be considered transformative for the museum’s collection.
The museum listed the works Kress donated in the Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
and the Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but did not
devote a great deal of attention to them. Samuel Kress is not even mentioned in Burroughs’s
discussion of notable donors and donations to the Metropolitan Museum in the ninth edition of
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Catalogue of Paintings. By the early twentieth century, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art benefitted from massive gifts of money and artwork from wealthy

113
See for example, “Brings ‘Society’ into Art Scandal: Vigouroux Testifies in Paris that it Helped Him
Sell to Metropolitan. SAYS HE PAID COMMISSIONS He Puts Spurious Art Purchases of Museum
Director at 3,000,000 Francs,” New York Times, special cable, July 11, 1923, 19. Many of the alleged
forgeries were pieces of Gothic art, see Mazaroff, 137.
114
Special cable, “Says Metropolitan Has a $30,000 Fraud: Vigouroux in Formal Complaint Names
“Virgin and Child” Statue as Spurious,” New York Times, June 18, 1923, 3.
115
“Promises Inquiry into Museum Pieces: Walters, Metropolitan’s Vice President, Says Any Fakes that
are Found Must Go. ADMITS HIS ART MISTAKES Says They Cost Him $100,000 – George
Blumenthal, a Trustee, Wants Gothic Art Investigated,” Special cable to New York Times, June 6, 1923,
23.

79
patrons; amidst this crowd, it is not surprising that Kress’s proportionally smaller gifts were not
singled out for notice.
116

Within a year of his first donations, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s lack of
enthusiasm for a namesake Kress Collection seems to have been apparent to Kress. It is unclear
whether Burroughs, DeForest, or the museum’s board discouraged Kress’s proposal, but it seems
a dispute of this nature arose in 1928.
117
After donating Luca di Tommé’s Madonna and Child
on June 1, 1928, Kress abruptly stopped donating paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art
for four years.
118
Though he made a handful of additional gifts to the museum in the 1930s and
1940s, after 1928 he ceased to envision the Metropolitan Museum as the future home of his
collection.
After this series of disappointing interactions with the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Kress slowed the pace of his acquisitions. In 1928, he purchased only seven paintings.
119
The
cool relations between Kress and the Metropolitan Museum provide only a partial explanation
for this shift. It is significant that during this period, the Continis returned to Italy and were busy
concluding their work at Castel Sant’Angelo. During this period, Kress began to envision sharing
his collection in new ways—he made the first of what would be many donations to smaller
museums in towns across the United States that supported his S.H. Kress & Co. stores. Rather

116
“Bequests of Objects of Art,” Annual Report of the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art no. 58
(1927): 56; March 1928, Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York 23, no. 3 (March 1928):
91–2.
117
Zeri, Confesso che ho sbagliato, 69.
118
Kress offered the Luca di Tommé to Robert DeForest in a letter dated June 1, 1928 (Metropolitan
Museum of Art Archive [Office of the Secretary Records, Kress, Samuel H.: Gifts and Loans, 1927-1954],
New York, New York). He donated the next painting in 1932 (Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H.
Kress Collection: Italian Paintings, XIII–XV, 12).
119
Five of these seven purchased works were early modern Italian paintings, dating from the thirteenth to
sixteenth centuries. In addition to the Italian paintings, Kress acquired two paintings attributed
respectively to Goya and Rembrandt. See Appendix II and Eisler, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress
Collection, 231 and 136.

80
than marking a moment when he curtailed his ambitions as a collector, 1928 represented a period
of reflection for Kress.

1929–34: Creating a Comprehensive Collection of Italian Art
In the wake of what he regarded as failure at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kress
sought to develop a new vision for his collection and legacy. After a momentary lull in
acquisitions in 1928, he began collecting in earnest again the following year. Over the course of
the next five years, Kress added over two hundred early modern European paintings to his
collection, in addition to a number of drawings and decorative art objects. Though Kress
abandoned his intention to primarily donate artwork to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he
remained committed to developing a collection of Italian Renaissance art. From 1929–34, over
90 percent of the paintings Kress purchased were examples of thirteenth- to eighteenth-century
Italian art.
120
I contend that this five-year period marks the true beginning of the Kress Collection,
for—though he was still undecided about the appropriate venue—Kress’s decision to create a
comprehensive collection of Italian Renaissance art for the benefit of the American public
emerged during this time.
The convergence of a number of economic and political circumstances made 1929–34
particularly ripe years for Kress to collect art. In October 1929, the United States entered the
Great Depression with a series of dramatic stock market crashes. Between 1929–32, the
country’s GDP dropped nearly by half—from 104 to 56 billion dollars—and the average
American family saw their income reduced by nearly 40 percent.
121
In general, the diverse

120
From 1929–34, Kress purchased 198 early modern Italian paintings, 19 non-Italian European paintings,
and a number of drawings and decorative objects (Appendix I and II).
121
Douglas F. Dowd, The Twisted Dream: Capitalist Development in the U.S. since 1776 (Cambridge:
Wintrop, 1977), 103.

81
investments more commonly held by wealthier Americans shielded their assets from the worst of
the October 1929 stock market crash. Nonetheless, many saw their fortunes diminish or
disappear. The prominent financier and collector Clarence MacKay suffered losses that required
him to sell off valuable works of art from his collection throughout the 1930s—including prized
paintings by Raphael and Mantegna—in order to remain financially solvent.
122
Somehow, Kress
avoided this fate. He seems to have suffered little to no anxiety about the state of his finances in
the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, for the following year he purchased fifty early
modern European paintings.
123
The S.H. Kress & Co. stores offered low-cost items that
continued to appeal to the public throughout the Depression. Rather than suffering setbacks,
Kress’s fortune grew throughout the Great Depression; between 1931 and 1936, his annual
income increased fivefold.
124

Kress’s financial success provided him with a unique opportunity to collect in the 1930s.
The onset of the Great Depression in the United States and across the world did not immediately
produce lower prices in the art market. Gerald Reitlinger explains that instead many works of art
failed to appear on the art market in the months following the crash, as owners and auction
houses were aware they would be unlikely to receive satisfactory bids. In time, this reluctance to
sell abated, and collectors with sufficient liquid assets could acquire valuable works of art.
125

Over time, financial pressures also forced many in the United States and Europe to sell off their
treasures during this period. Kress benefitted from these sales, acquiring fine examples of early
modern Italian art from the collections of individuals including Clarence MacKay and Dan

122
“MacKay, Clarence H.,” Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America, The Frick
Collection, accessed May 29, 2017,
http://research.frick.org/directoryweb/browserecord.php?action=browse&-recid=7046.
123
Appendix I and II.
124
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 5: Kress Family, Box 174, Kress Family: Samuel H.
Kress Federal Income Tax Returns], New York, New York.
125
Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste, 209.

82
Fellows Platt, artwork which might not have been offered in a more prosperous economic
climate.
126

The highest end of the art market still saw high prices in the early 1930s, but during this
period Kress did not yet make high profile purchases. In the first half of the 1930s, Kress
continued to buy artwork almost exclusively from Alessandro Contini Bonacossi. John Walker, a
curator and later director of the National Gallery of Art, worked with Kress; he argued that in the
early 1930s Kress was reluctant to compete with one of the other major collectors of his age,
Andrew Mellon. Walker stated that Kress worried that prominent dealers—especially the
Duveen Brothers firm—would only offer him works rejected by Mellon.
127
Walker’s statement
contains a partial truth, but because Kress was already pursuing artworks largely uninteresting to
Mellon, this is an unconvincing and excessively complicated explanation for Kress’s continued
reliance on the Continis. It is clear Kress felt loyal to the Continis, whom he considered good
friends. This in and of itself offers a strong explanation for Kress’s purchases from the couple.
However, the Continis’ increasingly high-profile role in Italian politics also offered them unique
opportunities as art dealers.
In 1928, King Vittòrio Emanuèle III made Alessandro Contini a count. The King also
bestowed upon Contini the right to use his maternal surname, Bonacossi, for this name had a
prestigious and noble history. Alessandro received these honors out of gratitude for his efforts to
improve the apartments at Castel Sant’Angelo, and in recognition of his patriotism.
128
At this
time, Alessandro and Vittoria were fervent supporters of Mussolini.
129
Alessandro worked to

126
Kress Provenance Research Project, http://www.kressfoundation.org/provenance/.
127
Walker, Self Portrait with Donors, 140–2.
128
Toffali, “Alessandro Contini Bonacossi tre le due guerre;” Adolfo Venturi, “L’appartamento di Paolo
III a Castel Sant’Angelo e la donazione dei Conti Contini,” L’arte XXXI (1928): 109–12.
129
In the diary, Vittoria writes about her patriotism and love of Mussolini (Contini Bonacossi, Diario
Americano, 178–83). Elsa de’ Giorgi, who married Alessandro’s nephew, Sandrino Contini Bonacossi,

83
support Il Duce’s cultural initiatives throughout the 1920s and 30s, and encouraged Kress to do
so as well.
Like many of his American contemporaries, Kress viewed Mussolini’s governance in the
1920s and early 30s with favor. Fearing the spread of communism, many Americans embraced
the Fascist seizure of power as an opportunity to make Italy more stable and productive.
130

Although the American press occasionally vocalized fears about the excesses and violence of
Italian fascism, Mussolini’s dictatorship was largely celebrated. The New York Times even ran
articles like “Italy Transformed by Mussolini Rule” praising Mussolini for running a country that
“glows with patriotism,” with cleaner city streets and fewer labor strikes.
131
For his support of
industry and stated commitment to laissez-faire economic policies, Gian Giacomo Migone also
argued that American financial elites particularly admired Mussolini as a leader.
132
Notably, an
article in La Voce, an Italian language newspaper printed in Cleveland, wrote that Kress admired
Italy’s economic progress under the fascist government.
133

Kress also strongly approved of the Fascists’ efforts to restore sites related to Italian
cultural heritage. Campaigns to conserve and restore important monuments, buildings, and public
spaces had already become politically important in the nineteenth century, when the

wrote that Vittoria urged Alessandro to support Mussolini because she perceived this would be to the
economic advantage for their family and business (de’ Giorgi, 85). However, Contini’s collaboration with
Italians and Germans throughout the war suggests he was ideologically sympathetic to Fascism as well.
See also, “Contini-Bonacossi, Count Alessandro” in Nancy Yeide, Konstantin Akinsha, and Amy L.
Walsh, The AAM Guide to Provenance Research (Washington, D.C.: American Association of Museums,
2001), Appendix H, 289.
130
Gian Giacomo Migone, The United States and Fascist Italy: The Rise of American Finance in Europe,
trans. Molly Tambor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), XXII–III; J.P. Diggins, Mussolini
and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).
131
Special Correspondence, “Italy Transformed by Mussolini Rule,” New York Times, November 3, 1926,
16. John Gibbons’s 1932 travel memoir also stresses the improved work ethic in “new Italy.” John
Gibbons, Afoot in Italy (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1932), 204.
132
Migone, 50–60.
133
“Ammira l’Italia e l’on. Mussolini,” La Voce, Cleveland, Ohio, October 4, 1929.

84
Risorgimento and subsequent unification of Italy in 1861 called for the creation of a unified
Italian national identity strong enough to compete with the traditional campanilismo.
134
When
the Fascists seized power in 1922, they continued these earlier efforts with renewed vigor.
Restorations and at times re-creations of cultural heritage sites in Italy allowed the Fascist party
to tie their own political power to a long history of Italian achievement. In tandem with their
restoration projects, the Fascist party expanded rail lines and subsidized train fares in order to
encourage Italians to explore their own country. Of course, these efforts were intended to reach
out to non-Italian tourists as well.
135
Kress’s annual trips to different regions of Italy allowed him
to see firsthand how tourism in Italy changed during the 1920s and 30s under Fascist leadership.
With the Continis’ encouragement, Kress decided to donate money to support restoration
campaigns in Italy. On October 1, 1929, Alessandro Contini Bonacossi brought Kress to meet
Mussolini, and Kress personally presented him with a check.
136
Mussolini then selected four sites
that would benefit from Kress’s donation.
137
In the Calabrian city of Crotone, Kress’s money
aided in the stabilization and restoration of a seventh-century B.C.E. Doric column that belonged
to the Temple of Hera. In Spoleto, his donation partially funded a campaign to restore the

134
Rosanna Pavoni, ed. Reviving the Renaissance: The use and abuse of the past in nineteenth century
Italian art and decoration, trans. Adrian Belton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
135
For more, see Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum, ed. Donatello Among the Blackshirts:
History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2005; Medina D. Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist
Italy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Marla Stone, The Patron State:
Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
136
Kress refused to share the amount of money he donated for these projects. He denied a report that it
amounted to one million dollars. “U.S. Magnate Restoring Italian Art Refuses to Tell Sum Given,”
Newark Ledger, October 24, 1929. It was widely reported in the press at the time that he donated
$200,000. “Eastman Gives Million, Kress $200,000 to Italy,” October 1, 1929, unidentified newspaper.
“N.Y. Merchant Gives Mussolini $200,000,” Atlantic City N.J. Press, October 2, 1929. Clippings in
scrapbook, “Restorations, Italian Monuments.” Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 7: Oversize
Material, Box OS 028], New York, New York.
137
“Il Palazzo Ducale di Mantova tornerà presto all’antico splendore,” Il Giornale d’Italia, Rome,
October 2, 1929. This newspaper article states that Alessandro Contini Bonacossi initiated and inspired
Kress’s donation. Ibid.

85
Basilica of Sant’Eufemia. In Mantua, Italian restorers used Kress’s donation to sufficiently repair
parts of the Palazzo Ducale in order to make it fully accessible to the public. Finally, in Ravenna,
Kress’s donation contributed to restoration work on the mosaic floors of the fifth-century church
of S. Giovanni Evangelista, which had been damaged in a recent earthquake.
138

This set of projects provides a valuable glimpse of the Fascist approach to historic
structures in the late 1920s and early 30s. With the exception of the Palazzo Ducale, all of the
projects involved preserving an element of Italy’s ancient history—either Greek or Roman—the
era most highly valued by the Fascists. The restoration work at these sites also involved
selectively valuing some historical moments more than others. For example, the restoration of
the Romanesque church of Sant’ Eufemia required the destruction of structures that accreted
around the twelfth-century church. An article in Il Messaggero stated that Kress’s donation
would help free Sant’Eufemia from the many “piccole casupole”—small hovels—that hid the
original structure from view.
139
As Claudia Lazzaro noted in her study of urban renewal in Rome
under the Fascists, Italian newspapers commonly referred to recently or soon-to-be-destroyed
structures with this kind of dismissive language—“casupole”—to frame their loss as
insignificant.
140
Few mourned the destruction of these structures at the time, instead viewing the
restoration campaigns as a method of safeguarding Italian cultural heritage and making it
accessible to the wider public.

138
Scrapbook “Restorations, Italian Monuments.” Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 7:
Oversize Material, Box OS 028], New York, New York. For before and after photographs of the
campaign in Mantua, see Clinio Cottavi, Galleria della Mostra nel Palazzo Ducale di Mantova (Mantua:
La Soc. per Il Palazzo Ducale di Mantova, 1934).
139
“Restauri di monumenti italiani offerti al Duce da un ammiratore americano,” Il Messaggero, Tuesday,
October 1, 1929, 2, column 1. A local Spoleto newspaper echoed this phrase, referring to the structures to
be destroyed as “piccole e brutte casupole” (“Restauro di Monumenti,” L’Alta Spoleto, October 5, 1929).
140
Lazzaro, “Forging a Visible Fascist Nation: Strategies for Fusing Past and Present,” in Donatello
among the Blackshirts, 20.

86
In comparison to his earlier gifts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kress received an
outpouring of recognition and celebration for his gifts to the Italian state. Newspapers in Italy
and the United States covered the details of the gift, as did Italian language newspapers in
communities across the world.
141
In February 1930, King Vittòrio Emanuèle III expressed his
gratitude by conferring upon Kress the title of Grand Officer of His Order of the Crown of
Italy.
142
Kress was proud of his contributions to the Italian state; in a privately commissioned
history of the Kress family written in 1930, Samuel Kress’s brief biography dedicates valuable
space to reprinting lines from Il Messaggero describing his meeting with Mussolini.
143

Kress’s engagement with Fascist cultural programs in Italy in the 1920s and early 30s
shaped his collection in two significant ways. First, Kress witnessed national efforts to create
cultural programs intended to connect the masses to a sense of their shared past. Though rarely
committed to historicity, Fascist efforts to restore historic sites and reinvent (or even
manufacture) historic events and festivals like calcio storico in Florence (“revived,” but really
invented, in 1930) and palio in Siena worked to produce a shared vision—both for Italians and
for an international audience—of Italy’s cultural heritage.
144

141
In addition to those already cited, see for example, “Kress to Restore Landmarks,” New York Times
October 1, 1929.
142
Francesco Jacomoni (head of the Ministero degli Affari Esteri) to Samuel Kress, February 12, 1930.
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 7: Oversize Material, Box OS 061], New York, New York.
143
Karl Friedrich von Frank zu Doefering and Charles Rhoads Roberts, Kress Family History (Vienna:
privately printed by authors, 1930), 544. Claude Kress aided the production of this volume more than any
of his brothers, but it was a family creation.
144
Unlike calcio storico, the palio emerged from long-standing tradition. However, many Italian cities
hosted races in the past, so the palio is not inherently Sienese. At the request of the Sienese podestà,
Mussolini declared in 1935 that only Siena could refer to their race as the “palio” (Lasansky, Renaissance
Perfected, 68-71). Also see D. Medina Lasansky, “Tableau and Memory: The Fascist Revival of the
Medieval Renaissance Festival in Italy,” European Legacy, 4, no. 1 (1999): 26–43; Luciano Artusi and
Giuliano Sottani, Firenze anni trenta: Rinasce il calcio fiorentino (Florence: Opera Edita del Calcio
Storico Fiorentino, 1989); Luciano Artusi and Silvano Gabbrielli, Early Florence and the Historic Game
of Calcio (Florence: Sansoni, 1972).

87
Critically, this shared vision extended beyond elites; through popular events and
celebrations, the masses could feel connected with the Italian past. The vision of Italy articulated
during this period largely persists to the present, demonstrating the success of the cultural
campaigns carried out in the 1920s and 30s. Kress’s annual trips to Italy occurred precisely as
many Italians sought to make their country’s art and history a vital part of national identity, and
likely contributed to his own desire to develop an art collection intended for “the masses” in the
United States.
Second, in addition to enhancing his own reputation in Italy, Kress’s donations to
Mussolini’s restoration campaigns strengthened the Continis’ political and social power. Strong
supporters of Mussolini, the Continis knew il Duce personally and they presented Kress—and his
significant gift—to him.
145
The Italian press rarely failed to mentioned Alessandro Contini
Bonacossi’s role in inspiring Kress’s generosity.
146

Alessandro Contini Bonacossi did not hesitate to use the coverage of Kress’s gift to his
advantage. Particularly after October 1929, Contini obtained special privileges to export Italian
artwork for Kress (and potentially other collectors) in gratitude for his role in cultivating
resources for Italy’s cultural monuments.
147
For example, in 1929 Contini exported a valuable
portrait by Anthony Van Dyck from the Genoese Doria Collection to the United States. Though
the Italian state had the right to forbid this sale, the Superintendent of Piedmont and Liguria
determined it would be inappropriate for the State to exercise its right to preemption in this case,

145
In the late 1930s, Mussolini named Alessandro Contini Bonacossi a senator for life (Perry, “The Kress
Collection,” A Gift to America, 17). Federico Zeri claims that Alessandro Contini Bonacossi befriended
Benito Mussolini’s brother, Arnaldo, years earlier when he was living in Spain (Zeri, Confesso che ho
sbagliato, 65).
146
See the clippings in scrapbook, “Restorations, Italian Monuments.” Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Archive [Series 7: Oversize Material, Box OS 028], New York, New York.
147
Eva Toffali, in her research on Contini as an art dealer, goes so far as to suggest that Contini pushed
Kress to make the gift in order to obtain privileges in exporting Italian artwork (Toffali, “Alessandro
Contini Bonacossi tra le due guerre,” 6–7).

88
as Contini “già benemerito per cospicui doni di oggetti d’arte” intended to exchange the painting
for Florentine and Sienese primitives that would then return to Italy. Furthermore, the
superintendent supported Contini when the shipping company B. Tartaglia & Co. disputed the
low valuation Contini assigned to the painting. He stated the work was worth 400,000 lire. B.
Tartaglia & Co. rejected this valuation, stating that the work was instead worth at least 600,000
lire, and therefore Contini must pay a higher fee to export the painting. The Superintendent
intervened in the dispute on Contini’s behalf, stating that the portrait had “tracce di restauri” on
the face and neckline of the woman that made the work less desirable and therefore justifiably
priced by Contini. As a result, Contini shipped the painting briefly to Paris and then onto New
York where it joined the Kress Collection in 1932. Today this painting, Van Dyck’s Portrait of a
Lady in White, Black, and Gold hangs in the National Gallery of Art.
148

In the 1930s, Italy tightened rules regulating the export of works of art deemed to be of
national importance. However, those with power and favor within the Fascist party could often
circumvent the new restrictions. For example, the art historian, critic, and dealer Ettore Sestieri
negotiated with the Italian state to break up the fidecommisso binding the Barberini Collection.
Established centuries earlier, the fidecommisso law mandated that great estates remain intact,
essentially enforcing primogeniture inheritance. Italy repealed this law in the nineteenth century,
except as it applied to art collections. This favored the state: private collections could not be
dispersed, which kept works of art in the country. Furthermore, families unable to pay estate
taxes had to offer entire ancestral art collections to the Italian state—allowing the government to

148
Toffali, “Alessandro Contini Bonacossi tra le due guerre,” 7. Perry notes that at $175,000, this
VanDyck portrait represented one of the most expensive paintings Kress purchased prior to World War II
(Perry, “The Kress Collection,” A Gift to America, 19).

89
enrich its museums with little competition. This is how, for example, the Villa Borghese and its
art collection became the property of the state in 1902.
149

Upon inheriting the Barberini estate, the Florentine Corsini family faced such a dilemma.
The estate taxes required liquidating at least part of the estate, but the valuable Barberini
Collection—filled with masterpieces of early modern Italian art including Raphael’s La
Fornarina—was inalienable. In the early 1930s, Sestieri negotiated with the state on behalf of
the Corsini family and convinced the government to release the Barberini Collection from the
fidecommisso and free future sales from export tax in exchange for the family’s donation of the
Barberini Palace in Rome, as well as a number of other properties.
150
Sestieri’s network within
the Fascist government made it possible for him to petition for this special arrangement, one that
benefitted him personally as an art dealer and the director of the Palazzo Barberini. As in the
case of Contini, Mussolini named Sestieri a senator in the 1930s. Contini and Sestieri knew one
another and worked together occasionally; in 1932, they likely collaborated to export five
paintings from the Barberini Collection that Kress purchased that year.
151

The Fascist government was hardly the first to provide special exemptions to favored
party members. Laws to limit the export of artwork predate unified Italy, beginning already in

149
Grassi, “The American View,” 45.
150
Marco Grassi, “The American View,” 45–7. As part of the agreement, the Corsini family agreed to
donate a few prized paintings—including Raphael’s La Fornarina (“ART/Collections,” Barberini
Gallerie Corsini Nazionali, accessed June 5, 2017 http://www.barberinicorsini.org/arte/collezioni/).
151
The negotiations between the Italian state and Sestieri over lifting the fidecommisso were not finalized
until 1934, but there were sales from the Barberini Collection before this date. In 1932, Samuel Kress
purchased five paintings from Alessandro Contini Bonacossi whose provenance state that they came from
the Barberini Collection: K206: attributed to Bernardino Licinio, Portrait of a Musician, c. 1515
(Memphis Brooks Museum of Art); K212: Franciabigio, A Young Man, c. 1520 (Philbrook Museum of
Art); K214: Giuseppe Ghislandi, Portrait of a Young Man, after 1720 (National Gallery of Art); K:215
Dosso Dossi, The Standard Bearer, c. 1514–19 (Allentown Art Museum); K226: workshop of Domenico
Fetti, The Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, 1618/1628 (National Gallery of Art) (Shapley, Paintings
from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XIII–XV; Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H.
Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XV–XVI; Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection:
Italian Schools, XVI–XVIII).

90
the sixteenth century under the Medici in Florence and in the Papal States. Yet in almost every
period, well-connected individuals could obtain permission to sell artwork abroad.
152
The
opportunities provided to individuals like Contini and Sestieri are historically specific, but not
completely unique. Nonetheless, Contini’s close association with the Fascist government in Italy
in the 1920s and 30s figured significantly in the creation of the Kress Collection.
Between 1929 and 1934, Contini sold Kress just over two hundred early modern
European works of art, over 90 percent of which were thirteenth- to eighteenth-century Italian
paintings. Contini acquired slightly under half of these paintings from Italian collections and
galleries. He also frequented sales in foreign markets to buy artwork to offer his clients.
153
It can
be difficult to trace where Contini found the paintings he sold to Kress, as many possess no
documented provenance prior to this transaction. In fact slightly over a quarter of the paintings
Contini sold Kress between 1929–34 possess no provenance records.
154
Kress therefore did not

152
Guido Guerzoni, “Cultural Heritage and Preservation Policies: Notes on the History of the Italian
Case,” in Economic Perspectives on Cultural Heritage, ed. Michael Hutter (Ipswich: MacMillan Press,
1997), 118–9. Unfortunately, at times the strict regulations regarding the sale of artwork seem to have
even encouraged illicit sales. For example, see a discussion of this issue—particularly as it pertains to the
market for antiquities—in the late 20
th
century in the New York Times (Guy Stair Sainty, “What Makes
Italy a Major Black Market in Art,” New York Times, March 16, 1990,
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/16/opinion/l-what-makes-italy-a-major-black-market-in-art-
913590.html).
153
During this five-year period, Contini also sold Kress slightly over a dozen non-Italian European
paintings. Considered all together, approximately forty-five percent of the paintings Contini sold Kress
came from Italian collections, galleries, or dealers. See Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress
Collection: Italian Schools, XIII–XV; Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian
Schools, XV–XVI; Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XVI–XVIII.
154
Fifty-five of the one hundred and ninety-four early modern Italian paintings (and an additional five
non-Italian early modern European paintings) Contini sold Kress between 1929 and 1934 possess no
provenance records that predate Contini’s ownership. For detailed provenance records, see the Kress
Foundation’s provenance research project http://www.kressfoundation.org/provenance/. For records not
posted on the website see: Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XIII–
XV Century; Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XV–XVI Century;
Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XVI–XVII Century; Eisler,
Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: European Schools excluding Italian.

91
view a distinguished pedigree an essential quality for the works of art he purchased in the early
1930s.
Nor, for that matter, was Kress focused on primarily acquiring the work of major masters.
His acquisitions from 1929 to 1934 instead display a wide-ranging list of early modern Italian
artists. Over the course of the last eighty years, art historians updated many of the attributions for
Kress’s early purchases, assigning authorship for paintings to studios and followers of some
noted artists while attaching entirely new names to others.
155
Yet even without these later
revisions, Kress displayed an unusual commitment in the early 1930s to collecting the work of
minor artists. By 1934, Kress’s collection paired paintings attributed to well-known artists like
Orcagna, Dosso Dossi, Lorenzo Lotto, and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo with those of little-known
minor masters like Spinello Aretino, Bartolomeo Vivarini, and Girolamo Giovenone.
156

This variation is part of what makes the Kress Collection rich, but it has also led some,
including former director of the National Gallery of Art John Walker, to describe the collection
as one uneven in quality. Following Walker’s lead, a number of scholars ascribe this quality to
the manner in which Kress acquired paintings. He preferred to buy works of art in large lots,
which—some have argued—allowed Contini to blend works by minor artists or those of lesser
quality into batches with finer examples of early modern Italian art. The invoices and
documentation related to Kress’s purchases from Contini in the early 1930s disprove this theory
soundly. Kress carefully reviewed receipts, authentication reports, and x-rays related to his
purchases; the Kress Foundation archives contain thousands of documents recording the
exchange of artwork and complicated financial arrangements between Kress and Contini. Kress

155
Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools XVI–XVIII Century, “Index
of Changes of Attribution,” 397–400. For more recently updated attributions, one must review catalogues
published by Kress Collection recipient institutions.
156
Appendix I.

92
was aware and attentive about his purchases, and regularly returned or exchanged works of art he
found unsuitable. He also sought expert advice to ensure the paintings in his collection bore
accurate attributions. Scholars including Roberto Longhi, Lionello Venturi, F. Mason Perkins,
and—later in the 1930s—Bernard Berenson, all provided written opinions on the attribution of
paintings in the Kress Collection, which Kress carefully kept in his files.
157

Kress did not naively acquire paintings by minor Italian artists; instead this approach
served his goals as a collector. Pragmatically, collecting paintings by lesser-known artists
allowed Kress to develop his collection more quickly, for he could easily acquire a great quantity
of artwork in this manner. However, Kress also aimed to build a collection that reflected the
diversity of artistic production in early modern Italy.
In the early 1930s, Kress embarked on the ambitious endeavor of creating a collection
that would illustrate the history of Italian Renaissance art for the American people. In retrospect,
those close to Kress described this as the goal that always motivated his collecting. John Walker
and Guy Emerson both stated that Kress hoped to obtain good examples of artwork by “every
Italian artist active from the thirteenth through the eighteenth century.”
158
In their later studies,
Perry and Bowron suggest Contini encouraged Kress to attempt this feat.
159
While this concept
may have served as a kind of mission statement for the collector-dealer pair, Kress’s purchases

157
Contini sent photographs of all paintings in the Kress Collection to art historians, critics and dealers to
gather their opinions. Each individual signed the back of the photograph and indicated their agreement or
disagreement with the given attribution, often they expanded their opinion with a brief commentary on the
picture. Contini frequently contacted Roberto Longhi, Giuseppe Fiocco, Lionello Venturi, F. Mason
Perkins, and William Suida for their opinions. The photographs with their opinions can be found in the
curatorial records and archives of museums housing Kress Collection paintings.
158
For Walker and Emerson’s statements, see their prefaces to Charles Seymour, Jr., Art Treasures for
America: An Anthology of Paintings & Sculpture in the Samuel Kress Collection, prefaces by John
Walker and Guy Emerson (London: Phaidon Press, 1961), vii and xxi.
159
Perry, “The Kress Collection,” A Gift to America, 17; Bowron, “Samuel H. Kress,” A Market for
Merchant Princes, 110. Walker agreed, though he described this as Contini’s method of selling Kress
works he did not wish to keep for his own collection (Walker, Self Portrait with Donors, 135).

93
during the first half of the 1930s do not support the idea that Contini and Kress sought to build
the Kress Collection in this philatelic manner. Kress purchased multiple examples by the same
artists throughout this period, which would have undermined his ability to collect examples by
each individual artist practicing in early modern Italy. Furthermore, Kress markedly avoided
pursuing “names” in building his collection, particularly in the early 1930s, which would have
posed a problem within a collection focused on examples of each master. Rather than working
from a kind of checklist, Kress and Contini sought to create a collection that would provide a
strong overview of the history of Italian Renaissance art.
Though they described it as a comprehensive collection, Kress and Contini intended to
create a strong collection of Italian Renaissance paintings. Kress collected examples of sculpture,
bronzes, textiles, decorative arts, and drawings from early modern Italy and Europe more broadly,
but these works of art did not lie at the heart of his project. His collection privileged painting
over other media. Kress purchased paintings spanning the chronological range of early modern
Italian art: he collected the popular fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Italian paintings heavily, but
also acquired strong examples of the then-unfashionable Baroque Italian painting.
160
Likewise,
Kress built up a collection that consisted of paintings from many regions of Italy. As might be
expected, Tuscan painting—primarily from Florence and Siena, but also Lucca, Aretino, and
Pisa—predominated, constituting slightly over half of his purchases between 1929–34. However,
the Kress Collection also contained examples of painting from the Umbrian, Venetian, Paduan,
Modenese, Riminese, Bolognese, Marchigian, Fabriano, Lombard, Ferrarese, Emilian, Veronese,
Vercellese, Parmese, Cremonese, Brescian, Milanese, Genoese, Roman, Piedmontese,

160
For Kress’s collecting of Baroque art, see Bowron, “The Critical Fortunes,” in Buying Baroque, 2–15.

94
Bergamask, Mantuan, and Neopolitan schools.
161
Three-quarters of the Italian paintings Kress
purchased during this period depict religious figures or scenes, which truly reflects the artistic
production of Italy in the thirteenth- to eighteenth-centuries. Of the images that are not religious,
portraits, classical and mythological imagery, and—for the eighteenth-century paintings—city
views predominate.
162
Considering this basic overview of the Kress Collection as it existed by
1934, it becomes clear that Kress and Contini aimed to create a collection that would convey a
fairly conventional overview of the history of Italian Renaissance art. If successful, Kress hoped
this collection would provide Americans who could not travel to Europe with an alternative
means of experiencing the artistic legacy of Italy.
By the end of 1934, Kress owned well over two hundred Italian Renaissance paintings.
163

He had begun sharing his collection with the public through special exhibitions and loans to
auction houses and museums.
164
At this point, the Kress Collection began to emerge as
something historically unique in the history of American collecting, a collection that might truly
succeed in providing a strong overview of the history of Italian Renaissance art. Even as Kress
and Contini continued to focus on collecting Italian paintings, Kress worked closely with his
brothers and advisors—including Contini—to create a long-term plan for his collection’s future.
In order to do so, Kress carefully studied art museums across the United States and their publics
in the early 1930s—a practice that will be discussed further in the following chapter. By 1935,

161
During this period, Kress purchased 98 Tuscan paintings and 91 paintings from other schools. Shapley,
Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XIII–XV; Shapley, Paintings from the
Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XV–XVI; Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress
Collection: Italian Schools, XVI–XVIII; Eisler, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: European
Schools excluding Italian.
162
See Appendix I.
163
By the end of 1934, he owned 238 early modern Italian paintings. This number could vary slightly
depending on how one counts deconstructed polyptychs. I count each panel that possesses its own
independent K number in Shapley’s catalogues as an individual work of art. See Appendix I.
164
Appendix II.

95
Kress developed a two-pronged approach to sharing his collection publicly. First, he donated
works of art to institutions in cities associated with the S.H. Kress & Co. business, hoping that
these gifts would stimulate further philanthropy and engagement from local communities.
Second, but concurrently, he began to plan a namesake museum to house the majority of his
collection.

Collecting for the Kress Museum: 1935–8
Starting in the mid-1930s, Kress expended more resources on his collection as he began
to plan his namesake museum. He spent more money on both individual works of art and on the
sum of his purchases during this time than he had in the previous decade. Equally significant, he
dedicated time to developing a wider team to help him develop and manage his collection.
Between 1935–8, the Kress collection grew substantially both in terms of size and quality. By
1938, the Kress Museum would easily have been one of the great collection museums in the
United States.
In the mid-1930s, when Kress was considering creating such an institution, collection
museums were well established in the country. Among the more famous examples open at this
time were the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (1903), the Huntington Gallery (est. 1919,
opened 1928), and the Frick Collection (1935). These institutions differed from larger, public
museums in that they housed works of art belonging to an individual private collector (or, as in
the case of the Huntington Gallery, a family of collectors) often within an intentionally domestic

96
setting. This setting is contrived, for collection museums almost always emerged out of building
campaigns to create homes for art.
165

In her study A Museum of One’s Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift, Anne Higonnet
contends that collection museums emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in response to public,
universal survey museums. Collection museums rarely employed the strict division of items
along chronological and geographical lines used to organize collections within encyclopedic
museums—thus permitting the visitor more intimate and varied viewing experiences. Though
this form of museum lost prestige and popularity in the postwar period, collection museums were
at the peak of their popularity in the 1930s.
166

When Kress began openly discussing building his own collection museum in 1935, the
Frick Collection had recently opened fully to the public. The Continis viewed and admired this
collection in the late 1920s, and may well have encouraged Kress to consider building a similar
institution.
167
For Kress, a collection museum fulfilled many of his goals as a collector: it would
provide a philanthropic outlet for his collection and cement his legacy as an art lover, while also
allowing him to exert control over the content and installation of his collection.
In October 1935, Kress discussed this idea with the Board of Trustees of the Kress
Foundation. Along with his brothers Claude and Rush, Samuel Kress established the Kress
Foundation in 1929 to “promote the moral, physical, and mental well-being of the human race.”

168
The Kress Foundation was not created to manage the Kress Collection; in fact, Samuel

165
Anne Higonnet, A Museum of One’s Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift (New York: Prestel, 2009),
xiv.
166
Higonnet, 2–24.
167
Contini Bonacossi, Diario Americano, 154–5.
168
In addition to the three Kress brothers, two partners in the S.H. Kress & Co. business served on the
Kress Foundation’s initial Board of Trustees: Nicholas F. Lenssen (trustee, 1929–1944), and Paul B.
Scarff (trustee, 1929–1940) (Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 4: Kress Foundation, Box 162,
Kress Foundation: Foundational Documents], New York, New York).

97
Kress’s art collection is not even mentioned in the Kress Foundation’s documents of
incorporation.
169
However, after being largely inactive for several years, Samuel Kress now
proposed that the Foundation might consider taking a more active role in shaping and
distributing his art collection.
170

In the minutes of this board meeting, Samuel Kress reminded his fellow trustees (most of
whom were his brothers) that his interest in works of art—“particularly Italian painting” —had
led him to develop a large and precious collection. He had collected with a sense of urgency,
explaining to his fellow trustees that the opportunities to develop a valuable collection of
paintings were “continually growing smaller” as works of art “were being absorbed in the great
museums of the world.” After describing the resources and quick decision-making necessary to
develop a collection like his own, Kress stated that he hoped that one day the Kress Foundation
might carry on his work of “collecting and perpetuating for the benefit of the public paintings
and objects of art.”
171
He noted that he never wished to limit the Kress Foundation to only this
form of charitable work, but he wanted to make a formal statement of his intentions regarding
the future of his collection and of the Kress Foundation.

169
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 4: Kress Foundation, Box 162, Kress Foundation:
Foundational Documents], New York, New York.
170
For the first two years of its existence, the Foundation did not possess any funds. According to the
Booz, Allen, & Hamilton survey of September 20, 1949, the Foundation “acquired its first resource in
1931 when Samuel H. Kress made his initial gift.” By 1934, the Foundation’s assets equaled $450,550.
Yet though the Foundation’s income that year totaled over $10,000, it spent only $156. Booz, Allen &
Hamilton Survey, September 20, 1949. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 4: Box 162, Kress
Foundation: Foundational Documents], New York, New York. The Kress Foundation’s earliest
documented charitable contributions date to 1935, when it donated funds to the United Hospital Fund and
Georgia Warm Springs Foundation. The Kress Foundation did not purchase works of art for the Kress
Collection until June 1936 (Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3: Exhibitions & Publications,
Box 160, Exhibitions: A Gift to America: Research Materials: Correspondence (1 of 2)], New York, New
York).
171
Minutes from the Kress Foundation Board of Trustees meeting, October 1935, Samuel H. Kress
Foundation Archive [Series 3: Exhibitions & Publications, Box 160, Publication: A Gift to America:
Research Materials: Correspondence (1 of 2)], New York, New York.

98
Kress continued, informing his fellow trustees that he was seriously considering building
a personal collection museum on Upper Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Kress listed four available
properties that he had inspected for this task; the options—located on the corner of Fifth Avenue
and alternatively, Sixty-Eighth, Sixty-Ninth, Eighty-Third, or Eighty-Fourth streets—would have
located a Kress Collection museum across the street from either the Metropolitan Museum of Art
or the Frick Collection.
172

After describing the location and prices of possible sites for a museum (which could also
serve as the Kress Foundation headquarters), Samuel Kress drew the board’s attention to the high
costs involved in taking on his project. Outside of the costs associated with building and
maintaining a museum, Kress pointed out all the expenses he had incurred in developing,
maintaining, and circulating—via a traveling exhibition—his collection. Up until 1935, he
personally covered all costs associated with his collection. In the process, Samuel Kress reported
that he had spent over five million dollars. He encouraged the trustees to think carefully before
committing the Kress Foundation to the task of “developing art” and “acquiring and erecting a
fitting museum.” In concluding his comments, Samuel Kress noted that the board needed to
come to a conclusion soon regarding the Foundation’s long-term activities.
173

After their meeting in October 1935, the Kress Foundation Board of Trustees deferred
purchasing property for a potential Kress Collection museum. Instead, Samuel Kress and the
Kress Foundation poured their resources into enriching the Kress Collection itself. In the mid-
1930s, Kress’s collection was not, in fact, especially well-suited for a collection museum. It

172
Minutes from the Kress Foundation Board of Trustees meeting, October 1935, Samuel H. Kress
Foundation Archive [Series 3: Exhibitions & Publications, Box 160, Publication: A Gift to America:
Research Materials: Correspondence (1 of 2)], New York, New York.
173
Minutes from the Kress Foundation Board of Trustees meeting, October 1935, Samuel H. Kress
Foundation Archive [Series 3: Exhibitions & Publications, Box 160, Publication: A Gift to America:
Research Materials: Correspondence (1 of 2)], New York, New York.

99
consisted of hundreds of paintings at this point. This large collection—intentionally designed to
provide a representative overview of Italian Renaissance art—differed significantly from the
small, “jewel-box” assembly of masterpieces usually housed within collection museums. Though
Kress remained committed to developing a comprehensive collection, he also began to invest in
more costly works as he contemplated opening his own museum.
The first of these noteworthy purchases occurred shortly before Samuel Kress proposed
building a collection museum to the board of trustees in 1935. Over the summer prior to this
meeting, Kress concluded the purchase of Duccio di Buoninsegna’s The Calling of the Apostles
Peter and Andrew (Fig. 1.11). This luminous predella panel belonged to the verso side of the
Maestà altarpiece Duccio created from 1308-11 for high altar of the Cathedral of Siena. Though
small, this painting represented a work of great art historical importance. The panel possessed a
rich provenance and was created by Duccio, the “first flower” according to Berenson, “from
whose seed all Sienese art sprung.”
174
The purchase of this painting marked a new level of
ambition in Kress’s collecting, a painting that would be prized in any public or private collection.
The Duveen Brothers had tried to convince Kress to buy The Calling of the Apostles
Peter and Andrew when they sold it in 1928, but to no avail. In 1934, Clarence MacKay—who
had purchased the work only a few years before—needed to resell the piece due to financial
hardship. The Duveen Brothers stepped in and helped negotiate the sale of the painting to Kress
at that time.
175
This purchase proved indicative of the future direction of Kress’s collection.
Kress’s decision to begin working with the Duveen Brothers reflected his growing confidence as

174
Bernhard Berenson, The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance, 2
nd
edition (New York: G.T.
Putnam’s Sons, 1911), 18.
175
One of the two surviving sales brochures for this painting in the Duveen archive bears a handwritten
note on its first page “Copy sent to K.” (“Duccio di Buoninsegna: The Calling of St. Peter and St.
Andrew.” Getty Research Institute [Duveen Brothers stock documentation from the dealer’s library,
1829–1965, Series IV, Brochures, 1910–1962, Series IV.A.Painting], Los Angeles, California).

100
a collector and commitment to enriching his collection.
176
Over the course of 1934, Kress’s
expenditures on new acquisitions equaled half the value of his existing collection.
177

As Europe became increasingly unstable in the years leading up to World War II, and as
the global economic recession reshaped the fortunes of many, works of art once safely ensconced
within private and public collections reemerged on the art market.
178
Samuel Kress was aware
that this moment was unique. At a special meeting of the Kress Foundation’s Board of Trustees
on June 3, 1936, he encouraged them to consider that together they might perform “a distinct
service to America” by seizing the chance “afforded under present conditions of obtaining and
building up collections of pictures and objects of art which would otherwise never be obtainable
for the benefit at least of this country.”
179
Since the Gilded Age, the media had cast American
collecting of European masterpieces in patriotic terms. Kress fully embraced this rhetoric to
describe his own collecting practices at this stage.
180
Kress’s high profile purchases in the mid-
1930s—including the aforementioned Duccio panel, as well as paintings by Giotto, Filippo Lippi,
Giovanni Bellini, Titian and Canaletto—transformed the Kress collection and drew a new level
of public attention to Kress’s activities as a collector and patron. The Kress collection grew in

176
Kress’s shift to include Duveen may also stem from the growing influence of Stephen Pichetto, his
restorer, as an important advisor to the collector. Pichetto worked for Duveen, and seems to have been
interested in counteracting Contini’s influence on Kress (according to John Walker). Walker, Self-Portrait
with Donors, 142.
177
Perry, “The Kress Collection,” A Gift to America, 22.
178
For example, in 1933–34 and 1936, Duveen acquired a number of remarkable paintings deaccessioned
from German museums under the Nazi regime. Several of these masterpieces found their way into the
Kress Collection, including a Madonna and Child by Fra Filippo Lippi from the Gemäldegalerie and
Raphael’s Bindo Altoviti from the Alte Pinakothek (Meryle Secrest, Duveen: A Life in Art (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 337–8). For the provenance of the Fra Filippo Lippi and the Raphael paintings
mentioned, see respectively: Shapley, Italian Paintings XIII–XV Century, 106, and Shapley, Italian
Paintings XV–XVI Century, 105.
179
Perry, “The Kress Collection,” A Gift to America, 22.
180
Santori, The Melancholy of Masterpieces, 71–116.

101
size as well during this period; between 1935 and 1938, Kress added 325 early modern Italian
paintings, more than doubling the collection he had built over the previous decade.
181

In addition to materially enriching the Kress Collection, Samuel Kress expanded the
circle of experts advising him on his collection during this period. He turned for the first time to
art dealers—like Duveen—to advise him on his purchases, rather than only consulting his friend
Contini. Kress also sought out the opinion of art historians on the collection he already possessed.
Though he had always collected expert opinions on the paintings he owned, in the past Contini
had arranged the team of art historians and critics that would review works of art for Kress.
182

Once he began planning for his own museum, Kress became more actively involved in this
process.
For example, in the spring of 1937, Samuel Kress personally reached out to Bernard
Berenson to seek his advice. At Kress’s request, Berenson agreed to review photographs of the
Kress Collection and provide his expert opinion on the authorship, condition, and art historical
merit of its paintings. He divided Kress’s paintings into four distinct categories: he deemed 64 to
be “masterpieces of the highest order,” 54 of sufficient quality to be exhibited with the
masterpieces, 196 possessed sufficient artistic or historic value to remain in the collection, and
86 should be discarded.
183
Berenson’s lists contain few surprises: the “masterpieces of the
highest order” are almost exclusively Tuscan and Venetian paintings by well-known artists,

181
Appendix I.
182
Walker, Self-Portrait with Donors, 136.
183
Lists sent by Bernard Berenson to Samuel Kress, November 23, 1938. Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 108, Collection: Berenson, Bernard: Correspondence: General
(1 of 5), 1937–8], New York, New York.

102
minor Italian artists fill the list of works of historical interest, and Berenson recommended
disposing of dozens of Madonna and Child paintings with debated attributions.
184

Kress did not dispose of the paintings Berenson disliked, but neither did he plan on
placing them at the center of his collection museum. Instead, Kress’s team marked several of the
works on Berenson’s list recommended for disposal for donation to museums in other parts of
the country. For example, a note next to Boccaccio Boccaccino’s Madonna and Child indicates
that the painting had been, or soon would be, donated to the Helena Museum of Phillips County,
where it still resides today.
185
Despite Berenson’s comments and his new willingness to buy
more conventionally valued “masterpieces,” Kress remained committed to collecting the work of
minor Italian artists in the latter half of the 1930s.
During this period, Kress collected with two plans in place for the future dispersal of his
collection. Even as he discussed opening a collection museum with the Kress Foundation’s
Board of Trustees, Kress continued to donate dozens of paintings to museums in cities across the
United States. Usually the work of minor Italian masters, these gifts would not substantially
detract from Kress’s larger plan to found a namesake museum.
186
Yet this program should not be

184
Unbeknownst to Kress, this list also reflects the thinking of the future curator of the National Gallery
of Art, John Walker. Berenson mentored Walker early in his career, and he happened to be at Villa I Tatti
while B.B. was engaged in this review (John Walker to David Finley, 1938. Library of Congress [David
Finley, Box 33, David E. Finley – Subject File – NGA – Samuel H. Kress Collection Correspondence,
February 1938 – July 1939], Washington, D.C).
185
Ibid., for the note on the list. For the work’s current location, see “Browse the Collection: Helena
Museum of Phillips County,” accessed June 3, 2017, http://www.kressfoundation.org/collection/View
Collection.aspx?id=72&artistID=18938.
186
For example, in 1936 Kress donated Madonna and Child paintings by Maro d’Oggiono, the Florentine
school, and Girolamo Romanino to, respectively, the Seattle Art Museum, Huntington College of
Montgomery, Alabama, and the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences. Kress occasionally gifted
museums with paintings with more prestigious attributions, as for example in 1937, when he donated
Alessandro Magnasco’s Soldiers Playing Cards to the Arizona Museum or Jacopo Tintoretto’s Portrait of
a Young Man in Black to the Seattle Art Museum. See Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress
Collection: Italian Schools, XIII–XV; Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian
Schools, XV–XVI; Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XVI–XVIII;
Eisler, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: European Schools excluding Italian.

103
dismissed simply as a method of weeding lesser works out of the Kress Collection, for Kress
continued to buy works of art by anonymous artists and minor masters even as he planned to
create his museum. By continuing to give artwork elsewhere, Kress ensured that at least part of
his collection would serve the communities responsible for the success of the S.H. Kress & Co.
business.
Kress’s collecting patterns from 1935–8 clearly demonstrate that he envisioned his
collection museum as a home for his survey collection of Italian Renaissance art. This was a
highly unusual goal for a private collection museum. As mentioned above, most collection
museums—like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Frick Collection and Huntington
Museum—house eclectic collections of rare and valuable artwork, arranged in a manner to
convey the collector’s taste. A few rare examples contain specialized collections, like the Musée
Nissim de Camondo, which is dedicated entirely to French decorative arts of the latter half of the
eighteenth century. Comte Moïse de Camondo constructed a mansion to house his collection,
arranged to evoke the feeling of an eighteenth-century elite residence.
187
Though Kress’s dream
of providing a survey of Italian painting from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries would present
more pressing spatial challenges, he could have chosen to design a museum in the manner of a
Renaissance palazzo in Manhattan.
If Kress had decided to proceed in this manner, his collection museum might have
resembled the interior of his apartment. A decade after he met the Continis in an effort to
improve the décor of his apartment, Kress had filled it with early modern Italian art. In late 1938
or 1939, the architectural photographer Drix Duryea photographed the interior of Kress’s highly
curated apartment in anticipation of the donation of many of the works of art it contained. This

187
Comte Moïse de Camondo ordered the creation of a mansion to house his collection that would
represent a twentieth-century interpretation of an elite eighteenth-century residence (Higonnet, 117–121).

104
series of photographs capture the way Kress and his advisors combined early modern Italian
paintings, sculpture, ceramics, small bronzes, furniture, and textiles to create a mid-twentieth-
century interpretation of an elite early modern Italian residence in his penthouse.
188

To create a setting appropriate for his collection, Kress hired the interior designer Ernest
L. Brothers. Brothers managed the New York branch of the French firm Carlhian & Co. Based in
Paris, this interior design firm specialized in helping clients create interiors in the eighteenth-
century French style. They bought and sold new and antique examples of furniture, wood
paneling, and wallpaper to create lavish interiors.
189
Brothers installed wood paneling, detailed
tile work, and re-purposed architectural elements—including a seventeenth-century Venetian
ceiling—to create an atmosphere of “old-world elegance” in Kress’s apartment.
190
This space did
not attempt to faithfully reproduce early modern Italian domestic or social spaces, but rather to
create a setting that would enhance the art displayed within it.
Rather than creating a dedicated gallery within the apartment, Kress displayed art
prominently in many rooms within his apartment.
191
Each room bore a loose thematic scheme of

188
The National Gallery of Art’s Library Department of Image of Collections digitized these photographs
and made them accessible via their website. “Samuel H. Kress Residence,” National Gallery of Art Image
Collections, accessed June 3, 2017,
http://library.nga.gov/imagecollections/mercury/holdingsInfo?searchId=400&recCount=20&recPointer&
bibId=126201.
189
The New York branch of the firm was closely associated with the Duveen Brothers and worked on the
homes of wealthy families like the Vanderbilts, Wideners, and Gettys. Karen Meyer-Roux, “The Carlhian
Records: A Peek Inside one of the largest archives at the Getty Research Institute,” The Iris: Behind the
Scenes at the Getty (blog), J. Paul Getty Trust February 21, 2012, http://blogs.getty.edu/ iris/treasures-
from-the-vault-the-carlhian-records/.
190
Ernest L. Brothers received his initial training in design from his English family of antique dealers and
decorators. He worked for Carlhian and Co. in New York from 1919–27, at which time he established his
own design firm. For more on Brothers, see “Ernest L. Brothers Interior Design Collection,” National
Building Museum, accessed June 5, 2017, http://www.nbm.org/collections/ernest-l-brothers-interior-
design-collection/.
191
Every photographed room includes paintings and artwork in other media. However, the seventeen
spaces recorded do not encompass the entirety of Kress’s apartment. “Samuel H. Kress Residence,”
National Gallery of Art Image Collections, accessed September 19, 2018,

105
organization; the Gothic sitting room held heavily religious, early Italian paintings—including no
fewer than eight paintings of the Madonna—while the French Salon displayed eighteenth-
century French drawings (another of Kress’s passions) and a handful of large contemporaneous
paintings by Venetian artists like Canaletto and Francesco Guardi. Some rooms—like the
Carpaccio bedroom and library—displayed predominately religious paintings. Others, like the
solarium and paneled dining room, featured more secular scenes. The paintings within these
rooms rarely related thematically to the activities carried out within them, though The Parable of
Lazarus and the Rich Man, despite its somber source material, evoked a festive feast in Kress’s
dining room (Fig. 1.12). With the exception of the French Salon and Moreau bedroom, Italian
paintings predominate in every space. However, in most cases there are a few examples of other
schools displayed alongside them.
The residence’s foyer, upper stair hall, and sitting room represented the most densely
decorated spaces within Kress’s apartment; they held many of Kress’s most prized paintings.
192

In the foyer, upon stepping off Kress’s private elevator and entering the apartment, one would
immediately encounter Giorgione’s Adoration of the Shepherds, Carpaccio’s paintings of
Temperance and Prudence, and Agnolo Gaddi’s Coronation of the Virgin (Fig. 1.13). In addition
to paintings, Kress displayed the early modern furniture and decorative arts he collected within
these spaces. An early modern cassone, two large candlesticks, two majolica vases, and
Giovanni Amadeo’s Virgin Enthroned Nursing Infant Jesus stand in the foyer. In addition to

https://library.nga.gov/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma991262013804896&context=L&vid=01NGA_IN
ST:IMAGE&search_scope=ImageCollections&tab=ImageCollections&lang=en.
192
The sitting room displayed a large number of paintings. Most rooms in the apartment hold ten to
twenty paintings, but the foyer and upper stair hall each hold more than two-dozen paintings. Melissa
Lemke, Image Specialist for Italian Art at the National Gallery of Art’s Library Department of Image
Collections, created a list of Kress Collection objects within each of the photographs of Kress’s apartment.
She generously shared her research with me, which, in tandem with the images themselves, informs my
observations.

106
demonstrating Kress’s taste and commitment to the arts of early modern Italy, these works of art
form a frame to direct the visitor’s attention to Kress’s newly acquired and highly prized painting,
the Adoration of the Shepherds (Fig. 1.14). Appropriately enough, this assemblage of items is all
stylistically consistent to the period in which Giorgione (with or without Titian’s assistance)
painted this altarpiece.
193

Upstairs, the upper stair hall displayed an additional twenty-six works of art, all Italian
and predominately dating from the fifteenth- and sixteenth-centuries. The Venetian sitting room
also displayed Italian paintings exclusively (Fig. 1.15–16). Despite its name, the Venetian room
displayed paintings from many regions of Italy, again mostly dating from the fifteenth to
sixteenth centuries. Though Italian art appears throughout the apartment, it is striking that the
spaces dedicated to exclusively to displaying Italian Renaissance art are also the most socially
significant in Kress’s home. Friends and visitors would quickly gain a sense of Kress’s priorities
as a collector by strolling through the apartment’s entryway and main entertaining rooms.
Occupying the thirteenth and fourteenth floors of a luxurious residential building, Kress’s
penthouse was never intended to serve as a collection museum itself. Yet the way works of art
are displayed within Kress’s home provide some insight into how such a collection might have
looked. The arrangement of the Kress collection within this apartment in the late 1930s displays
both eclectic and specialist impulses. Through the dominance of Italian paintings, sculpture, and
decorative arts by known and anonymous masters, Kress demonstrates his specialist interest in
this period. In Drix Duryea’s photograph of Kress’s Venetian sitting room, it is clear that the
collector and his advisors sought to convey the rich legacy of Renaissance Italy through his

193
This is not to say that they all necessary date to the sixteenth century. However, in the sixteenth
century, taste shifted and carved, rather than painted, cassoni became more popular (Jacqueline Marie
Musacchio, Art, Marriage, & Family in the Florentine Renaissance Palace (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2008), 6–7).

107
collection (Fig. 1.15–16). The Venetian sitting room surrounds Kress’s Italian paintings,
sculptures, ceramics, and small bronzes with furniture, architectural ornaments, and textiles
intended to provide a fuller sense of the artistic production of this period.
194
At the same time,
Kress’s densely packed and heavily ornamented Venetian room displays an aesthetic popular
with wealthy Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. The groupings of paintings
within each space are only loosely chronological or geographical, and provide more information
about Kress’s personal taste than of the history of Italian Renaissance art itself.
In developing the hanging scheme in his apartment, Kress and his advisors may have
begun to realize how difficult it would be to display his entire collection in this manner. Kress
purchased hundreds of works of art that remained in storage in the late 1930s. In order to display
this collection in its entirety, he would either need to build a vast structure or split his collection,
reserving the masterpieces for a smaller collection museum, and donating the minor works to
regional museums across the country. Kress knew the first option could prove prohibitively
expensive in Manhattan, but also that the latter one would fail to achieve his goal of providing a
survey of Italian Renaissance art. From 1935–38, Kress and the Kress Foundation, along with
their advisors, continued to collect early modern art in spite of these unresolved questions,
confident the Kress Collection would find an appropriate home in time.

Enter the National Gallery of Art
In 1938, an unexpected opportunity arose that provided a plan for the future of the Kress
Collection and changed the nature of the collection’s development. Early in the year, Jeremiah
O’Connor and Herbert Friedmann, curators at the Corcoran Gallery and Smithsonian Institution

194
In addition to the ceiling installed in this room, Kress carefully collected early modern velvets in order
to recover his furniture and create the shadow box frames often associated with the Kress Collection. His
textile collection is discussed in Chapter 3.

108
respectively, visited Kress’s apartment to view his art collection. The following month,
O’Connor wrote to Kress, urging him to consider contributing his collection to the newly
founded National Gallery of Art. Less than a year earlier, Congress had accepted Andrew
Mellon’s offer to build a National Gallery in Washington, D.C. In addition to contributing the
funds necessary to build and initially endow the institution, Mellon’s own highly esteemed art
collection would fill some of its galleries.
195
In 1938, the building to house the National Gallery
was not yet constructed. Nonetheless, O’Connor argued that Kress’s paintings would be far more
secure in this newly formed institution than in a private museum; furthermore, in this context
they would do “the maximum of good.”
196
Kress communicated with O’Connor about this
possibility over the following weeks. In April 1938, he invited David Finley, the director of the
National Gallery of Art, to visit him.
197
Finley spent seven hours in Kress’s apartment. Though
the formal indenture documents would not be signed for some time, this meeting initiated the
negotiations that would culminate in Kress’s commitment to donate the greater part of his
collection to the National Gallery of Art.
198

The donation agreement between Kress and the National Gallery of Art ensured that
Kress maintained some control over how his collection was maintained and displayed. His
paintings would occupy their own galleries, which would be labeled with his name. However,

195
David E. Finley, A Standard of Excellence: Andrew W. Mellon founds the National Gallery of
Art at Washington, D.C. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1973); Philip Kopper,
America’s National Gallery of Art: A Gift to the Nation (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991).
196
Jeremiah O’Connor to Samuel H. Kress, February 8, 1938. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive
[Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 127, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art: Correspondence: Early
Communication Regarding the Gift (1 of 2)], New York, New York.
197
David Finley to Samuel Kress, April 18 and 23, 1938. Library of Congress [David Finley, Box 33,
David E. Finley – Subject File – NGA – Samuel H. Kress Collection Correspondence, February 1938 –
July 1939], Washington, D.C.
198
Samuel H. Kress, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, and the trustees of the
National Gallery of Art signed an indenture document on June 29, 1939. Copies of the indenture
document can be found in the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 122,
Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art: Indenture], New York, New York.

109
those galleries would be interspersed throughout the museum in order to ensure they fit into the
geographic and chronological organization of the museum at large.
199
Thus, even without the
private collection museum, Kress’s name would be tied to the love of Italian art. The agreement
also provided the National Gallery with flexibility. They were not bound to permanently display
the works Kress donated. On the contrary, Kress encouraged the gallery’s staff to regularly
assess their holdings and exchange less-desirable works from the Kress Collection for Kress’s
newer purchases.
Kress’s agreement with the National Gallery inspired him to collect heavily in 1939. He
and the Kress Foundation purchased over one hundred and ten early modern Italian paintings,
undoubtedly preparing to fill the empty rooms of the National Gallery of Art. The paintings
purchased that year follow the collecting patterns Kress established over the past decade—they
consisted largely of the work of minor masters, interspersed with the work of artists with more
commonly known names like Lorenzo Monaco and Alessandro Allori.
200
Kress’s large collection
of minor masters worried the National Gallery’s curator, John Walker. In later years, he spoke
openly of how even as he sought to obtain Kress’s donation to the National Gallery, he found
many of the paintings by anonymous or minor masters to be below the standard of quality
Mellon required in the founding documents of the National Gallery. In order to mitigate this

199
In a draft of his offer letter to the Board of Trustees, Kress stated he had no objection to his non-Italian
paintings being placed in galleries alongside art donated by other collectors. Samuel H. Kress to the
Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art. Library of Congress [Finley – Box 33, David E. Finley –
Subject File – NGA, Samuel H. Kress Collection Correspondence, February 1938 – July 1939],
Washington, D.C.
200
Notably, Kress and the Kress Foundation purchased fewer non-Italian European paintings in 1939 and
1940. From 1927 onward, Kress usually purchased a few early modern European paintings from regions
outside of Italy—ranging from two to six paintings a year throughout this period. In 1939–40, this small
number of purchases diminished to zero. See Appendix II.

110
problem, Walker, Finley, the National Gallery’s trustees, and Kress agreed that parts of the Kress
Collection would be displayed in a downstairs “study gallery.”
201

This stipulation, along with the conversations and meetings regularly occurring from
1938 onward among Kress, his advisors, and the team at the National Gallery of Art, shifted
Kress’s approach to collecting the following year. In 1940, he only purchased ten early modern
Italian paintings, nine of which joined the National Gallery’s collection.
202
This smaller set of
purchases included works by some of the most coveted names in the history of Renaissance art
including Fra Filippo Lippi, Sandro Botticelli, Giovanni Bellini, Raphael, and Tiepolo.
203
With
this series of purchases, Kress demonstrated his willingness to pursue—and pay for—the most
desirable paintings available on the art market.
The National Gallery of Art opened on March 17, 1941, displaying close to four hundred
and fifty works of art from the Kress Collection. Almost four hundred of these pieces were gifts,
while Kress loaned an additional fifty items for an indefinite period of time.
204
In his opening
address, President Roosevelt praised Andrew Mellon, Samuel Kress, and Joseph Widener for
their gifts, and for their decision to “establish not a memorial to themselves but a monument to

201
Walker writes of this in Self Portrait with Donors, 137–40. Walker repeated this in 1990, stating
frankly that they invented the study collection to handle Kress’s less desirable paintings and sculpture
(John Walker, Interview 90-14, conducted by Anne G. Ritchie, October 23, 1990, 10–11. National
Gallery of Art Archive [National Gallery of Art Oral History Program], Washington, D.C.).
202
Seven of these ten paintings are still part of the National Gallery’s collection today.
203
This is especially true in the case of the sole painting by Raphael in the Kress Collection, Bindo
Altoviti, which Kress purchased from Duveen Brothers in 1940. For more on the art historical debates
surrounding this painting and its provenance, see David Alan Brown and Jane Van Nimmen, Raphael and
the Beautiful Banker: The Story of the Bindo Altoviti Portrait (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
204
Raphael’s Bindo Altoviti, and Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna and Child with Saints (both new purchases)
were among the works loaned to the museum, both of which were ultimately donated (Shapley, Paintings
from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XV–XVI Centuries, 44 and 105).

111
the art that they love and the country to which they belong.”
205
Samuel Kress attended the
opening, one of the only times he attended an event related to his art donations.
Following the opening, the Kress Collection received favorable coverage in the press
surrounding the National Gallery’s opening. Articles in the New York Times, Washington Post,
and Baltimore Sun noted the strength of the newly opened museum lay in its Italian paintings,
which constituted the majority of the collection.
206
The New York Herald Tribune praised the
Kress Collection of Italian art more directly, stating it was “one of the finest in the world”
containing “works of virtually all the masters of that country from the thirteenth to eighteenth
century.”
207
For Kress, it must have been deeply gratifying to see his collection appreciated and
discussed in this manner.
However, Kress did not view the National Gallery of Art’s opening as an indication that
his collection was now complete. Throughout 1941, Kress continued to acquire early modern
Italian artwork. He purchased twenty-one paintings from Contini over the course of that year,
both to enrich his own collection (now greatly depleted) and to provide options for the National
Gallery.
208
This set of paintings would be the last exchanged between Samuel Kress and Contini.
In December 1941, Italy declared war on the United States following the American declaration
of war on Japan. The bellicose relationship between their countries barred Kress and Contini
from working together again until the late 1940s.
209

205
“The Text of President Roosevelt’s Art Address,” Special to the New York Times, March 18, 1941, 8.
206
Edward Alden Jewell, “National Gallery a Cultural Asset,” New York Times (March 18, 1941), 8.; A.D.
Emmart, “The National Gallery: Emmart Reviews It,” Baltimore Sun, March 18, 1941, 13; “Roosevelt
Will Dedicate the National Art Gallery Tomorrow, Public to Get First Look on Tuesday,” The
Washington Post, March 16, 1941, pg. L5.
207
New York Herald Tribune, August 20, 1939.
208
See Appendix I and II.
209
Contini began selling to the Kress Foundation again in 1947. See Appendix I.

112
The advent of war also impacted the National Gallery of Art. In January 1942, the
director of the National Gallery of Art, David Finley, decided to evacuate the most valuable
artwork in the collection to an undisclosed location (the Biltmore estate in Asheville, North
Carolina) for the duration of the war.
210
Nonetheless, the gallery remained opened; works from
Kress’s study collection at the National Gallery even served to fill depleted galleries.
211

Finally, though Samuel Kress remained passionate about his collection until his death in
1955, his active engagement with the Kress Collection began to diminish after 1941. That
summer, he suffered the first of a series of strokes that would leave him bedridden from 1946
onward, and limited his abilities to maintain the steady stream of correspondence and meetings
associated with the collection.
212
From this point forward, his younger brother Rush Kress
assumed responsibility for the future of the Kress Collection.
Despite all this upheaval, Kress and the Kress Foundation continued to collect artwork
and make donations to the National Gallery.
213
The focus of the Kress Collection continued to be
on early modern Italian art, but there is a noticeable increase in the number of non-Italian
European paintings purchased in 1942. Once he partnered with the National Gallery of Art,
Kress and the Foundation occasionally agreed to purchase art that would strengthen weak aspects

210
Samuel H. Kress Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 124, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery
of Art: Collection: Evacuation of Artworks during World War II], New York, New York.
211
In a letter dated January 28, 1942, Finley requested Kress’s permission to move some of the Kress
Collection paintings from their downstairs galleries to fill holes upstairs. At the time of the opening and
throughout the war years, there was anxiety at the National Gallery that the government would compel the
museum to give up some of its space for other government offices should they appear empty. Samuel H.
Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 124, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of
Art: Collection: Evacuation of Artworks during World War II], New York, New York.
212
On his health, see “Memorandum for the Record.” Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 5:
Kress Family, Box 172, Kress Family: Correspondence: General], New York, New York.
213
Together, Kress and the Foundation donated sixty-nine paintings and twenty-six sculptures in April
1943. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 124, Washington, D.C.:
National Gallery of Art: Collection: Exchange of Objects between the NGA & Kress Foundation, 1939–
1960], New York, New York.

113
of the new museum’s collection, even if they strayed from Kress’s focus on Italian art and
culture. In the late 1940s, under Rush’s leadership, this trend intensified, as will be discussed in
Chapter 4.

Conclusion
By the time Samuel Kress ceased to be actively involved in managing the Kress
Collection, it encompassed close to eight hundred paintings and fifty works of sculpture created
in Italy between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. This collection contained examples from
every region of Italy, and by producers ranging from anonymous artisans to great masters like
Desiderio da Settignano, Bellini, Giorgione, Raphael, and Tiepolo. Kress fulfilled the dream of
many American collectors to create a deep and broad survey of Italian art for the people of the
United States. However, Kress’s success cannot be solely ascribed to his personal vision or
approach to collecting. A confluence of historic events—the economic depression of the early
1930s, the political instability that uprooted many collections, and his friendship with a Fascist
senator—made it possible for Kress to succeed where many others had failed. Kress was also
able to create a broad collection of Italian art because of his willingness to collect the work of
minor artists, paintings with unpopular subject matter, and periods not yet fully fashionable—
like the Baroque. Remarkably, due to his efforts the National Gallery of Art opened in 1941 with
a collection consisting predominately of Italian paintings. After a century of longing to possess
Italian Renaissance art, American museum visitors could finally claim part of this artistic
heritage as their own.

114
Chapter 2
Italian Renaissance Art for the Hinterlands

From the moment he emerged as a serious collector, Samuel Kress stated that he
collected art for the benefit of the American public. He demonstrated the sincerity of his
intentions by earmarking a number of his earliest purchases for immediate donation to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1927. Within a year of this gift, Kress reconsidered his initial
plan to donate the entirety of his collection to this institution. He then spent a decade
experimenting with alternative modes of sharing the Kress Collection with the American people.
Between 1928 and 1938, Kress developed an ambitious plan to donate art from his collection to
regional museums across the country, lent works to galleries and world’s fairs, organized a
travelling exhibition that toured the United States for three years, and discussed opening a Kress
Collection museum. Publications discussing Kress’s legacy briefly cite this period as an
important precursor to his donation to the National Gallery of Art, but beyond that Kress’s early
attempts to share his collection with the public receive little scholarly attention.
1

Kress’s divergent visions for the future of his collection emerged in response to
contemporaneous debates about how to make art collections—in and out of museums—

1
Dianne Dwyer Modestini and Mario Modestini, “Mario Modestini, Conservator of the Kress Collection,
1949–1961,” in Studying and Conserving the Paintings: Occasional Papers on the Samuel H. Kress
Collection (New York: Archetype Publications Ltd., 2006), 43; Marilyn Perry, “The Kress Collection,” in
A Gift to America: Masterpieces of European Painting from the Samuel H. Kress Collection, ed. Chiyo
Ishikawa, Lynn Federele Orr, George T.M. Shackelford, and David Steel (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1994), 20–1; Charles R. Mack, “Creating a More Cultured Understanding of Art: The Samuel H. Kress
Foundation and the Columbia Museum of Art,” in European Art in the Columbia Museum of Art,
Including the Samuel H. Kress Collection, vol. 1: The Thirteenth through the Sixteenth Century
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 3–4; Bowron writes that the success of the
traveling exhibition “moved Kress to greater philanthropy” (Bowron, “Samuel H. Kress and His
Collection of Italian Renaissance Paintings,” in A Market for Merchant Princes: Collecting Italian
Renaissance Paintings in America, ed. Inge Reist [University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University
Press for the Frick Collection, 2015], 113).

115
accessible and useful to the American public. The Progressive Era conviction that art museums
could elevate and educate the public, and in doing so strengthen democracy, held strong in the
late 1920s and 1930s. Museum workers and cultural reformers pushed for an expanded definition
of the museum, one that might reach wider audiences by experimenting with new policies for
creating and sharing their collections. Through his gifts and loans, Kress actively participated in
these debates, consistently stressing the importance of Italian Renaissance art to the cultural and
educational mission of American art museums. Thus, tracing the circulation of the Kress
Collection between 1928 and 1938 demonstrates Kress’s growing desire not merely to participate
in the world of museums and art exhibitions, but to actively shape its future.

The Second “Kress Idea”: Kress’s Early Donations of Italian Art
In 1896, Samuel Kress opened his first five-and-dime store in Memphis, Tennessee.
Though he was a Pennsylvania native, Kress explained that he selected Memphis because “it was
a thriving cotton port and it appeared, after careful appraisal, to offer the maximum potential and
minimum risk for the Kress idea.”
2
The Southeastern United States in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries remained understored, providing a unique opportunity for Kress. Within
five years of opening his first store, Kress developed a chain of fifteen S.H. Kress & Co. stores in
cities across the Southeast. In the first half of the twentieth century, S.H. Kress & Co. continued
to flourish, opening dozens of additional stores and expanding into growing areas in the
American West.
3
The “Kress Idea” succeeded, making Samuel Kress—along with Claude and
Rush, his brothers and business partners—wealthy.

2
Karl Friedrich von Frank zu Doefering and Charles Rhoads Roberts, Kress Family History (Vienna,
Austria: Privately printed by authors, 1930), 541.
3
Susan Wilkerson and Hank Griffith, A Guide to the Building Records of the S.H. Kress & Co. 5-10-25
Cent Stores at the National Building Museum (Washington, D.C.: National Building Museum, 1993).

116
The Kress brothers’ fortunes developed in the midst of the Progressive Era, a period in
which the rich developed new and more sophisticated forms of philanthropy to fulfill their
obligations to society. During this period, the federal government rarely intervened in the social
and economic problems that arose in the wake of industrialization, relying instead on the private
sector to help those in need. Rather than continuing to provide “palliative charity,” industrialists
like Andrew Carnegie sought to develop philanthropic organizations that could systematically
identify, study, and address the causes of social issues.
4

To this end, wealthy families like the Sages, Carnegies, and Rockefellers established
foundations—charitable trusts managed by experts and trustees tasked with directing resources
as efficiently as possible to address issues related to social welfare.
5
Philanthropy provided
wealthy social elites with an avenue to call for reform, while simultaneously protecting the
conditions that allowed them to develop their fortunes in the first place. As Carol Duncan
explained, the reform measures called for by most elites were conservative in that they were
“designed to preserve the current social and economic order, while bringing to it new class
harmony by fixing its gravest injustices, inequities, and inefficiencies.”
6
Though the Progressive

4
Karl and Katz characterize “palliative charity” as that which does not address the “root causes of social
ills” (Barry D. Karl and Stanley N. Katz, “Foundations and Ruling Class Elites,” Daedalus 116, no 1.
[Winter 1987]: 5); Andrew Carnegie, “The Gospel of Wealth,” North American Review 148 (1889): 653–
64; Sally Anne Duncan, Paul J. Sachs and the Institutionalization of Museum Culture between the World
Wars. (PhD diss., Tufts University, 2001),102–10.
5
Margaret Olivia Sage established the first modern foundation in memory of her husband Russell Sage in
1907. Notably, the Sage, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations were all established before 1917, when
federal income tax began allowing charitable deductions (Peter Dobkin Hall, Inventing the Nonprofit
Sector and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations [Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992], 45–58). Inspired by these earlier examples, the Kress brothers
established the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in 1929 “to promote the moral, physical, and mental well-
being of the human race.” Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 4: Kress Foundation, Box 162,
Kress Foundation: Foundational Documents], New York, New York. In addition to the three Kress
brothers, two important partners in the S.H. Kress & Co. business served on the Kress Foundation’s initial
Board of Trustees: Nicholas F. Lenssen (trustee, 1929–1944), and Paul B. Scarff (trustee, 1929–1940).
6
Carol Duncan, A Matter of Class: John Cotton Dana, Progressive Reform, and the Newark
Museum (Pittsburgh: Periscope Publishing, 2009), xiii.

117
Era came to an end as people struggled to reconcile their idealistic visions of reform with the
horrors of World War I, ideas about the social responsibility of the wealthy and the forms
through which they practiced their philanthropy remain firmly entrenched.
Having thoroughly absorbed these lessons themselves, the Kress brothers sought to
engage in meaningful philanthropic work. Together and individually, they supported a wide
range of causes and charities.
7
In the late 1920s, Samuel Kress decided to focus his energy and
resources on creating a collection of Italian Renaissance art for the American people. This
collection would serve as his philanthropic legacy. When relations cooled between Kress and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1928, Samuel Kress expanded the team of experts advising him
on everything regarding collecting, conserving, and curating art. His advisors also offered insight
on emerging museum markets in order to develop a new strategy for sharing his collection with
the public. Along with his brothers—his partners in philanthropy as well as business—Samuel
Kress worked to develop a new “Kress Idea” to guide his giving.
The Kress brothers decided to launch their new venture in Memphis, the same place they
opened the first S.H. Kress & Co. store thirty-two years earlier. In March 1928, Kress donated a
tondo painting, Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist, attributed to Raffaellino del Garbo
to the Brooks Memorial Art Gallery (Fig. 2.1).
8
He initially intended to donate this painting to
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but pulled this offer without an explanation. If the
Metropolitan Museum had found the work undesirable for any reason, Kress could have returned

7
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 5: Kress Family, Box 174, Kress Family: Samuel H.
Kress: Personal Donations], New York, New York.
8
Samuel H. Kress to Valerie Farrington, March 20, 1928. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2:
Kress Institutions, Box 140, Memphis, TN: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art: Correspondence: Early
Communication Regarding the Gift], New York, New York.

118
it to Alessandro Contini Bonacossi.
9
Instead, he chose to keep the work and begin exploring how
he might enrich and support institutions beyond the cultural centers of the Eastern seaboard.
Kress’s gift to the Brooks Memorial Art Gallery marked the beginning of a series of
donations to relatively new museums in the American South and West, institutions that enjoyed
community support, but had limited collections. Between 1928 and 1938, Kress donated more
than sixty works of art to museums in twenty-eight different cities across the United States, 90
percent of which were early modern Italian paintings. Rather than enriching an already strong
collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kress’s new gifts helped small museums grow,
especially in cities closely tied to their S.H. Kress & Co. business across the United States.
By the late 1920s and early 1930s, reformers and educators called for precisely this kind
of growth in the museum field. During this period, President Herbert Hoover, the American
Association of Museums, and the Carnegie Corporation all commissioned studies to determine
how museums served the American public and how they might improve. In each case, the
publications emerging from these studies indicated that small to mid-size museums were the
most effective in engaging their audiences. Using a variety of statistics and measures, each study
concluded that smaller museums benefitted from a higher ratio of attendance relative to their
population, more focused and sustained visitor attention, and a greater sense of community
involvement.
10

9
Note on a bill of sale presented to Samuel Kress by Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, October 14, 1927.
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 110, “Contini-Bonacossi,
Alessandro: Bills of Sale (1 of 3)], New York, New York.
10
Edward S. Robinson, Irene Case Sherman, and Lois E. Curry, The Behavior of the Museum
Visitor. Publications of the American Association of Museums, New Series, no. 5. (Washington,
D.C.: American Association of Museums, 1928); Paul Marshall Rea, The Museum and the Community
(Lancaster, Pennsylvania: The Science Press, 1932); Frederick P. Keppel and R.L. Duffus, The Arts in
American Life (New York: Macgraw-Hill Book Company, 1933). Concurrent to these studies, a number
of texts emerged advising people on how to run community museums, including: Laurence Vail Coleman,
Manual for Small Museums (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927); R.L. Duffus, The American

119
This series of studies emerged from and contributed to period rhetoric that viewed
museums as important community assets, the cultivation of which could enhance the “cultural
maturity” of the nation at large.
11
Of course, in the era of Prohibition and social reform,
museums continued to offer entertainment devoid of vice. Inspired by John Cotton Dana, many
also viewed the museum as an important site for cultivating the industrial arts and strengthening
civic culture within local communities.
12
Taste and morality remained significant in discussions
about the museum’s role throughout the 1930s, but in the years following the First World War,
American cultural leaders increasingly discussed museums in patriotic terms. For example,
Robert de Forest, the President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Federation
of Arts, described the chance to directly engage with works of art as part of the “pursuit of
happiness” promised all Americans in the Declaration of Independence.
13
Establishing and
supporting museums all over the United States thus became a way of supporting one’s
democratic ideals.
This sense only intensified in the 1920s and 1930s as political unrest in Europe and the
global economic depression threatened the perceived stability of democratic institutions. As an
institution theoretically dedicated to providing equal cultural opportunities to all citizens, the
museum served as a kind of bulwark of democracy. Kress’s desire to commit his art collection to
the American people emerged from this kind of patriotic impulse.

Renaissance (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928); W.N. Berkeley, The Small-Community Museum: Why
it is Entirely Feasible, Why it is Extremely Desirable (Lynchburg, Virginia: J.P. Bell Company, 1932).
11
W.N. Berkeley writes that museums can serve as indicators of the “cultural maturity” of a community
(Berkeley, The Small-Community Museum, 1).
12
For more on John Cotton Dana, see Carol Duncan, A Matter of Class; Ezra Shales, Made in Newark:
Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era (New Brunswick: Rivergate Books,
2010). For an example of a museum outlining their commitment to industry, see Richard F. Bach,
Museums and the Industrial World (New York: Gilliss Press for the Metropolitan Museum, 1926).
13
De Forest made these comments in a speech given to the American Federation of Arts’ annual
convention in 1919 (Jeffrey Trask, Things American: Art Museums and Civic Culture in the Progressive
Era [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2012], 135).

120
In deciding to send his paintings to cities with new and smaller museums Kress
participated in the broader effort of the era to expand public access to works of art. Kress’s gifts
aided small to mid-size museums in relatively early stages of development by drawing new and
repeat visitors in to see a new acquisition, while also hopefully inspiring other collectors to make
their own gifts in the future. Furthermore, by restricting the donation of artwork to cities with
S.H. Kress & Co. stores, the Kress brothers organized the dispersal of the Kress Collection in
two distinct ways: First, they could rely upon an existing network of contacts to gather
information and handle the logistical details necessary to make such gifts. Secondly, by giving
works from the Kress Collection to the communities that built the Kress fortune, they provided a
socially motivated framework for Kress’s giving.
Kress’s cultural program also echoed the narrative of his commercial enterprise: Kress
presented the S.H. Kress & Co. stores as sites where previously underserved consumers could
purchase affordable items of good quality to enhance their daily lives. Likewise, Kress chose to
give his paintings—bought en bloc for their cultural and historical significance—to museums
with few comparable resources in order to benefit their local communities. The new “Kress Idea”
both built upon the success of and reinforced the merit of the old “Kress Idea.”
After initiating this new program of giving in Memphis, Kress next donated a sixteenth-
century Madonna and Child by Lorenzo Lotto to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in late
1929.
14
Like Memphis, Houston was a significant site for the Kress business. S.H. Kress & Co.
stores opened there in 1900. From this date until 1916, the S.H. Kress & Co. stores in Texas
operated as a separate company—distinct from all other S.H. Kress & Co. operations—with their

14
The formal offer of gift letter dates to January 1930. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston [Curatorial Files,
Lorenzo Lotto, after, Holy Family with Donatrix as St. Catherine of Alexandria, 30.5], Houston, Texas.

121
own corporate offices in Houston.
15
By the time of Kress’s gift in 1929, the S.H. Kress & Co.
stores had long since been subsumed by the parent company. However, Houston remained an
important and profitable center for the S.H. Kress & Co. business.
16

Through his gifts to Memphis and Houston, Kress demonstrated his desire to donate
paintings from his collection to “the out-standing centers of the South and West.”
17
By the spring
of 1930, this interest developed into a more clearly articulated plan. A letter from Kress’s office
dated March 22, 1930, states “…in the past few years Mr. Kress has been making the donation of
paintings somewhat in keeping with the time we have been operating stores in certain cities.”
18

However, as Kress’s secretary explained in the letter, Samuel Kress’s decision to donate
paintings to certain cities was only “somewhat” related to the amount of time the S.H. Kress &
Co. stores had been operating at particular locations. In selecting Houston as the site of his

15
On the two separate Kress businesses, see Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 5: Kress
Family, Box 172, Kress Family: Genealogical Summary: The Kress Story (1739–1963)], New York, New
York. The Houston S.H. Kress & Co. headquarters were located at 705 S. Germain Street (705 Main
Street). Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 6: Kress Stores, Box 176, Kress Stores: Buildings:
General], New York, New York.
16
In the late 1920s, the Kress brothers also owned major shares of the Houston-based John Franklin
Corporation. This separate company managed leasing agreements for S.H. Kress & Co. stores. The nature
of these arrangements is unclear, but Claude, Samuel and Rush Kress were sued over the profits they
made through the John Franklin Corporation in August of 1930 (“Suit Alleges Kresses Made Illegal
Profits: The Stockholders of Business Accuse Three Directors in $15,000,000 Realty Deals,” New York
Times, August 13, 1930).
17
W.L. Baker to S.H. Kress, November 23, 1929. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress
Institutions, Box 139, Houston, TX: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Correspondence: Early
Communication Regarding the Gift], New York, New York.
18
In this letter, Kress’s secretary explained to J.A.H. Kerr, the vice president of the Los Angeles Chamber
of Commerce, that Kress’s “schedule is made up for the year 1930,” but that he would likely include Los
Angeles on “his next list of cities to be considered for these donations.” Indeed, in January, Samuel Kress
selected Los Angeles as the first city in 1931 to receive a painting from his collection. Letter to J.A.H.
Kerr, March 22, 1930. Los Angeles County Museum of Art Archive [Curatorial Files, Luca di Tommé,
Madonna and Child, 31.22], Los Angeles, California.

122
second gift, Kress passed over eight other cities in which S.H. Kress & Co. stores thrived before
the Houston location opened in 1900.
19

Though these eight cities in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida all supported the
Kress business, Houston possessed clear advantages in terms of the city’s size, growth rate, and
existing community engagement with the arts. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, represented
an ideal site for Samuel Kress to donate a work of art: this institution already possessed a
purpose-built museum building and had a strong network of supporters in Houston, but its
collection lacked any early modern works of art. This allowed Kress to significantly improve the
museum’s holdings when he donated a Madonna and Child by Lorenzo Lotto in 1929.
Not all institutions selected by Kress for donations in the early 1930s possessed the kind
of established facilities and audience that he found in Houston, however. For example, in 1931
when Kress donated Jan Fyt’s Hunting Scene to the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado
Springs, the organization was in a period of great transition. In the wake of the stock market
crash in 1929, the Broadmoor Art Academy consolidated with other arts organizations in
Colorado Springs to form a central Fine Arts Center.
20
The plans and structure for this new
organization were far from settled when Kress decided to make his gift. The same year, Kress
chose to donate Luca di Tommé’s Madonna and Child to the Los Angeles Museum of History,
Science and Art even though it was not dedicated primarily to displaying works of art. In

19
Before opening the S.H. Kress & Co. store in Houston on August 25, 1900, the company had already
opened stores in Nashville, Tennessee (March 20, 1897), Montgomery, Alabama (November 22, 1897),
Knoxville, TN (November 21, 1898), Augusta, GA (November 26, 1898), Birmingham, AL (September
23, 1899), Chattanooga, TN (November 25, 1899), Macon, Georgia (November 29, 1899), and
Jacksonville, FL (June 30, 1900) (James S. Hudgins, ed., We Remember Kress, 3. Samuel H. Kress
Foundation Archive [Series 6: Kress Stores, Box 177, Kress Stores: Publication: We Remember Kress],
New York, New York).
20
“Birth of the Fine Arts Center,” Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, accessed
January 3, 2018, http://www.csfineartscenter.org/about/history/birth-of-the-colorado-springs-fine-
artscenter/.

123
selecting the “out-standing centers of the South and West,” Kress considered the potential of
museums and galleries as much, if not more than, how well established the institutions already
were.
In no small part, the S.H. Kress & Co. owed its fortune to the remarkable demographic
growth occurring across the American South and West throughout the twentieth century.
21
From
the first store in Memphis, Samuel Kress bet that these regions of the country would become
more populous and profitable, and his gamble had paid off. It is reasonable to assume that Kress
kept all this in mind as he determined where he would donate paintings from his collection. In
the American South and West, Kress and his brothers identified growing communities that
demonstrated an interest in expanding access to and appreciation of the arts. Within these
communities, they targeted promising institutions with small existing collections. In doing so,
Kress ensured that the paintings he donated would substantially change the nature of their
recipient institutions and hence, he hoped, of the expanding community.
Kress relied heavily on his brothers to help him select and evaluate sites for donations.
Together, they drew on the staff and existing infrastructure of the S.H. Kress & Co. stores to help
organize the distribution of the Kress Collection. In Memphis, Rush Kress asked M.L. Meacham,
a local resident associated with S.H. Kress & Co. there, to advise him regarding the best place to
donate a work of art in the city. Meacham informed Rush Kress that the “the proper institution
for you to consider and open negotiations with” would be the Brooks Memorial Art Gallery.
22

21
The South surpassed the Northeast as the second fastest growing region in the United States in the
1930s. This trend continued until the end of the century. Meanwhile, the West represented fastest growing
region in the country for every decade of the twentieth century (Frank Hobbs and Nicole Stoops,
Demographic Trends in the 20
th
Century: Census 2000 Special Reports, Series CENSR-4. [Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2002]).
22
M.L. Meacham to Rush Kress, March 9, 1928. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress
Institutions, Box 140, Memphis, TN: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art: Correspondence: Early
Communication Regarding the Gift], New York, New York. M.L. Meacham to Rush Kress, February 4,

124
The following year, W.L. Baker, a manager of the S.H. Kress & Co. in Houston, wrote Rush
Kress describing the merits of the Museum of Fine Arts. His letter stresses the museum’s fine
construction, ample display space, desire for growth, and enthusiastic support from the
community.
23

In addition to providing their assessments of local institutions, S.H. Kress & Co.
managers helped the Kress brothers develop a new network of contacts involved in art and
philanthropy. From Memphis, Meacham sent Rush Kress the names of all the art committee
members for the Brooks Memorial Art Gallery—all of whom were members of the National
Academy of Design in New York City.
24
Samuel Kress invited Francis Jones, an artist and
member of the Brooks Gallery’s selection committee, to inspect the Madonna and Child with St.
John the Baptist and determine whether or not it would be suitable for the gallery in Memphis.
Jones approved, and recommended the museum accept Kress’s donation.
25
Through Meacham,
the Kress brothers found a suitable home for this tondo painting. They also strengthened their
connections within the art world in New York, since in addition to acting as a trustee for the
Brooks Gallery, Jones served as a treasurer for the National Academy of Design, and a trustee
for the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1917–30.
26

1929. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 140, Memphis, TN:
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art: Correspondence: Early Communication Regarding the Gift], New York,
New York.
23
W.L. Baker to Rush Kress, September 21, 1929. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress
Institutions, Box 139, Houston, TX: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Correspondence: Early
Communication Regarding the Gift], New York, New York.
24
Meacham’s role in the Kress Store in Memphis is unclear, but he was involved in their business.
25
Samuel Kress to Valerie Farrington, March 20, 1928. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2:
Kress Institutions, Box 140, Memphis, TN: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art: Correspondence: Early
Communication Regarding the Gift], New York, New York.
26
Lee Edwards, Domestic Bliss: Family Life in American Painting, 1840–1910 (New York: Hudson
River Museum, 1986), 92.

125
In a similar manner, Baker strengthened Kress’s connection with Jesse and Mary Jones.
In 1929, Mary Jones was a trustee for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
27
Baker informed
her husband of Kress’s growing interest in art and philanthropy, and convinced him to reach out
to Kress on behalf of the museum. The Vice President of the National Bank of Commerce, Jones
was a towering figure in business not only in Houston, but also on a national scene—in addition
to owning the Houston Chronicle and major shares of companies like Texas Trust and Humble
Oil, Jones was asked to serve as director of finance for the Democratic National Convention in
1928. In a few years time, he would go on to serve as the United States Secretary of
Commerce.
28
He and Mary worked together diligently to promote cultural development in
Houston. Jesse Jones knew Samuel Kress, though it seems the two had fallen out of touch for
many years. Following his conversation with Baker, however, Jones wrote to Kress, teasingly
noting that he heard that “if we could slip up on your blind side, you might be persuaded to give
Houston an Old Master.”
29
Within weeks of receiving this letter, Kress formally offered to
donate Lorenzo Lotto’s Madonna and Child to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Throughout
his life, but particularly in his early years as a donor, Kress preferred to initiate conversations
with art museums through a personal contact. S.H. Kress & Co. managers like Meacham and
Baker helped form connections between the Kress brothers and local arts institutions.
Through his team, Kress also kept an eye on the fate of his paintings after their donation.
In early 1929, Claude Kress visited the Brooks Memorial Art Gallery to see how his brother’s

27
Mary Jones served as a member of the board of trustees from 1926–1929 (Tammy Largent, Deputy
Chief Development Officer, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, email to the author October 31, 2016).
28
Guide to the Jesse H. Jones Family and Personal Papers, 1841–2000 MS 252,” Woodson Research
Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, accessed October 26, 2016,
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/ricewrc/00844/rice-00844.html.
29
Jesse Jones to Samuel H. Kress, November 23, 1929. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2:
Kress Institutions, Box 139, Houston, TX: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Correspondence: Early
Communication Regarding the Gift], New York, New York.

126
painting fared. In a pattern that would become commonplace, the Kress’s business and cultural
projects merged during this visit. Meacham led Claude’s tour of the S. H. Kress & Co. store and
then took him to visit the Brooks Memorial Art Gallery. He then wrote a single report to Rush
Kress noting Claude’s positive response to the condition of both the store and the painting.
30

Over the years, Samuel Kress wrote asking managers and store employees all over the
country to visit their local museums and galleries and to report back on the condition of his gifts.
In addition to inquiring about whether the paintings he donated were “properly hung … and in
good condition,” Kress asked him employees to identify how many other examples of “old
foreign paintings” the museum possessed, whether or not they had a catalogue (if so, he
requested a copy), if the museum was “active and successful,” and if the people in the region
displayed interest in the collection.
31
Thus donating artwork to cities with S.H. Kress & Co.
stores allowed Kress not only to thank his loyal customers, but also to easily track and study the
degree to which his donations proved successful. For Kress, a well-placed Kress Collection
painting would be maintained and displayed with care, and would serve to encourage
communities to engage and invest in their local museum or gallery. Kress intentionally chose to
donate paintings from his collection to institutions with few, or often no, examples of “old
foreign paintings.”
32
A single Kress Collection painting could then transform the museum’s

30
M.L. Meacham to Rush Kress, February 4, 1929. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress
Institutions, Box 140, Memphis, TN: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art: Correspondence: Early
Communicated Regarding the Gift], New York, New York.
31
For example, see Samuel Kress’s letter to H.W. Davis, of the S.H. Kress & Co. store in Denver,
Colorado. Letter dated August 17, 1942. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress
Institutions, Box 137, Denver Art Museum: Correspondence: Early Communication Regarding the Gift],
New York, New York. M.A. Hodges, of the S.H. Kress & Co. store in Houston received a letter from
Kress asking the same series of questions on August 20, 1942. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive
[Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 139, Houston, TX: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Correspondence:
Early Communication Regarding the Gift], New York, New York.
32
See above, but also note W.L. Baker wrote Rush Kress in 1929 stating that the Houston Museum of Art
possessed no original Old Master paintings, though they displayed reproductions. W.L. Baker to Rush

127
collection and provide communities in places like Denver and Houston with access to the art of
the past.
Through his gifts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kress had highlighted his
collection’s strength in Italian primitives. Between 1928 and 1932, as we have seen, Kress
donated four trecento paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. However, Kress did not
maintain this narrow focus on early Italian Renaissance art as he expanded his giving to a wider
range of museums. In fact, beyond his gifts to the Metropolitan Museum, he only donated one
additional trecento painting during this time period; in 1931, he gave Giovanni del Biondo’s
Madonna and Child to the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art in New Orleans.
33
Rather than
continuing to present his collection as one of Italian primitives, Kress donated paintings in the
1930s that represented the fuller history of Italian Renaissance art.
The majority of the Italian paintings Kress donated during this period were created
between 1480 and 1540, a period traditionally defined as the “High Renaissance.” Florentine
artists dominated this group, but—with the exception of a portrait by Bronzino given to the M.H.
de Young Museum in 1930—most of the artists were not especially well known. Kress donated
paintings attributed to artists like Raffaellino del Garbo, Pier Francesco Fiorentino, and Jacopo
del Sellaio. The attributions of many of these early gifts have changed since the 1930s, but the
paintings are still largely perceived to be the work of productive, though lesser-known,
Florentine workshops of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Beyond the Florentine

Kress, September 21, 1929. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 139,
Houston, TX: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Correspondence: Early Communication Regarding the
Gift], New York, New York.
33
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 141, New Orleans, LA: New
Orleans Museum of Art: Correspondence: Early Communication Regarding the Gift], New York, New
York.

128
school, Kress also donated paintings by artists like Lorenzo Lotto and Defendente Ferrari, artists
from Venice and Piedmonte respectively.
The preponderance of paintings Kress donated between 1928 and 1938 convey religious
scenes. Over a third of the gifted works of art display images of the Madonna, with or without
the Christ Child. This should not necessarily be read as reflective of Kress’s own beliefs or
commitments; most early modern Italian art is religious. Kress’s gifts also included six portraits
of elite Italians and a few mythological scenes. Most of the paintings were conservative in style
and iconography. For example, many displayed figures against a gold-ground.
The paintings Kress donated during this period would likely not have attracted the
attention of established institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. However, in smaller
and newer museums they were prized as examples of Italian Renaissance art. For example, the
mayor of Memphis lauded Kress’s donated Raffaellino del Garbo painting as “one of the
treasures of the gallery.”
34
Local expressions of gratitude mattered to Kress. He saved letters and
newspaper clippings celebrating the gifts from his art collection.
In many ways, the paintings Kress donated between 1928 and 1938 provide an accurate
representation of artistic production during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy: they are
primarily religious, and were created by successful, if not famous, artists. Through his early
giving, Kress created a good introduction to the history of Italian Renaissance art. Yet it is
important to keep in mind that visitors to each individual recipient museum would not have
experienced the “Kress Collection” in this manner. At each of the dozens of institutions to which
Kress donated art by 1938, visitors could see a few works from the whole collection. Spread out

34
Watkins Overton to Samuel Kress, July 16, 1928. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 7:
Oversize Material, Box OS 020: Gift Scrapbooks], New York, New York.

129
in this manner, Kress’s larger aim to create a representative collection of Italian Renaissance art
would not be discernible to an individual visitor.
This was the disadvantage of Kress’s decentralized model of giving. While he was
creating a comprehensive collection of Italian Renaissance art, it could not be experienced in this
manner in places like Memphis or Houston. To combat this problem, Samuel Kress developed a
plan in 1932 to send paintings from his collection on a traveling exhibition. Running from 1932
to 1935, “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress” dispatched fifty-five
paintings to two dozen cities across the United States. The traveling exhibition worked to expand
public awareness of the Kress Collection by sharing a select sample of its holdings with
thousands of Americans. The exhibition provided Kress with an opportunity to craft and control
perceptions of his collection; through it, he presented it as one of Italian Renaissance art, created
for the edification and enjoyment of the American public.

Cultural Resources and the Hinterlands of the United States
“An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress” toured during a period
when travelling exhibitions were on the rise in the United States. In the early 1930s, the College
Art Association, Museum of Modern Art, American Federation of Arts and other smaller groups
all circulated their own traveling exhibitions, loan shows consisting of original artwork as well as
reproductions. Organizations dedicated to art and culture developed traveling exhibitions in
response to a perceived need to improve access to cultural resources across the country.
From the Progressive era forward, educators, politicians, and museum professionals
engaged in extensive conversations about how the museum could best serve its varied publics. In
the 1920s, museums began gathering statistics on their visitors, which led to greater self-

130
awareness of the communities they failed to serve.
35
For museums in metropolitan centers,
studies of this nature often indicated they should make a greater effort to make working class
people feel welcome in the museum. John Cotton Dana (1856–1929), the director of the Newark
Museum, critiqued traditional museum practices of organization and display for intimidating and
boring visitors. Prior to the Newark Museum’s founding in 1909, Dana was a well-known
librarian and social reformer. For decades, he endeavored to make libraries more accessible to
the public by implementing policies like open stacks and newspaper rooms. Dana advocated for
museums to also reconsider their practices of collecting, display, and public outreach in order to
be of service to the community. He believed museums should redirect their energy away from
traditional elite audiences to engage with industrial laborers, immigrants, and the disadvantaged.
In doing so, Dana argued museums—like libraries—could play a vital role in helping American
society weather the conflicts brought on by the industrial age.
36
In his “New Museum” series,
Dana discussed these issues, calling upon socially progressive museum directors to “entertain
and instruct” visitors in new ways.
Rather than keeping objects safely ensconced within the museum, Dana encouraged
curators and educators to bring their collections to the public. For local audiences, this meant
bringing collections into classrooms and community centers for hands-on display and discussion.
For the public further afield, Dana recommended museums establish branch collections, which
could be located “…in some cases in little more than rooms, like stores, fronting on the street
level, in business parts of the city” or “in factories, stores, schools, settlements, clubs and

35
Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, theory, politics (New York: Routledge, 1995), 8.
36
Carol Duncan, A Matter of Class.

131
churches.”
37
Through branch museums or loans to smaller institutions, metropolitan museums
could share their cultural resources with those outside of urban centers.
Dana was also an advocate for displaying art in department stores. With their artistically
designed window displays, Dana recognized that the department stores captured and held the
public’s attention more successfully than many museums. Ideologically, Dana also viewed
department stores as potential partners with museums in cultivating good taste in the American
public. In the mid–1920s, the Newark Museum was one of many museums across the United
States creating close relationships with these popular leisure destinations. Major retailers like
Wanamaker’s, Gimbel’s, Lord and Taylor, Macy’s, Sears and even Kress’s friendly competitor,
Kresge’s, all set aside space to display art exhibitions to the public in the 1920s and 1930s. This
kind of activity reinforced the public perception of department stores as authorities on good
taste.
38
Kress followed suit, displaying his prized Giorgione, The Adoration of the Shepherds, in
the storefront window of the S.H. Kress & Co. store on Fifth Avenue in December 1938.
39

Sending artwork into the community expanded the museum’s reach. However, the
audience that was increased by showing works in branch museums and department stores was
largely local. In The Museum and the Community, Rea suggested the branch system would
extend the museum’s reach by a roughly fifty-mile diameter from the center.
40
Even if every one
of the museums in cities exceeding a quarter million people—the size Carnegie Corporation

37
John Cotton Dana, A Plan for a New Museum: The Kind of Museum it Will Profit a City to Maintain,
no. 4 of The New Museum Series (Woodstock, Vermont: The Elm Tree Press, 1920), 51.
38
Carol Duncan, A Matter of Class, 149–56; Jonathan Harris, Federal Art and National Culture: The
Politics of Identity in New Deal America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 91–2; Michael
S. Shapiro, “The Public and the Museum,” in The Museum, ed. Michael Steven Schapiro with Louis Ward
Kemp (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 237; Natalya Semyonova and Nicolas V. Iljine, eds. Selling
Russia’s Treasures: The Soviet Trade in Nationalized Art, 1917–1938, trans. Andrew Bromfield and
Howard M. Goldfinger (New York: Abbeville Press, 2013); Laura Morowitz, “A Passion for Business:
Wanamaker’s, Munkácsy, and the Depiction of Christ,” Art Bulletin 91, no. 2 (June 2009): 184–206.
39
Perry, “The Kress Collection,” A Gift to America, 23.
40
Rea, 180.

132
President Frederick Keppel estimated necessary to guarantee a museum’s success—established
branch programs huge swaths of the country would remain without access to museum-quality
works of art.
41
To meet the needs of rural communities, individuals like James B. Townsend, the
editor of American Art News, called for traveling exhibitions in order to bring works of art into
cities unable to develop their own collections.
42

Traveling exhibitions afforded towns too small to support their own museums the
opportunity to host exhibitions in community centers like libraries, clubs, and churches. A
circulating exhibition also allowed smaller museums and galleries to expand the range of artwork
on display for their patrons. Thus, traveling exhibitions offered an exciting model of how
institutions large and small could work together with their communities to make the arts
accessible to a larger proportion of the American public.
To this end, at the 1909 convention of the National Academy of Arts, Secretary of State
Elihu Root called upon those present to form a federation dedicated to preparing “exhibitions of
original works of art on tour to the hinterlands of the United States.”
43
The American Federation
of Arts’ original members included prominent artists, collectors, and politicians such as William
Merritt Chase, Cecilia Beaux, Andrew Mellon, J.P. Morgan, and Presidents Theodore Roosevelt

41
Keppel and Duffus, The Arts in American Life, 84. This holds true even if we expanded the list to all
cities of at least 100,000 people—the low end in terms of a city large enough to support their own
museum according to Keppel’s study. Rea was more conservative, stating that a city needed a population
of 290,000 to create “a thoroughly effective museum from general community resources” (Rea, 68). For
the population of U.S. cities in 1930, see “Fifteenth Census of the United States – 1930 – Population.
Volume 1: Number and Distribution of Inhabitants,” accessed August 2, 2017, https://www2.
census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/03815512v1_TOC.pdf
42
William Armstrong, “A Picture Exhibition in Your Town: How to Arrange It and How Much It Will
Cost,” Woman’s Home Companion (February 1913), 26. For more favorable discussions of traveling
exhibitions, see Berkeley, 71–2; T.R. Adam, The Civic Value of Museums (New York: American
Association for Adult Education, 1928), 92; Keppel and Duffus, 80–3, Rea, 68.
43
American Federation of Arts, Proceedings of the Convention at which the American Federation of Arts
was Formed: Held at Washington, D.C., May 11
th
, 12
th
and 13
th
, 1909 (Washington, D.C.: Press of Byron
S. Adams, 1909).

133
and William Taft. This well-placed set of members helped the Federation achieve its goals. For
example, in 1916, the American Federation of Arts lobbied the Interstate Commerce
Commission to protest the high interstate taxes imposed on traveling art exhibitions. Through
their efforts, the American Federation of Arts worked to promote traveling exhibitions of art both
in the United States and, later, abroad.
44
By the 1930s, the American Federation of Arts
circulated more traveling exhibitions than any other organization. Improvements in
transportation in the 1920s and 1930s—including the increasing number of automobiles and
roadways, as well as expanded railways—connected urban and rural regions of the United States,
making traveling exhibitions easier to circulate than ever before.
45

From 1909 onward, the American Federation of Arts organized exhibitions every year
that any institution in the United States could rent for a low fee. The proposed exhibitions
consisted primarily of contemporary American art and reproductions of Old Masters. When the
“Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress” began its tour in 1931–2, the
American Federation of Arts offered collections of reproductions for rent with titles like
“Drawings by Old Masters” and “Italian Paintings from the XIV to the XVII Century.” The
American Federation of Arts also made original works of art available to rent by collaborating
with well-established American museums. For example, the “Picture of the Month” program
allowed institutions to select an original painting from a pre-approved list of available loans from
the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
46
The American Federation of Arts also occasionally circulated

44
“A Century in the Arts,” American Federation of Arts, accessed January 3, 2019,
http://www.amfedarts.org/about-the-afa/afa-history/
45
Alexander J. Field, A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Edward Weiner, Urban Transportation Planning in the United
States: An Historical Overview. Revised and expanded edition. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood
Publishing, 1999), 7–12.
46
American Federation of Arts, Traveling Exhibitions: 1931–1932: Twenty Third Season (Baltimore:
Norman T.A. Munder & Co., 1930).

134
original works of art by partnering with other organizations. For example, in 1930, the American
Federation of Arts “in cooperation with” the Carnegie Corporation sent “The Mexican Exhibition”
to a number of museums across the United States.
47

Whether working independently or alone, the American Federation of Arts sought to
make works of art more available to American audiences by exhibiting them in a wide range of
venues. Though they sent shows—including the “Mexican Exhibition”—to established museums
like the Cleveland Museum of Art, the American Federation of Arts primarily tried to reach
communities that did not possess substantial art collections, for whom, in the words of Robert de
Forest, “art still remains a closed book.”
48
In addition to museums and libraries, the American
Federation of Arts sent exhibitions to places like state fairs, where large crowds gathered to view
the artwork on display.
49
To further aid their efforts, the American Federation of Arts opened
regional offices at the University of Nebraska and Stanford University in 1920.
50

In their desire to send works of art to the “hinterlands,” the American Federation of Arts
anticipated many of Samuel Kress’s own goals in sharing works of art from his collection. Their
target audiences overlapped significantly. Several of the museums that hosted the “Exhibition of
Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress” had also recently displayed loan exhibitions from
the American Federation of Arts. For example, the Witte Memorial Museum in San Antonio,
Texas, hosted the collaborative American Federation of Arts–Carnegie Corporation “Mexican
Exhibition” and the Kress’s exhibition over the consecutive summers of 1933–34.
51

47
L.M., “The Mexican Exhibition,” The American Magazine of Art 22, no. 1 (January 1931), 3–4.
48
Robert de Forest described the regions of the country without access to artwork in these terms in his
1919 address to the American Federation of Arts. Trask, 135.
49
Keppel and Duffus, 82.
50
“A Century in the Arts,” American Federation of Arts.
51
Correspondence to Samuel H. Kress, July 25, 1933. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3:
Exhibitions and Publications, Box 156, Traveling Exhibition: San Antonio, Texas: Witte Memorial
Museum], New York, New York.

135
Though they displayed paintings in the same institutions, Kress’s traveling exhibition
differed from those circulated by the American Federation of Arts in two significant ways. First,
the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress” presented early modern works
of art to audiences. In the 1930s, the American Federation of Arts circulated reproductions of
Old Master paintings, but they rarely circulated any original paintings pre-dating the nineteenth
century.
52
Secondly, Kress’s exhibition consisted of paintings loaned by a single collector.
During this period, the American Federation of Arts did not sponsor exhibitions highlighting
individual private collections. In both of these respects, Kress’s traveling exhibition was unusual.

Precedent for “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings”
Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American private collectors
had often displayed their collections in temporary exhibitions in art museums and other cultural
centers. In 1909, many major collectors—including J.P. Morgan—lent works of art to create an
exhibition of seventeenth-century Dutch art for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration in New York.
53

In this instance, many collectors contributed works they owned in order to convey both an art
historical introduction to Golden Age Dutch art, and to create a narrative about the cultural
progress of the United States over the intervening four centuries.
54

Collectors also occasionally created temporary exhibitions highlighting their own
collections. For example, in 1910, Henry Clay Frick lent fifty paintings—mostly, but not
exclusively, early modern Northern European paintings—to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

52
List of exhibitions, 1909–1959, kindly provided to the author by Natalie Espinosa of the American
Federation of Arts, December 8, 2016.
53
Esmée Quodbach, ed., preface to Holland’s Golden Age in America: Collecting the Art of Rembrandt,
Vermeer, and Hals (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press for the Frick
Collection, 2014), xiii.
54
W.R. Valentiner, preface to The Hudson-Fulton Celebration: Catalogue of a Collection of Paintings by
Dutch Masters of the Seventeenth Century vol. 1 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1909), v–xliii.

136
During the two-week run of the show, close to fifty thousand people turned out to visit this
special exhibition.
55
Long before Kress started collecting art himself, his Gilded Age
predecessors had presented their collections to the public through temporary loan exhibitions.
The “Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress” must be understood as
emerging from this context. Kress began collecting Italian Renaissance art shortly after the
frenzied collecting of the Gilded Age had come to an end. By 1932, the narrative of a business
tycoon turned art collector would be familiar to many Americans. During the Gilded Age,
wealthy individuals like J.P. Morgan, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Henry Clay Frick amassed
remarkable collections of art. Their purchases and plans for their collections appeared
prominently in the American press. Newspapers, including major national publications like the
New York Times, presented art collecting as an honorable and even patriotic way for the
wealthiest members of society to use their private wealth for the public good.
56
The
inaccessibility of most private art collections during the first decades of the twentieth century did
little to temper the sense that private collections would one day belong to the public.
Because he began collecting in his sixties, Kress was old enough to have followed the
press coverage of this earlier generation of collectors in the early twentieth century. The
“Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress” is therefore part of a longer
tradition by which private collectors loaned parts of their collections to public institutions. In
doing so, collectors hoped to enhance both their own prestige as philanthropists, and that of their
collections as museum-worthy works of art.

55
Ronni Baer, “Collecting Dutch Paintings in Boston,” in Holland’s Golden Age in America: Collecting
the Art of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hals, ed. Esmée Quodbach, (University Park, Pennsylvania:
Pennsylvania State University Press for the Frick Collection, 2014), 117–18.
56
Flaminia Gennari Santori, The Melancholy of Masterpieces: Old Master Paintings in America, 1900–
1914 (Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2003).

137
However, the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings” differed from prior and concurrent private
collection exhibitions because of its unprecedented mobility. Kress’s decision to send dozens of
early modern paintings on an extended tour of the United States in 1932 had no forerunners. In
organizing and executing the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress,”
Kress and his team reached out in a manner few other private collectors ever would, to bring
Italian Renaissance art to the “hinterlands” themselves.

“An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress”
In April 1932, Kress wrote L. Palmer Skidmore, the director of the High Museum of Art
in Atlanta, to tell him he “had in mind to select about 30 paintings from my collection to send to
several museums in the fall for exhibition.”
57
Once envisioned, Kress’s plan for a traveling
exhibition rapidly grew into a reality. Rather than send around thirty paintings to several cities,
Kress committed fifty-five paintings, a microcosm of his larger collection, to tour eight cities
across the United States. “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress”
opened at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in October 1932. From Atlanta, the exhibition
traveled to Memphis, Birmingham, New Orleans, Houston, Dallas, Denver, and Colorado
Springs.
58

57
Samuel Kress to L. Palmer Skidmore, April 1932. High Museum of Art Archive [Kress Collection:
Notes on the Collection], Atlanta, Georgia.
58
The dates for the exhibitions are as follows: Atlanta, GA (October 23
rd
–November 22nd, 1932

);
Memphis, TN (December 4
th
–January 1
st
, 1933); Birmingham, AL (January 12
th,
1933–February 1
st
); New
Orleans, LA (February 12
th
–March 2
nd
); Houston, TX (March 14
th
–April 5
th
); Dallas, TX (April 16
th
–May
10
th
); Denver, CO (May 21
st
–June 18
th
(planned), extended through June 24
th
); and Colorado Springs, CO
(June 28
th
–July 26
th
(planned), actually: July 2
nd
–August 4
th
). For the planned dates, see “Dates of
Exhibitions.” The actual schedule appears on the “Record of Attendance at Museums.” Samuel H. Kress
Foundation Archive [Series 3: Kress Exhibitions & Publications, Box 154, Traveling Exhibition:
Administrative Reports], New York, New York.

138
The idea for this traveling exhibition emerged as a natural extension of the Kress brothers’
existing project of sharing works of art from the Kress Collection with a number of developing
museums across the South and West. Samuel Kress had established relationships with all eight of
the original museums and art galleries chosen to host the Italian paintings exhibition. Samuel
Kress acknowledged the close connection between his earlier gifts and the traveling exhibition.
In the foreword to the catalogue for “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings,” Kress wrote that he
organized the traveling exhibition in response to the “keen interest and appreciation shown”
following his donations to “museums of various cities across the country.”
59
Six of the eight
museums that were to host “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress” had
already received paintings from Kress before the exhibition launched. While the exhibition was
underway, Kress donated works of art to Birmingham and Dallas as well, so that all eight
museums visited by the show also owned works from the Kress Collection by the end of 1933.
The exhibition was originally planned to last for nine months, but once underway the
show proved so popular that Kress decided to extend the tour of his paintings to include an
additional sixteen cities: Salt Lake City, Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco, Los
Angeles, San Diego, San Antonio, Nashville, Montgomery, Macon, Tampa, Winter Park,
Savannah, Charleston, and Charlotte.
60
Of these sixteen additional sites, Kress had donated

59
Samuel Kress and Stephen Pichetto, foreword to An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel
H. Kress to California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park, San Francisco, California (New
York: Burland Printing Company, 1934).
60
Salt Lake City, UT (August 13
th
–September 17
th
); Seattle, WA (September 28
th
–October 29
th
); Portland,
OR (November 8
th
–28
th
); Sacramento, CA (December 10
th
–28
th
); San Francisco, CA (January 7
th
, 1934–
February 22
nd
); Los Angeles, CA (February 28
th
–April 15
th
); San Diego, CA (April 25
th
–May 27
th
); San
Antonio, TX (June 10
th
–July 1
st
); Nashville, TN (July 15
th
–October 10
th
); Montgomery, AL (October 21
st
–
November 11
th
); Macon, GA (November 21
st
–December 11
th
); Tampa, FL (December 23
rd
, 1934–January
22
nd
, 1935); Winter Park, FL (February 1
st
–24
th
); Savannah, GA (March 7
th
–31
st
); Charleston, SC (April
10
th
–May 5
th
); and Charlotte, N.C. (May 15
th
–June 2
nd
). “Record of Attendance at Museums.” Samuel H.
Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3: Kress Exhibitions & Publications, Box 154, Traveling Exhibition:
Administrative Reports], New York, New York.

139
works of art to only five of them prior to 1933.
61
In this second wave of the tour, the “Exhibition
of Italian Paintings” introduced the Kress Collection to new communities.
In determining which institutions might serve as suitable hosts for his traveling exhibition,
Samuel Kress relied upon the same processes and criteria he had developed to evaluate various
museums as sites to which he might donate paintings. Again, he turned to his brothers and
business partners for advice. Rush Kress tied his suggestions about donating works of art and
planning the traveling exhibition together in a letter to Samuel in February 1932. He encouraged
“dear Sam” to give “one of the larger, less valuable paintings” in his collection to the
Montgomery Painting and Art Museum.
62
Rush continued by stating that Montgomery would be
“a most desirable city to include in the list of cities to display an exhibit a number of your
paintings [sic].”
63
Though Samuel Kress did not include Montgomery on the original tour of “An
Exhibition of Italian Paintings,” he sent the show there on its extended run in October 1934.
In both its original and extended schedule, “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr.
Samuel H. Kress” only visited museums and galleries located in towns with S.H. Kress & Co.
stores.
64
Like Kress’s earlier donations, the exhibition thus functioned as an implicit gesture of
gratitude to the cities whose spending in Kress’s five-and-dime stores made his art collecting
possible. However, this was a practical decision as well as a savvy public relations move. To
select the sites most worthy for his exhibition, Kress relied upon his staff members for their
insights regarding possible host institutions across the country.

61
San Francisco (1930), Los Angeles (1931), San Diego (1932), Charleston (1931). “List of Gifts.”
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 115: Collection: Inventories and
Valuations: Early Gift Distribution], New York, New York.
62
Rush Kress calls the art museum by this name. It is now called the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts,
not the Montgomery Museum of Painting and Art.
63
Rush Kress to Samuel Kress, February 5, 1932. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3: Kress
Exhibitions & Publications, Box 155, Traveling Exhibition: Montgomery, AL: Womans College of
Alabama], New York, New York.
64
Wilkerson and Griffith, A Guide to the Building Records of S.H. Kress & Co. 5-10-25 Cent Stores.

140
On February 1, 1933, as Kress planned the possible extension of “An Exhibition of
Italian Paintings” to additional sites, he sent letters to S.H. Kress & Co. managers across the
United States asking them to assess potential exhibition sites in their area. This form letter
instructed the recipient to “find out” whether there was a museum “of sufficient importance” to
justify considering sending the exhibition there. Kress did not consider displaying his paintings
in the S.H. Kress & Co. stores, although (as noted above) many department and chain stores
hosted art exhibitions during the 1930s.
65
In part, the exhibition Kress envisioned would have
been impractical to display within his stores. The letter he sent to his managers stressed that an
appropriate institution would have sufficient wall space for fifty-two paintings “some quite large.”
Beyond considerations of space and security, I contend that sending the loan exhibition to S.H.
Kress & Co. stores would have undermined Kress’s intention to establish connections to
American art museums. In the form letter inquiring after local institutions, Kress also asked that
his correspondent provide the name of the museum and its director, and offer an opinion as to
whether “you do or do not think the museum sufficiently developed and advanced.”
66

Kress’s employees usually responded favorably, describing the spaces prepared to
display the paintings and encouraging him to send the exhibition to their city. However, in a
handful of instances, Kress employees informed him there was no suitable site in their city.
67
The
information included on these returned forms helped Samuel Kress decide where to next send his
exhibition. The sixteen added venues extended the tour length of “An Exhibition of Italian

65
See note 38.
66
Multiple examples of this letter are available in the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3:
Exhibitions & Publications, Box 154, Traveling Exhibition: Exhibition Site Surveys], New York, New
York.
67
The employees often included explanations in this case as well. For example, Long Beach, California,
was recovering from recent earthquake damage (Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3:
Exhibitions & Publications, Box 154, Traveling Exhibition: Exhibition Site Surveys], New York, New
York).

141
Paintings” from nine months to almost three years; the paintings did not return to New York until
1935.
Even with the added sites, Kress had to refuse dozens of requests from other cities hoping
to host the Italian paintings exhibition in their own museums and libraries.
68
The many letters
requesting the Italian paintings exhibition demonstrate the show’s popularity, as do the
exhibition’s impressive attendance numbers: the three California locations recorded a combined
total of almost 300,000 attendees; in Nashville almost 72,000 went to the exhibition, a number
that Edgar Peter Bowron points out equates to almost half the city’s population.
69
Many
museums set new attendance records while hosting the exhibition. To cope with the increased
number of visitors, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts kept the museum open until 10 p.m. on the
exhibition’s final two days.
70
James Chillman, Jr., the museum director in Houston, reported to
Kress that many visitors traveled great distances to see the exhibition and that locals visited
repeatedly. He was also impressed, he wrote Kress, by the careful attention visitors paid to the
paintings while they were in the galleries.
71
By the time “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent

68
Perry, “The Kress Collection,” A Gift to America, 21.
69
Though of course, this figure includes repeat visitors (Bowron, “Samuel H. Kress and His Collection of
Italian Renaissance Paintings,” 112). For the full attendance records, see “Record of Attendance at
Museums.” Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3: Exhibitions & Publications, Box 154,
Traveling Exhibition: Administrative Reports], New York, New York.
70
Memphis set a new record for visitors in the first 7 days (“Large Numbers Visit Kress Art Exhibit: New
Attendance Record Set for Gallery,” The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Sunday Morning, December 11,
1932). The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston also set a record for attendance (“Attendance Record Set at
Museum,” The Houston Chronicle, Sunday, March 26, 1933). The final two days the MFAH stayed open
until 10pm to permit more visitors to see the exhibit (“Art Exhibit is Extended: Museum to Remain Open
Saturday and Sunday Until 10 P.M.”, The Houston Post, Wednesday, March 29, 1933). The Gibbes
Gallery in Charleston also set attendance records (“975 Persons See Kress Paintings: Attendance Record
is Set at the Gibbes Gallery. Show to End Sunday,” The News and Courier, Charleston, S.C., Monday
Morning, April 29, 1935). All these clippings can be found in scrapbooks at the Samuel H. Kress
Foundation Archive [Series 7: Oversize Material, Boxes OS 007, OS 008, OS 076, OS 009, OS 053, OS
019], New York, New York.
71
James Chillman, Jr. to Samuel H. Kress, April 8, 1933. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 7:
Oversize Material, Box OS 009], New York, New York.

142
by Mr. Samuel H. Kress” returned to New York in the summer of 1935, over six hundred
thousand people had viewed this show.
72

Prior to “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings,” Samuel Kress had never attempted to
present his collection in a public setting. Before 1932, Kress had lent a few paintings to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art and to the Fogg Museum in Boston on a long-term basis. He had
also loaned individual paintings to a few special exhibitions at home and abroad.
73
Through these
loans and Kress’s gifts to museums beginning in 1927, Kress slowly began to make his
collection available to the public. However, the full extent of the Kress Collection would not
have been well known in 1932. Kress kept his collection in his Manhattan penthouse and a
closed storage facility. Under these conditions, members of the public would have found it
impossible to gain a sense of its scope and scale. The “Exhibition of Italian Paintings” allowed
Kress and his team to create a cohesive presentation of the collection’s content and purpose: it
consisted of Italian art, primarily of the Renaissance, and was intended for the public’s pleasure
and edification.

Teaching the Renaissance through “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings”
Though he was heavily involved in the planning and execution of the traveling exhibition,
Samuel Kress did not plan “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings” on his own. In addition to the

72
According to the attendance records in Samuel Kress’s records, the combined attendance numbers for
all twenty-four sites came to 666,135 visitors. “Record of Attendance at Museums.” Samuel H. Kress
Foundation Archive [Series 3: Exhibitions & Publications, Box 154, Traveling Exhibition: Administrative
Reports], New York, New York.
73
In 1929, Kress lent Giovanni Paolo Pannini’s The Interior of the Pantheon to the exhibition, “Il
Settecento Italiano” in Venice. The following year, he lent El Pelele (att. to Goya) to “The Old Spanish
Masters from the Contini-Bonacossi Collection,” a show organized by Roberto Longhi at the National
Gallery of Modern Art in Rome (May–July, 1930), and Portrait of a Young Woman (att. to Rembrandt) to
“The Thirteenth Loan Exhibition of Old Masters, Paintings by Rembrandt.” The latter exhibition was
under the patronage of Mussolini, and the proceeds of the exhibition were to be given to the Fascista di
Cultura and Nazionale C. Donati.

143
advice and logistical support he received from his brothers and business partners, Samuel Kress
worked closely with his restorer and advisor, Stephen Pichetto, to select the works of art that
would make up the exhibition. The range of paintings that composed the traveling exhibition
echoed Kress’s donations prior to 1932; in both instances, Kress chose Italian paintings from the
fourteenth to eighteenth centuries.
The fifty-five paintings selected for the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings” provide an
overview of painting in Italy from the traditional starting point of the Renaissance in the trecento
by contemporaries of Duccio and Orcagna (represented by panels attributed to Ugolino da Siena
and the School of Orcagna) up through eighteenth-century paintings of Venice by Canaletto and
Francesco Guardi.
74
In addition to providing a chronological overview, the “Exhibition of Italian
Paintings” highlighted the geography of Italian Renaissance art. Kress and Pichetto arranged the
exhibition based on “schools” of Italian painting from Siena, Florence, Rome, Central and
Northern Italy, and Venice.
75

In the foreword to the catalogue for “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings,” Kress explained
that he believed this set of paintings to be “comprehensive in its scope and in its characteristic
examples, illustrating the various phases of the work of these schools.”
76
Though “these schools”
extended into the eighteenth-century, less than ten percent of the paintings included in the
exhibition post-date the sixteenth century. Like his early gifts, the works chosen to make up the
traveling exhibition brought early modern Italian art into communities without regular access to
works from this period.
Kress demonstrated his investment in Italian Renaissance art in the foreword to An
Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress. With Pichetto’s assistance, he wrote

74
Kress and Pichetto, An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress, Index of Artists.
75
Kress and Pichetto, foreword to An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress.
76
Ibid.

144
this introduction to the catalogue over the summer of 1932. In the first paragraph of the one-page
forward, Kress—writing in the third person—explained that he selected a set of paintings from
his “well-known collection” in order to afford “an unusual opportunity for the study of the
development of the art of painting in Italy in its principal schools.” Though this statement
suggests “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings” would consider Italian art beyond the sixteenth
century, Kress devoted the remainder of the foreword to an introduction to Italian Renaissance
art.
After a few sentences discussing the prevalence of religious subject matter in pre-
Reformation painting, Kress launched into a lengthier paragraph outlining the chronology of
Italian Renaissance art. He stated that the “Renaissance is generally considered as beginning with
Cimabue,” and then differentiated between the painting of “Primitives” (1300–1450), the True
Renaissance (1450–1500), and the High Renaissance (1500–1550). The date ranges given for
these respective phases of Italian Renaissance art, while somewhat crude, indicate that Kress
subscribed to a conventional understanding of the chronology of Italian Renaissance art. This
paragraph concluded by stating that Kress tried to include a few examples of each of the
discussed phases of Italian Renaissance art in this exhibition. The foreword prepared the reader
and visitor to view “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings Lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress” as one of
Italian Renaissance art.
Pichetto disagreed with Kress’s decision to present the exhibition in this manner. In
August 1932, the two men worked together closely to prepare the catalogue for “An Exhibition
of Italian Paintings.” Pichetto wrote all the object entries, and he provided Kress with feedback
on the foreword. Through their correspondence, it becomes clear that Kress and Pichetto
possessed differing visions of the scope of this exhibition. While Kress wanted to emphasize his

145
collection as one of Italian Renaissance art, Pichetto would have preferred to envision the
exhibition as a broader collection of art unrestricted to any particular era. Pichetto likely feared
that stressing the historical context from which Kress’s paintings emerged would distract
exhibition viewers from engaging aesthetically with the artwork.
77

Pichetto’s edits to Kress’s foreword demonstrate how he pushed the collector to present
the parameters of his exhibition in ambitious terms. When Kress wrote that he had given
paintings to museums across the United States “for the purpose of encouraging a more cultured
understanding of Italian art,” Pichetto encouraged him to “cut ‘Italian’” to avoid limiting
himself.
78
Again, Pichetto would have preferred Kress present himself as a collector of fine Old
Master paintings, rather than a specialist collector of Italian art. In this instance, Kress acceded to
Pichetto’s suggestion.
Kress’s restorer also pushed him to eliminate the section of the foreword outlining the
timeline of the Renaissance, stating: “I do not approve including the paragraph on the periods of
the Renaissance. …Your exhibition was not planned to show paintings just of the Renaissance
but rather to show the development chronologically of the important schools of Italy.”
Nonetheless, Kress insisted on keeping this section. He explained to Pichetto, “So few people
know the dates of the Renaissance and it was and is my idea that if we could work it in as an
information it should be done. We want to try to do what others do not do…as the Renaissance is

77
Over the previous winter, Rene d’Harnoncourt published an article in which he criticized eager
American museum visitors for focusing too intently on gathering facts, while failing to privilege the
aesthetic experience (Rene d’Harnoncourt, “The Museum and the American Art Renaissance,” Creative
Art (November 1931): 381–86).
78
Stephen Pichetto to Samuel Kress, August 16, 1932. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1:
Kress Collection, Box 109, Correspondence: Pichetto, Stephen: Reports and Correspondence (1 of 2)],
New York, New York.

146
referred to I thought and do think it would be information people would be interested in.”
79
The
disagreement between Kress and Pichetto over this paragraph on Renaissance chronology may
stem as much from their differing perspective on the exhibition’s audience as on its content.
Kress envisioned his exhibition reaching an audience that might not possess basic knowledge
about Italian Renaissance art.
Even as he insisted upon keeping the paragraph on the chronology of the Renaissance,
Kress reassured Pichetto that the exhibition need not reflect the distinct phases of this period
outlined in the foreword. He stated that in writing this passage, he “had not thought that it had
anything to do definitively with the paintings.”
80
This is an odd statement, as Kress’s discussion
of the Renaissance clearly provides a historical background for the paintings on display.
However, his basic overview does not attempt to address the catalogue’s arrangement of
paintings by regional schools.
Within the catalogue, Pichetto organized the paintings of the exhibition according to their
place within the schools of Siena, Florence, Central and Northern Italy, and Venice. This manner
of structuring the exhibition highlights the variation present among regions composing modern
Italy. It also immediately brings to mind Bernard Berenson’s highly influential “four gospels”
devoted to Italian Renaissance art, in which Berenson divided his discussion of Renaissance
painters into four volumes dedicated to artists working in Venice, Florence, Central and Northern
Italy.
81
Pichetto and Kress knew Berenson by reputation, and likely heard more about his work

79
All underlining original to Kress’s letter. August 28, 1932, Samuel Kress to Stephen Pichetto, August
28, 1932. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 109, Correspondence:
Pichetto, Stephen: Reports and Correspondence (1 of 2)], New York, New York.
80
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 109, Correspondence: Pichetto,
Stephen: Reports and Correspondence (1 of 2)], New York, New York.
81
Bernard Berenson, The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894);
Bernard Berenson, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896);
Bernard Berenson, The North Italian Painters of the Renaissance (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons,

147
through the Continis, who knew him personally. Though Berenson would not advise Kress on his
collection until the end of the 1930s, the organization of the exhibition demonstrates that his
thinking was already important to the structure of the collection.
82
The organization of the
exhibition demonstrated that Kress and Pichetto cared deeply about conveying art historical
knowledge through the Kress Collection. Though the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings” only
displayed a portion of the Kress Collection (a point that Kress was eager for the press to
understand), it successfully represented the collection in microcosm to the nation.
83
Through the
“Exhibition of Italian Paintings,” Kress provided a thorough overview of the history of early
modern Italian painting to new audiences.

Making Early Modern Art Mobile: Shipping the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings”
Between 1932 and 1935, Kress’s traveling exhibition moved all across the United States.
Even major museums hesitated (and still would hesitate today) to organize traveling exhibitions
with routes as extensive as that followed by the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings.” The paintings
Kress sent on tour were not only hundreds of years old, but most were painted on panel thus
highly sensitive to atmospheric shifts and to the vibration inevitable in travel. By the 1950s, the

1907); Bernard Berenson, The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance (New York: G.P. Putnam’s
Sons, 1908).
82
The earliest letters between Samuel Kress and Bernard Berenson date to early 1937. Though they only
met once, Bernard Berenson corresponded with Samuel Kress, and later with his brother Rush, until the
end of his life. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 108, Collection,
Berenson, Bernhard, Correspondence (1 of 5) through (5 of 5)], New York, New York.
83
On September 13, 1933, the Foundation sent a letter signed by Samuel Kress to Anna Crocker, the
curator of the Portland Art Museum, asking her to make it clear to the press that the exhibition did not
represent Kress’s entire collection. The letter states: “In newspaper articles concerning a previous loan
exhibition we note the paintings were sometimes referred to as “The” S.H. Kress Collection. While the
paintings have all been chosen from Mr. Kress’ collection they by no means cover his entire collection,
particularly those in his home; therefore, if the subject is brought up we believe it is adviseable [sic] to
state that the group of paintings on exhibition is from (not “the”) Mr. Kress’ collection.” Correspondence
from Samuel H. Kress to Anna Crocker, September 13, 1933. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive
[Series 3: Kress Exhibitions & Publications, Box 155, “Traveling Exhibitions: Portland, OR, Portland Art
Museum], New York, New York.

148
Kress Foundation would not have approved putting the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings” on the
road.
However, Samuel Kress built his business by safely moving consumer goods and
employees across the country to run his S.H. Kress & Co. stores. This lifetime of experience
likely made him more confident than many of his contemporaries would have been with the idea
of organizing a traveling exhibition. Samuel Kress worked with trusted advisors to control every
aspect of the exhibition’s contents and itinerary. They also carefully planned the complicated
logistics involved in shipping dozens of early modern paintings. The traveling exhibition
provided Kress and his team with an opportunity to demonstrate how seriously they took their
role as stewards of the Kress Collection. When the exhibition departed in 1932, Kress and
Pichetto considered the precautions taken in packing and moving the exhibition’s paintings
sufficient to ensure their safety.
From the exhibition’s launch to its conclusion, local newspaper articles fixated on the
complicated measures required to pack and install the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings.” In
November 1932, The Express Messenger described in great detail the white pine travel
containers designed for the paintings by W.D. Budworth & Sons. The article states that the
company—in consultation with Pichetto—created cases with custom drawers and rubber
bumpers in order to safeguard the paintings from impact as well as shifts in temperature and
humidity.
84
Article after article repeated this information—stressing the protection offered by
these “custom” cases. Descriptions of the crates alternatively emphasized their hard and soft
qualities: they contained, according to one journalist, “air-cushions” to help protect paintings that
needed to be “handled more carefully than a crate of eggs,” yet the crates’ exteriors resembled

84
“Early Italian Paintings on Tour,” The Express Messenger, November 1932. Samuel H. Kress
Foundation Archive [Series 7: Oversize Material, Box OS 007], New York, New York.

149
“steel vaults.”
85
Alongside discussions of the cases, the press often mentioned that the Kress
paintings traveled within a special air-conditioned railway express car.
In the midst of fairly generic discussions of the paintings themselves, the level of detail
dedicated to discussing the logistics of the exhibition is noteworthy. The Charlotte News even
felt readers needed to know the total weight of the Kress exhibition shipment (twelve thousand
pounds).
86
Through their repeated and focused attention on the means of moving the Kress
collection paintings, the local press highlighted the remarkable accomplishment of the
“Exhibition of Italian Paintings” in making early modern art mobile.

Community Support for the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings Lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress”
After organizing the exhibition, and orchestrating its shipment, Kress and his team sent
the traveling exhibition on tour in October 1932. From this point forward, they largely ceded
control over the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings” to the local host institutions. The traveling
exhibition thus provided museums and the local cultural organizations that supported them with
valuable opportunities to develop their experience and resources.
Within the museums, galleries, and libraries hosting the exhibition, Kress only insisted
that works from his collection be displayed safely. Pichetto provided a suggested installation
plan to each host institution, but Kress felt each museum should determine how they wished to

85
“16
th
Century Masterpieces on Display at Brooks Art Gallery,” The Press-Scimitar, Memphis,
Tennessee, Wednesday, December 7, 1932; Frederic McFadden, “Most Interesting of Traveling
Exhibitions, Kress Collection of Italian Paintings, Now on View at Dallas Museum of Arts Until May 10,”
The Dallas Morning News, Dallas, TX, Sunday, April 16, 1933. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive
[Series 7: Oversize Material, Boxes OS 007 and OS 009], New York, New York.
86
“16
th
Century Masterpieces on Display at Brooks Art Gallery/ Brooks Gallery Exhibit Offers Rare
Opportunity,” The Press-Scimitar, Memphis Tennessee, Wednesday, December 7, 1932; “Kress Paintings
Here in Specially Cooled Car,” Nashville Evening Tennessean, Thursday Evening, July 5, 1934; “Famous
Italian Paintings Here for Exhibition,” The Charlotte News, Thursday, May 9, 1935. Samuel H. Kress
Foundation Archive [Series 7: Oversize Material, Boxes OS 007, OS 015, and OS 019], New York, New
York.

150
arrange his paintings in their galleries.
87
Most institutions organized the paintings roughly
according to chronology or geography, but others chose other approaches. For example, the M.H.
de Young Museum in San Francisco arranged Kress’s paintings according to color and
proportion.
88
Surprisingly, given his interest in store display and later detailed attention to the
installation of his collection in the National Gallery, Kress did not express strong opinions
regarding the installation of the exhibition, perhaps understanding that limiting his input allowed
the host institutions to play a more active and engaged role.
Kress only experienced the installation of his traveling exhibition second-hand. Though
he was always invited, Samuel Kress did not attend a single exhibition opening. Nor does he
seem to have visited any of the museums hosting the traveling show in order to see “An
Exhibition of Italian Paintings” installed. He did however study photographs of the exhibition’s
installation at each site and collected newspaper clippings related to the show. Kress’s reputation
for shyness may explain his reticence to attend the openings of his exhibition, but it is still
surprising he did not visit the exhibition. Perhaps, as Paul Rea advocated in his 1932 study of
museum development in the United States, Kress hesitated to strongly associate his name with
these institutions for fear that his patronage might deter others who should step forward to lend
their support.
89

87
“Instructions for Man Accompany Exhibit.” Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3: Kress
Exhibitions & Publications, Box 155, Traveling Exhibition: Correspondence: Robbins, Wallace], New
York, New York.
88
The San Francisco News published Donald Scott’s letter to the editor on Tuesday, January 16, 1934;
Scott disliked the installation of the Kress paintings in the Legion of Honor. He stated that since they
were hung by shape and color rather than chronology or school, one had to jump around the gallery a
great deal in order to follow the order set out in the catalogue and make sense of it all. Scott argued that
this “arrangement is not fair to the lender, Mr. Kress, and confuses the public mind” (Samuel H. Kress
Foundation Archive [Series 7: Oversize Material, Box OS 010], New York, New York).
89
Rea argued that museums supported by individual donors or societies tended to develop slowly and
with difficulty because they failed to attract widespread support (Rea, 13).

151
During the early 1930s, American museums needed to expand their roster of donors. Like
the communities they served, many institutions struggled financially during this period. As it
moved across the United States, the traveling exhibition often inspired communities to support
their local museums with renewed vigor. In the midst of the Great Depression, Kress chose
museums he believed could produce sufficient funding to keep their doors open for the duration
of his exhibit. Kress’s personal finances held strong throughout the 1930s; his tax returns reveal
that his income grew exponentially over the course of the decade, quadrupling between 1931 and
1936.
90
Five-and-dime stores offered small luxuries that appealed to people maintaining tight
budgets, but the success of Kress’s business is noteworthy nonetheless.
Yet while he covered the costs of packing, installing, and insuring “An Exhibition of
Italian Paintings,” Kress did not intend to provide any additional money to the museums hosting
this show. It is almost surprising that only one of the twenty-four institutions hosting the
traveling exhibition required further assistance. In the spring of 1934, Kress provided two
emergency donations—initially anonymously—to the Los Angeles County Museum of History,
Science and Art after a budget crisis threatened to close the museum during the run of his
exhibition.
91
For the most part, Kress avoided this kind of direct assistance. Shaped by the
Progressive Era approach to giving, he aimed to engage philanthropically with the museums
hosting his exhibition, rather than providing them with charity.
For this reason, Kress and his team primarily relied upon host museums to staff and
publicize “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress.” Kress made it clear

90
Samuel H. Kress Federal Income Tax Reports. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archives [Series 5: Kress
Family, Box 174, Kress Family: Samuel H. Kress Federal Income Tax Reports], New York, New York.
91
“Museum Closing Studied by Board,” The Southwest Wave, February 13, 1934; “Secret Donor Gives
Funds to Museum,” Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, March 7, 1934; “S.H. Kress Museum
Sponsor: Merchant Revealed as Anonymous Art Patron Who Has Made Two-Weeks’ Reopening
Possible,” March 9, 1934. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 7: Oversize Material, Box OS
014], New York, New York.

152
to museums along the route that his S.H. Kress & Co. employees were available to help with
installation issues should they arise—but it seems few museums contacted them for assistance.
92

Aside from insisting that the exhibition be available to the public free of charge, Kress offered
few stipulations regarding how visitors encountered his paintings.
93
Museums maintained their
own hours and policies—including, in places like Savannah, Georgia, and Charlotte, North
Carolina, racially segregated viewing times—without comment from Kress.
94

The programming that grew up around “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings” varied as
considerably as the institutions that hosted this exhibition. Museums hosted lecture series,
lanternslide presentations, concerts, reading groups, and other special events to accompany and
precede the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress.”
95
At each institution,
community involvement made the exhibition a success. Organizing and executing the exhibition
relatively independently provided host institutions an opportunity to develop local leadership and
galvanize support from clubs and other groups within the community.
Among the many groups that provided substantial support for “An Exhibition of Italian
Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress,” women’s philanthropic clubs stand out as among the
most active supporters. Women’s clubs provided natural venues and partners for Kress’s
exhibition. From their inception in the late nineteenth century, American women’s clubs sought

92
Samuel H. Kress to Wallace Robbins, January 12, 1933. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series
3: Kress Exhibitions & Publications, Box 155, Traveling Exhibition: Correspondence: Robbins, Wallace],
New York, New York.
93
San Diego Museum of Art [Curatorial Records], San Diego, California.
94
This mirrors the policy of the S.H. Kress & Co. business, which maintained local segregation policies
into the 1960s. S.H. Kress & Co. lunch counters became sites of sit-in protests in cities in North Carolina
and Tennessee (Jean Maddern Pitrone, F.W. Woolworth and the American Five and Dime: A Social
History (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2003), 154–55).
95
For example, in Houston, Mrs. Schumacher gave a lecture in Italian. The museum also held a music
program. In Macon, Georgia, art critic Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. spoke about the exhibition. Samuel H.
Kress Foundation Archive [Series 7: Oversize Material, Box OS 009 and OS 017, news-clippings], New
York, New York.

153
to instill in their members a love for the Western art tradition, and to strive to teach their
communities to appreciate this artistic tradition as well.
96
The General Federation of Women’s
Clubs circulated study outlines and bibliographies to its many chapters to support lectures and
discussion groups on art. In the introduction to one such publication, the Art Division of the
General Federal of Women’s Clubs urged their members to help their communities understand
art as “not only a cultural asset” but also as a “vital interest” for “successful and happy living for
the individual and for the nation.”
97
Like Kress, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs
embraced the idea that by creating a shared set of cultural values, art appreciation strongly
geared toward the Western tradition could contribute to national unity and peace in the midst of
growing waves of immigration, labor disputes, and political and economic turmoil.
At its peak in the 1920s, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs alone boasted over a
half million members.
98
Though women’s clubs across the United States declined in popularity
during the Depression, they remained significant actors in organizing cultural activities.
99
In
many of the smaller cities that hosted “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings,” the clubhouses for
local women’s clubs served as a primary site for displaying artwork to the community. Having in
the past worked with organizations like the American Federation of Arts, women’s clubs were
well equipped to host traveling exhibitions.
100
Kress and his team collaborated with local
women’s clubs in Winter Park, Florida, and Charlotte, North Carolina, when they decided to
send the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings” to their clubhouses. In Winter Park, the Woman’s Club

96
Karen J. Blair, The Torchbearers: Women and their Amateur Arts Associations in America, 1890–1930
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 77.
97
General Federation of Women’s Clubs Art Division. Study Outlines and Bibliography of American Art:
Art Projects for Federations and Clubs. United States: Art Division General Federation of Women’s
Clubs, 1927 (3
rd
printing 1921, 1923), 1.
98
Women’s Clubs diminished in importance during the Great Depression (Blair, 39).
99
Ibid, 200–3.
100
Ibid, 78–87, 178–200.

154
offered their auditorium after Rollins College—the sponsor of the exhibition—determined its
chapel could not accommodate Kress’s paintings.
101
In Charlotte, Kress and his team selected the
Woman’s Club as the most appropriate site for the exhibition.
All over the route of the traveling exhibition, women’s clubs worked to increase
community awareness and enthusiasm for the exhibition. For example, members of the Charlotte
Woman’s Club’s art department organized a tea party to discuss the catalogue of “An Exhibition
of Italian Paintings” the week before the show opened.
102
In Charlotte, the Woman’s Club also
helped organize volunteers from other philanthropic organizations of women, like the Catholic
Daughters and Charlotte Charity League.
103
Women’s clubs supported “An Exhibition of Italian
Paintings” in many ways other than physically hosting the Kress show as well.
At almost every site the exhibition visited, local women supported museum staff by
serving as “hostesses.” At Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia—the all-women’s liberal art
college to which Kress loaned his exhibition in late 1934—current students and alumnae
volunteered in this capacity to help the exhibition run smoothly.
104
The women volunteering their
time were predominately white and middle-class.
105
This segment of the population overlapped

101
Hamilton Holt, President of Rollins College, to Rush Kress, October 22, 1934. Samuel H. Kress
Foundation Archive [Series 3: Exhibitions & Publications, Box 157, Traveling Exhibition: Winter Park,
FL: Rollins College], New York, New York.
102
“Mrs. Russell Gives Delightful Tea for Mrs. H.C. Scofield,” The Charlotte Observer, Thursday, May 9,
1935.
103
May 26, 1935—The Charlotte News, “Record Crowds Expected at Art Exhibit.” Samuel H. Kress
Foundation Archive [Series 7: Oversize Material, Box OS 017], New York, New York.
104
Letters and news clipping in the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 7: Oversize Material,
Box OS 017], New York, New York.
105
Women of many racial and socio-economic backgrounds formed women’s clubs in the early twentieth
century, but those described in the newspaper articles surrounding “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent
by Mr. Samuel Kress” are predominately white. The Woman’s Club hosting the traveling exhibition in
Charlotte, North Carolina, was associated with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, which did not
usually welcome women of color at that time (Blair, 187), and Rollins College did not graduate any
African American students until 1970 (“Traditions and History,” Rollins College, accessed August 7,
2017, http://www.rollins.edu/about-rollins/traditions-and-history/index.html). For a more inclusive

155
neatly with Kress’s primary customers, a fact that goes without comment in the press
surrounding the exhibition. Hostesses welcomed visitors and discussed the content of the
exhibition, but they could also police the spaces of the galleries. They assisted school groups,
making it possible for more teachers to bring their young students to visit the exhibition. At the
Art Students’ Club in Tampa, Florida, local hostesses also guarded the galleries, thus allowing
the Art Club to offer extended hours for visitors.
106
The “Exhibition of Italian Paintings” owed
part of its success to the abundant free labor contributed by female volunteers.
Though Kress never explicitly invited women’s cultural organizations to partner with him,
their efforts to promote expanded access to the fine arts were closely aligned. In one newspaper
after another, volunteers echoed Kress’s desire to “promote a more cultured understanding of art.”
Women’s groups, along with many other volunteers, aided Kress by making his exhibition a true
learning opportunity for visitors unfamiliar with early modern Italian art.

Gifts for the Public: Sharing the Catalogues for “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings”
After selecting the institutions to host his exhibition, Kress provided limited feedback
about the installation of, advertising for, and programming related to the “Exhibition of Italian
Paintings.” Therefore, the catalogue he and Pichetto carefully produced represented a unique
opportunity to convey their ideas about the exhibition’s content and purpose. Kress provided
locally specific copies of the catalogue to each of the museum’s hosting the “Exhibition of
Italian Paintings.” Though the contents were identical, the title pages of the catalogues varied in
order to state the name of the host institution and the dates of the exhibition. The foreword varied

history of women’s clubs, see Anne Ruggles Gere, Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Works in
U.S. Women’s Clubs, 1880–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
106
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 7: Oversize Material, Box OS 017], New York, New
York.

156
as well, for Pichetto insisted that it should read that Kress was lending his collection “to the City
of ___” rather than “to this city.” He convinced Kress that as gifts, the catalogues should be
personal.
107

Pichetto could refer to the catalogues as gifts because Kress stipulated that they should be
distribution free of charge to any interested attendees of the exhibition. The catalogues
represented a considerable expenditure on Kress’s part. Each catalogue cost approximately one
dollar, and Kress printed approximately 2,500 copies for each site during the early part of the
tour.
108
Kress sold goods for nickels and dimes; he knew that a dollar was not a negligible sum in
1932.
109
The Burland Printing Company produced the catalogues. Burland managed printing and
advertising for many of New York’s leading business. Kress likely hired them to print his
catalogues due to an existing relationship between S.H. Kress & Co. and the firm.
110

Though the catalogue printed to accompany the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings” was
mass-produced by a commercial printer, it was a fairly luxurious publication. The book consists
of fifty-five pages, bound in thick, soft ivory paper. The front cover of the catalogue bears a
color reproduction of Piero di Cosimo’s sixteenth-century tondo painting, Madonna and Child
with Saints and Angels (Fig. 2.2-4). Three rings of simple gold borders frame the cover image,
echoing the fine gold frame encircling the original painting. The reproduced paintings and its

107
Stephen Pichetto to Samuel Kress, August 16, 1932. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1:
Kress Collection, Box 109, Pichetto, Stephen: Reports and Correspondence], New York, New York.
108
Wallace Robbins to Samuel Kress, December 7, 1932. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3:
Kress Exhibitions & Publications, Box 155, Traveling Exhibition: Correspondence: Robbins, Wallace],
New York, New York. The Portland Art Museum received 2,700 copies of the catalogue at Kress’s
expense. Samuel Kress to Anna Crocker, May 20, 1933. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3:
Kress Exhibitions & Publications, Box 155, Traveling Exhibition: Portland, OR, Portland Art Museum],
New York, New York.
109
One dollar in 1932 is approximately equivalent to $17 in 2015 (Samuel H. Williamson, "Seven Ways
to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to present," Measuring Worth, 2015,
measuringworth.com).
110
Marjorie Greene, “The Story of Edward Brandford,” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life (Spring
1947): 109.

157
golden borders all appear upon an indented circular space on the booklet’s cover, an indentation
repeated by the rounded rectangular box surrounding the booklet’s title below the image. The
clear indentation of the paper evokes the platemark left by printers using a press to create
etchings, engravings, and woodblock prints. However, the letters of the title are flat—they are
neither indented nor raised—so the platemark is not actually an integral part of the printing
process for the catalogues, but rather mimicked to evoke a greater sense of luxury and tradition
(Fig. 2.5).
Inside the catalogue, black and white images reproduce all the paintings in the exhibition
(Fig. 2.6). Providing color reproductions inside this booklet would have been prohibitively
expensive. Furthermore many art historians in the 1930s still felt black and white images were
most trustworthy for study purposes since they would accurately convey the form and design of a
painting, while avoiding the danger of misrepresenting its color values.
111
In addition to the
image, each entry within the catalogue includes one to three paragraphs describing the life of the
artist, noteworthy characteristics of their style, their place within the history of art, and where
else one might see examples of their work. Pichetto omitted references to the artwork’s original
patrons, instead occasionally highlighting later owners of the paintings on display.
112
Few entries
exceed a paragraph in length. With this concise presentation of information, the catalogue served
as a useful tool for the scholar as well as the lay exhibition visitor.

111
For example, Richard Offner would only study works of art from black and white reproductions. Craig
Hugh Smyth, “Glimpses of Richard Offner,” in Discerning Eye: Essays on Early Italian Painting by
Richard Offner, ed. Andrew Ladis (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 38. Even
in 1940, when Lionello Venturi prepared a catalogue of the Kress Collection, he did not trust color
photographs to accurately convey the coloring of a painting. When he was unable to view a picture in
person, he wrote to the staff of the museum to request a written description of the paintings’ coloring.
Lionello Venturi to the E.B. Crocker Art Museum, December 30, 1940. Crocker Art Museum [Curatorial
Records, Donor – Samuel H. Kress Foundation], Sacramento, California.
112
Kress and Pichetto, An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress, 1–55.

158
Neither Kress nor Pichetto developed a clear policy for how museums should distribute
the catalogues. Though Kress had stated that anyone interested in the exhibition should be
permitted to take a copy of the catalogue, he never provided enough copies for this to be the
actual practice. For example, the 2,500 catalogues Kress provided for the exhibition’s run in
Memphis, Tennessee, would not allow anywhere near the total number of 12,707 attendees to
obtain their own copy.
113

Kress sent copies of the catalogue to the museums hosting his exhibition and tasked them
with distributing the books to interested parties. However, he also asked his employee to keep an
eye on their dispersal. Throughout its three-year run, Wallace Robbins travelled with “An
Exhibition of Italian Paintings” and kept Kress abreast of the show’s trials and successes. Kress
hired Robbins primarily to ensure the safety of the paintings. He personally oversaw the packing
and unpacking of the exhibition at each stop of the tour, performed simple conservation work,
and acted as an additional guard within the museums. However, Robbins primarily served to
protect Kress’s interests while the exhibition toured. He kept in regular correspondence with
Kress and Pichetto to report on the paintings’ condition, the exhibition’s reception, and
opportunities to improve their approach.
Among his list of duties, Kress instructed Robbins to “watch the distribution of the
catalogue.”
114
In his letters to Samuel Kress, it becomes clear that Robbins interpreted this vague
directive to mean he should restrict distribution of the catalogue to those individuals whom he
believed would truly benefit from them. In December 1932, he wrote to Kress from Memphis
explaining most people in this city would just throw the catalogues away, so he was only

113
“Record of Attendance at Museums.” Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive, Box 154, Traveling
Exhibition: Administrative Reports], New York, New York.
114
“Instructions for Man Accompany Exhibit.” Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive, Box 155, Traveling
Exhibition: Correspondence: Robbins, Wallace], New York, New York.

159
handing copies to people who would keep them and perhaps even display them in their homes.
115

Kress thanked Robbins for helping him save money, but stated that he would not mind “a little
more expense if we can secure a permanent impression through wider distribution.”
116
Like
Burland’s commercial projects, the catalogue served to advertise the Kress Collection. Kress
viewed the catalogues as a valuable investment; he was willing to print additional copies of the
catalogue upon request.
Nevertheless, two days later, Robbins wrote to Kress, “I don’t want you to go to the
expense of having more printed and have them wasted for they do not understand Italian
paintings of course when I get to New Orleans Houston Dallas & Denver there is where they will
under stand Italian painting and I will need more catalogues for 2,500 will not be enough.”
117

“They” who “do not understand Italian paintings” presumably refers to the people of Atlanta,
Memphis, and Birmingham. Robbins did not enjoy his time in these cities. He disparaged
Southerners in a letter to Kress, complaining they had not helped him at the museum and
suggesting that they were not good Americans—that they privileged their identity as Southerners
over their national identity, for they had not yet “got over the war” but had already “forgotten the
last war.”
118
Kress, who built his fortune by building stores in the post-reconstruction South,

115
Wallace Robbins to Samuel Kress, December 7, 1932. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3:
Kress Exhibitions & Publications, Box 155, Traveling Exhibition: Correspondence: Robbins, Wallace],
New York, New York.
116
Samuel Kress to Wallace Robbins, December 13, 1932. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series
3: Kress Exhibitions & Publications, Box 155, Traveling Exhibition: Correspondence: Robbins, Wallace],
New York, New York.
117
Spelling and punctuation here are Robbins’s. Wallace Robinson to Samuel Kress, December 15, 1932.
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3: Kress Exhibitions & Publications, Box 155, Traveling
Exhibition: Correspondence: Robbins, Wallace], New York, New York.
118
Robbins wrapped up a letter reporting his experiences in Birmingham, Alabama, with the comment:
“And I suppose you know that the south has not much use for the north for they have no got over the war
yet but have forgotten the last war.” Robbins to Kress, January 14, 1933. Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Archive [Series 3: Kress Exhibitions & Publications, Box 155, Traveling Exhibition: Correspondence:
Robbins, Wallace], New York, New York.

160
communicated his unease about Robbins’ comments to Stephen Pichetto. In a letter written in
January 1933, Pichetto then instructed Robbins to refrain from making similarly derogatory
statements in the future and reminded him of the importance of these cities to the Kress
business.
119

In his desire to deny copies of the catalogue to those who “do not understand Italian
paintings,” Robbins misconstrued the goals of the traveling “Exhibition of Italian Paintings.” In
many ways, this audience was Kress’s primary target. Kress hoped people who would never
travel to Europe, and who he assumed would not be familiar with the dates of the Renaissance
would find his exhibition valuable. To this end, Kress created the freely distributed catalogue to
serve as an educational resource to the communities visiting the exhibition.
The catalogue for “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings” extended and strengthened the
impact of the exhibition in a number of ways. As discussed, it presented Kress and Pichetto’s
vision for the exhibition in their absence. Museums could present their own lectures and
programming related to the exhibition, for the catalogue guaranteed visitors would encounter the
message and facts deemed relevant by Kress’s team. The catalogue also enriched the visitor’s
experience by serving as a guide, and hopefully extending the time spent with the paintings. The
American Association of Museums and Carnegie Corporation’s mid-1920s study on “museum
fatigue,” concluded that freely distributed catalogues almost doubled the amount of time visitors
spent in a museum. The study even noted that catalogues stimulated interest in works of art not
listed, by helping visitors practice focusing and engaging on individual works of art.
120

119
Stephen Pichetto to Wallace Robbins, January 21, 1933. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series
3: Kress Exhibitions & Publications, Box 155, Traveling Exhibition: Correspondence: Robbins, Wallace],
New York, New York.
120
Robinson, Sherman, and Curry, The Behavior of the Museum Visitor.

161
In addition to providing historical context for each work of art, Pichetto provided visitors
lessons in looking by weaving examples of visual analysis into the text of An Exhibition of
Italian Paintings Lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress. Most entries include one or two sentences
dedicated to formal analysis; these portions of the text encourage readers—including but not
limited to, exhibition visitors—to thoughtfully analyze aspects of the painting including color,
modeling, and form both within the individual work of art and in a comparative manner. For
example, Pichetto drew attention to “the hard modeling, strong contrasts of light and shadow and
reddish flesh tones” in the Madonna with the Child, St. John, and Three Angels as “outstanding
characteristics” of Bastiano Mainardi’s work (Fig. 2.7).
121
Similarly, Pichetto presented the
“exquisite play of shadow on the hand holding the handkerchief” in Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of
a Gentleman as “characteristic of the mature work of Lotto” (Fig. 2.8).
122
In addition to offering
succinct art historical lessons, Pichetto’s descriptions provided exhibition visitors (and readers)
with vocabulary for visual qualities of the paintings.
Notably, Pichetto used rich language to discuss the use of color in Kress’s paintings. He
defined Giuliano Bugiardini’s Madonna and Child and the Infant St. John as “striking in its
composition and in the Raphaelesque lucidity of color” (Fig. 2.9).
123
Similarly, he highlighted
Alessandro Moretto’s use of color in St. Jerome Penitent, writing: “Moretto developed a unique
color scheme, a wonderfully cool tone that can be defined as silvery, which is different from that
of most Venetians, whose paintings have that famous golden glow” (Fig. 2.10).
124
Again,
Pichetto’s writing invited visitors and readers to appreciate the paintings aesthetically while also
placing them into art historical context. At the same time, Pichetto’s careful discussion of color

121
Kress and Pichetto, An Exhibition of Italian Paintings Lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress, 20.
122
Ibid, 46.
123
Ibid, 24.
124
Ibid, 36.

162
served to enrich the experience for readers removed from the exhibition, whose experience of the
paintings would be limited to the catalogue’s black and white reproductions.
This is significant as the catalogue also served as educational resources outside of the
museum. At each site, large numbers of local students visited the “Traveling Exhibition of Italian
Paintings.” Before starting his five-and-dime stores, Samuel Kress worked briefly as a
schoolteacher in Pennsylvania.
125
Though this represented a short period of time, he remained
interested in education for the rest of his life. Pichetto and Kress encouraged teachers and
students to discuss the exhibition in and out of the classroom. To this end, in 1933, Kress
instructed Robbins to send Miss Cora Stafford, a schoolteacher in Dallas, fifty to sixty copies of
the catalogue for her students to study. Several months later, students in Seattle received copies
of the catalogue in advance of the exhibition to encourage a larger and better-informed audience
to attend the show.
126
From the thank you letters Kress received, it appears teachers used these
catalogues to teach both art history and art appreciation. Students could study the catalogues in
before or after a visit to the exhibition, or as a resource in its own right.
Kress’s interest in education expanded beyond the classroom. Like many tycoons of the
early twentieth century, he expressed keen appreciation for self-improvement and self-education.
In the 1930s, adult education—a favorite topic from the Progressive Era—emerged as an
important social issue. Writing for the American Association of Adult Education, T.R. Adam
stated that adult education “is simply another name for social democracy.” Adam encouraged all
“power groups,” including corporations, to fulfill their responsibility to promote and support

125
von Frank zu Doefering and Roberts, Kress Family History, 541.
126
Kress declined however to send her the 100 copies she requested as this seemed too costly. Samuel H.
Kress to Wallace Robinson, April 25, 1933. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3: Kress
Exhibitions & Publications, Box 155, Traveling Exhibition: Correspondence: Robbins, Wallace], New
York, New York. For information on the catalogue distribution in Seattle, see Wallace Robbins’ letter to
Samuel H. Kress on November 6, 1933. It is located in the same file as the missive cited above.

163
adult education.
127
Within S.H. Kress & Co., Samuel Kress and his brothers certainly embraced
this ideal. In frequently paternalistic ways, Kress encouraged his employees to seek out
opportunities to advance their education. For example, he provided S.H. Kress & Co. employees
with a series of texts—and accompanying quizzes—on “the Science of Efficient Service,” in
order that they might improve their sales techniques.
128
When the traveling exhibition went on
the road, Kress encouraged museums to invite employees from his stores to their openings and to
the exhibition itself.
129
By circulating free catalogues, Kress sought to enhance the educational
benefits of visiting his exhibition to adult visitors as well as children, members of the public that
included his employees, women’s clubs, and other middle- and working-class groups.
Rather than primarily reaching an elite audience, Kress stated that he hoped the
“Traveling Exhibition of Italian Paintings” would provide access to Italian Renaissance art to
people who could not afford to travel internationally or perhaps even to the major museums
within the United States. His foreword with its basic introduction to Italian Renaissance art
further indicates that he anticipated the exhibition would reach an audience unfamiliar with art
history. In this respect, the “Traveling Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H.
Kress” helped define Kress as a collector and philanthropist concerned with expanding public
access to fine art. By extension, Kress’s namesake chain of stores also became associated with
high culture, good taste, and civic responsibility, which could only prove helpful for business.
Of course, concurrently, the “Traveling Exhibition of Italian Paintings” and its
accompanying catalogue also publicized the Kress Collection to particular elite audiences.

127
Adam, 100–2.
128
We Remember Kress, edited by James S. Hudgins. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 6:
Kress Stores, Box 177, Kress Stores: Publication: We Remember Kress], New York, New York.
129
See for example, letters from Samuel Kress to the Utah Art Institute, August 17, 1933, and Henry Art
Gallery on August 23, 1933. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3: Kress Exhibitions &
Publications, Box 156, Traveling Exhibition: Salt Lake City, UT: Utah Art Institute, and Traveling
Exhibition: Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery], New York, New York.

164
Kress’s traveling exhibition introduced his collection to the wider world. Through the catalogue,
Kress tried to shape its reception and expand its reach. Pichetto personally sent the catalogue to
prominent members of the Portland Art Museum community in October 1933; he invited them to
visit the exhibition and to encourage others to do so as well.
130
Circulating copies of the
catalogue in advance of the exhibition opening prepared select visitors to see and describe the
“Traveling Exhibition of Italian Paintings” in line with Kress and Pichetto’s vision.
Finally, the catalogue memorialized “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr.
Samuel H. Kress.” Copies of the free catalogue still exist in libraries across the country today,
bearing witness to this remarkable, but largely forgotten, exhibition. When the exhibition closed,
Kress personally memorialized the exhibition by ordering a small run of leather-bound copies of
the exhibition catalogue. Unlike the catalogues sent to museums to distribute to the public, these
versions of the catalogue were not specific to any individual museum. Instead, they opened with
a list of the exhibition’s full run of cities and dates.
131
Kress sent these deluxe copies of the
exhibition catalogue to the President of the United States, art critics, and the presidents of dozens
of art museums.
132
Through the exhibition catalogue, Kress aimed to create a lasting memory of
this exhibition at the host sites, and to establish a reputation for his collection among cultural
elites that might not have seen the exhibition itself.

130
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3: Exhibitions and Publications, Box 155, Traveling
Exhibition: Portland, OR: Portland Art Museum], New York, New York.
131
A leather-bound copy of An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress can be found
in the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3: Kress Exhibitions & Publications, Box 157,
Catalogue], New York, New York. The cover was originally green suede, which has now largely faded to
brown. The Getty Research Institute also has a copy, inscribed to Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. and signed by
Samuel Kress. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California.
132
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3: Exhibitions & Publications, Box 154, Presidential
Acknowledgement], New York, New York. A copy of this version of the catalogue is in the Samuel H.
Kress Collection Archive, [Series 3: Exhibitions & Publications, Box 154, Catalogue], New York, New
York.

165
“An Exhibition of Italian Paintings” Returns Home
Between its launch in 1932 and return to New York in 1935, two-thirds of a million
people viewed “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress.”
133
At a remove
of nearly ninety years, it is difficult to know exactly how the diverse audiences visiting Kress’s
traveling exhibition interacted with the works of art. But in the dozens of thank you notes he
saved, visitors thanked Kress for sharing his collection with them. They stressed the unique
opportunity this exhibition provided for cultural enrichment in their communities. The local
newspaper articles covering the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings” highlighted the same sentiments.
Through the brief and relatively repetitive articles covering the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings,”
it becomes clear that the exhibition fulfilled Kress’s goals: it introduced the Kress Collection to
the public as one primarily consisting of Italian Renaissance art, and conveyed the message that
in collecting art and sharing it with the public, Kress acted philanthropically.
In this respect, the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress” was a
success. Newspaper coverage of the traveling exhibition introduced Kress as not only a
successful businessman, but also as a savvy collector and generous philanthropist. The exhibition
also presented the Kress Collection favorably, as one of Italian Renaissance or Old Master
paintings.
Finally, the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings” exceeded Kress and Pichetto’s expectations
in terms of its popularity. Even after extending the tour’s run by over two years, Kress and
Pichetto engaged in serious discussions about prolonging the show. They developed an itinerary
and schedule for a further extension that would have taken the exhibition to eight cities in the
Northeast. Had the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings” visited the additional cities, it would have

133
“Record of Attendance at Museums.” Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3: Exhibitions &
Publications, Box 154, Traveling Exhibition: Administrative Reports], New York, New York.

166
toured until the end of 1936. However, this final proposed leg of the tour was canceled and the
paintings instead returned to New York in June 1935.
134

During the summer of 1935, Kress shifted his focus to consider the possibility of creating
his own collection museum. By the early 1930s, a select group of private art collections had
become available to the public. From 1903 on, one could visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner
Museum in Boston, although it had extremely restricted visiting hours. Six years later, the
Walters Gallery in Baltimore opened to the public with the same kind of limited hours and
intermittent closings.
135
J.P. Morgan’s private collection went on display at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art for two years following his death in 1913. Ironically, this memorial exhibition—
which stirred conversations and excitement about how much a private collector might
accomplish for public institutions—ultimately served as an advertisement for the sale of well
over half of Morgan’s collection to other private collectors.
136
In 1928, almost a decade after
Henry Huntington originally dedicated his San Marino estate, the Huntington Library, Art
Collection and Botanical Gardens opened to the public.
137
Two years later, John Ringling

134
The proposed extended schedule would have taken the Kress exhibit to New York City (October 16–
November 16, 1935); Newark, N.J. (December 11, 1935–January 12, 1936); Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania
(January 19–February 20, 1936); Rochester, New York (February 28–March 29, 1936); Buffalo, New
York (April 5–May 3, 1936); Ithaca, New York (May 9–June 15
th
?, 1936); Syracuse, New York (? June–
July ?, 1936); Princeton, New Jersey (? July–Tuesday, December 1, 1936). This final leg of the tour
would have brought the Kress traveling exhibition into more established cultural centers, which may be
why Kress and Pichetto ultimately determined this extension was unnecessary. “New List for Exhibit.
1935 and 1936.” Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 109, “Collection:
Pichetto, Stephen: Reports and Correspondence (1 of 2)], New York, New York.
135
Stanley Mazaroff, Henry Walters and Bernard Berenson: Collector and Connoisseur (Baltimore: John
Hopkins University, 2010), 70–80.
136
Flaminia Gennari-Santori, “Medieval Art for America: The Arrival of the J. Pierpont Morgan
Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Journal of the History of Collections 22, no. 1 (2010):
81–98; Jean Stouse, Morgan, American Financier (New York: Random House, 1999).
137
Shelley Bennett, The Art of Wealth: The Huntingtons in the Gilded Age (San Marino, California:
Huntington Library, 2013).

167
presented his rapidly assembled collection to the people in Sarasota, Florida.
138
In addition to
these prominent collections, there were smaller private collections being shared with public
audiences across the country in smaller house museums and other contexts. In October 1935,
Samuel Kress asked the Kress Foundation to consider whether or not they might one day create a
similar institution to make his own collection available to the public.
Even more than the traveling exhibition, a Kress Collection museum would make the
scope and scale of Samuel Kress’s Italian paintings discernable to visitors. Yet this imagined
institution, which Kress intended to build on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, would only
enrich the cultural offerings in this neighborhood, without expanding access to any new groups
of visitors. This limitation seems to explain some of Kress’s hesitation (along with the
considerable cost) in proceeding with his plans to establish his own museum. Tellingly, between
1935 and 1938, the years during which a Kress Museum was on the table, Samuel Kress and the
Kress Foundation continued to make gifts to regional museums across the country.
139

Furthermore, Kress remained committed to the idea that that traveling exhibitions performed
important work by improving access to cultural resources for Americans outside of culturally
rich urban centers. Neither Kress nor Pichetto ever mentioned the American Federation of Arts
in the papers related to planning and executing the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings,” but from
1935 onward Kress made annual donations to support the organization.
140

138
Virginia Brilliant, “Building a Renaissance Collection and Museum after the Gilded Age: The Case of
John Ringling” in A Market for Merchant Princes, ed. Inge Reist (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2015), 96.
139
For example, Kress donated a predella panel (att. to Bernardino Fungai) to the Mint Museum of Art in
Charlotte, North Carolina in 1937 and a Portrait of a Lady (att. to Ridolfo Ghirlandaio) to the Haggin
Museum in Stockton, California (See the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress
Institutions, Box 149, Charlotte, N.C.: Mint Museum of Art], New York, New York and Haggin Museum
Archive [Kress Correspondence], Stockton, California).
140
Samuel Kress made annual donations to support the efforts of the American Federation of Arts from
1935, the year his own traveling exhibition concluded, until 1941, the year the National Gallery of Art

168
Kress’s desire to bring artwork to all regions of the country was timely. In August 1935,
right as his traveling exhibition returned to New York, the United States government initiated the
Federal Art Project to ensure that people in “the hinterlands of the United States” could
encounter works of art within their communities.
141
The Federal Art Project grew out of the
Works Progress Administration; in addition to providing jobs for the unemployed, this project
sought to address the perceived imbalance of cultural resources between Northeastern cities and
the more rural areas of the Midwest, South, and West.
142
In a period of four years, the Federal
Art Project helped open and run over one hundred Community Art Centers in small towns across
the United States. Located primarily in rural and desert areas, these Community Art Centers
serve as sites for both local and traveling exhibitions, artist in residence programs, displays of
local art, classes, and group meetings. In the midst of the instability created by the Great
Depression, the Federal Art Project initiated programs like the Community Art Centers in the
belief that American national identity—and democracy itself—depended upon shared cultural
experiences and values.
143
Kress’s idea to send a traveling exhibition to communities with
limited cultural resources emerged in dialogue with this set of concerns.
However, Kress’s desire to share Italian Renaissance art with the American public lay in
direct opposition to the promotion of American art by the Federal Art Project, and to a lesser

opened (Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 5: Kress Family, Box 174, Kress Family: Samuel H.
Kress: Personal Donations], New York, New York).
141
Harris, Federal Art and National Culture, 28.
142
The Federal Art Project was the fourth New Deal art program. The first, the Public Works of Art
Project, was a relief program that ran from December 1933 to June 1934. In October 1934, the Treasury
Department initiated a new project called the Section of Fine Arts. Through a series of competitions, this
program supported American artists by buying their work to decorate federal buildings. The Section of
Fine Arts continued to run until around 1943. In July 1935, the WPA created the Treasury Relief Art
Project, which hired artists to decorate federal buildings. Finally, in August 1935, the WPA created the
Federal Art Project as part of Federal Project No. 1, which also supported drama, music and writing (Olin
Dows, “The New Deal’s Treasury Art Program: A Memoir,” in The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology
of Memoirs, ed. Francis O’Connor [Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972], 11–50).
143
Harris, Federal Art and National Culture, 44–9.

169
degree, the American Federation of Arts. From its inception in 1935, the Federal Art Project
sought to replace the American reverence for Old Masters with appreciation for American art.
144

Holger Cahill, the director of the Federal Art Project, wrote that since the mid-nineteenth century,
American artists suffered while “fully four-fifths of our art patronage has been devoted to… …a
tremendous traffic in aesthetic fragments torn from their social backgrounds, but trailing clouds
of vanished aristocratic glories.”
145
As a result, Cahill argued Americans were “incapable of
reacting” to their own environment, and furthermore that the art object—which should reflect a
vibrant creative community—“has become more and more a minor luxury product.”
146
The
Federal Art Project instead aimed to document and share the history of American artistic
endeavors through the ambitious Index of American Design, and to encourage creativity at all
levels through their Community Art Centers.
The Federal Art Project shifted attention away from the endeavors of collectors to focus
attention on the creative work of artists. In contrast, the “Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by
Mr. Samuel H. Kress” demonstrated Kress and Pichetto’s belief that private collections—even,
or perhaps especially of elitist, European paintings—could contribute to the development of
American cultural identity by promoting a shared appreciation for fine art and the narrative of
Western Civilization. Despite their differences, both Cahill and Kress sought to make art more
accessible across the United States in the belief that engaging with art could produce a more
democratic and united society.

144
According to Harris, the Federal Art Project sought to combat what they saw as the undervaluing of
American art by collectors, museums, and art historians, in favor of Old Master paintings and European
modernism (Harris, Federal Art and National Culture, 44).
145
Holger Cahill, foreword to Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of
the WPA Federal Art Project, edited by Francis O’Connor (Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic
Society, 1973), 37.
146
Ibid.

170
Engaging the Past in 1930s America: Italian Renaissance Art as American History
The Federal Art Project and “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H.
Kress” both represented attempts to discover a “usable past” for contemporary Americans. Van
Wyck Brooks first introduced this phrase around the First World War, when he called for
American writers to develop a stronger—and selectively idealized—perspective on the American
literature of the past in order to enrich the literary scene of their present.
147
The idea took on
broader relevance in the 1930s, when many Americans began searching for a “usable past,” one
that might provide guidance in the midst of great economic, social, and technological change.
Figures like Cahill encouraged Americans to document and study their own national past;
projects like the Index of American Design and the newly established National Archives
preserved and organized documents and objects that illuminated the American past.
148

Concurrently, many Americans turned to European history to develop their own “usable
past.” The United States’ entry into World War I brought Americans out of isolation and into
closer relationship with their European allies. Following the postwar peace agreements, the
emergence of communist government in the Soviet Union and the growing power of fascism in
several European states only underlined the need for the United States to partner with European
democracies in order to protect liberal governments. Against this backdrop, American
universities began requiring a new course of their undergraduates, the introduction to Western
Civilization. Arguably invented at Columbia University in 1919, the Western Civilization course
traced the origins of European history from the ancient Near East, through Greece to Rome, and
from medieval to modern Europe. Covering a vast swath of time and space, this course focused

147
Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” The Dial (April 11, 1918): 337–41.
148
O’Connor, introduction to Art for the Millions, 21. On the Index, see Lincoln Rothschild, “The Index
of American Design of the WPA Federal Art Project,” in The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of
Memoirs, ed. Francis O’Connor (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972), 177–97.

171
on great cultural achievements and progressive ideas rather than local specificities.
149
The course
presented a liberal, progressive view of history, one that grounded American history and cultural
identity more broadly in the narrative of “Western Civilization.”
This perspective shaped cultural events outside of the classroom as well during the 1930s.
In the midst of their optimistic projections for the future, the most significant Depression-era
world’s fairs featured exhibitions of Old Master paintings. The Art Institute of Chicago hosted
the first such exhibition, entitled, “A Century of Progress in American Collecting” as part of the
Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. Consisting entirely of loans from private collectors, this
exhibition of thirteenth- to twentieth-century paintings drew enormous crowds and praise from
critics.
150

In a manner similar to “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress”
(though on a grander scale), this show encouraged visitors to celebrate the private collecting of
their compatriots as an activity that enriched the nation. Beyond acquisition, the exhibition
became a celebration of Americans’ increasingly elevated taste, so much so that in his review of
a “Century of Progress,” critic Dudley Watson argued that the Art Institute’s contribution to the
exposition “may be a prophecy of a more complete renaissance… greater than has been known
since fifteenth-century Italy.”
151
Thus Watson suggests that possessing, curating, and reframing
examples of fifteenth-century Italian art, synecdochically referenced here to stand for all Old

149
Gilbert Allardyce, “The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course,” The American Historical
Review 87, no. 3 (June 1982): 695–725.
150
Neil Harris, “Old Wine in New Bottles: Masterpieces Come to the Fair” in Designing Tomorrow:
America’s Worlds Fairs of the 1930s, ed. Robert W. Rydell and Laura Burd Schiavo (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2010), 41–56.
151
Dudley Crafts Watson, “What Chicago Learned: The Art Institute Appraises the World’s Fair
Exhibition,” The American Magazine of Art 27, no. 2 (February 1934): 77–9.

172
Master art, could engender an American Renaissance by encouraging Americans to view
themselves, both as creators and citizens, as inheritors of the Western tradition.
152

Following the great success of Chicago’s Old Masters exhibition, both New York and
San Francisco included retrospectives of early modern art in their own expositions in 1939. New
York’s “World of Tomorrow” opened in May 1939 to commemorate the sesquicentennial of
George Washington’s inauguration. Because New York’s many museums were organizing
exhibitions to coincide with the fair, the organizers of “World of Tomorrow” did not initially
intend to plan a special exhibition of Old Master artwork. Protestors noted that this represented
an important and prestigious aspect of planning such an event, and a group of volunteers led by
William Valentiner, the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, worked to organize an Old
Masters exhibition.
153
Their show, “Masterpieces of Art” consisted of four hundred paintings that
spanned the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries. Loans came from museums, galleries, and dealers
as well as private collectors. Samuel Kress participated in this exhibition, loaning a little over a
dozen early modern paintings including works attributed to Vittore Carpaccio, Titian, and
Francesco Guardi.
154

Like Chicago’s “Century of Progress” show, “Masterpieces of Art” celebrated the
accomplishments of American collectors and reinforced the connection Americans felt to the
elite European aesthetic traditions manifest in Old Master artwork. The Mayor of New York,
Fiorello La Guardia, opened the exhibition by declaring it “the most sacred and prestigious spot

152
There is a long tradition of this kind of cultural borrowing. For example, in the United States during
the Federalist era, many embraced Greek Revival architecture to evoke comparisons between the new
nation and the democracies of ancient Greece and Rome. Notably, Europeans turned to Greek Revival
architecture during the same period, also for its ability to stand for civic virtue and national identity (J.
Mordaunt Crook, The Greek Revival [London: John Murray, 1972]).
153
Harris, “Old Wine in New Bottles,” 49.
154
George Henry McCall and William R. Valentiner, Masterpieces of Art: Catalogue of European
Paintings and Sculpture from 1300–1800 (New York City: Bradford Press, 1939).

173
at the Fair.”
155
It proved popular as well, much more so than Cahill’s competing exhibition at the
fair, “American Art Today,” which was comprised of federally sponsored art.
156

However, as Jonathan Harris notes, the parallel exhibition “Masterworks of Five
Centuries” at San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition attracted twice as many
visitors in 1939 as the combined “World of Tomorrow” art exhibits.
157
Walter Heil, director of
the De Young Museum and the Legion of Honor, began organizing their “Masterworks of Five
Centuries” exhibition years earlier. He arranged loans from an array of museums in the United
States and Europe, while also borrowing works of art from private collectors.
Samuel Kress and the Kress Foundation each respectively loaned five paintings to
“Masterworks of Five Centuries.” However, only half of these loans consisted of Italian
paintings, the rest representing seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art.
158
In an exhibition in
which Heil wrote he “regretted” the “gaps… in the field of German and Dutch painting,” Kress’s
few Northern European paintings helped address the show’s imbalance.
159
Conversely, Kress’s
loaned Italian paintings made a less noticeable impact in shaping the exhibition’s incredibly rich
section dedicated to early modern Italian art.
Heil borrowed nearly fifty works of art from museums and private collectors in the
United States and Europe for the Italian, fourteenth- to eighteenth-centuries, section of
“Masterworks.” Twenty-seven loans from Italian public and private collections made
“Masterworks” an unprecedented exhibition of Italian Renaissance art in the United States,

155
Harris, “Old Wine in New Bottles,” 49.
156
Harris, Federal Art and National Culture, 103–9.
157
Harris, Federal Art and National Culture, 108–9.
158
Walter Heil, Masterworks of Five Centuries: Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco
(San Francisco: Schwabacher-Frey, Co., 1939). The additional five loans Kress and the Foundation made
represented early modern Dutch (4) and Flemish (1) painting. Kress refused some of Heil’s loan requests,
including of a painting by Giovanni di Paolo (Lorenzo Carletti and Cristiano Giometti, Raffaello on the
road: Rinascimento e propaganda fascista in America (1938–1940), (Rome: Carocci editore, 2016), 104).
159
See the foreword to Masterworks of Five Centuries.

174
including masterpieces like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard, a
Crucifixion by Masaccio, Raphael’s Madonna della Seggiola, Titian’s Portrait of Paul III,
Michelangelo’s Pitti Tondo, sculpted busts by Donatello and Francesco Laurana, and
Verrocchio’s David.
160
Roberto Longhi, the Italian art historian and critic who helped orchestrate
the loans, primarily selected examples of high Renaissance artwork in order to complement the
Italian primitives he knew Heil could borrow from strong American collections of early Italian
Renaissance art.
161
Once chosen, the twenty-seven works of art travelled six thousand miles—
first by boat, then by train—from Genoa to San Francisco. To keep the exhibition’s costs down,
Mussolini elected to send all works owned by the state without insurance.
162
Without the help of
the Italian government, which promoted exhibitions like “Masterworks” as an act of indirect
propaganda for the Italian Fascist state, it is unimaginable that Heil could have obtained this
remarkable set of loans.
Though the twenty-seven “ambassadors” in Heil’s exhibition represented the first such
loan to the United States, there was precedent for this exhibition. In 1930, the “Exhibition of
Italian Art, 1200–1900” at Burlington House in London displayed an impressive set of loans

160
For the full list, see Appendice I in Carletti and Giometti, 199–200.
161
Carletti and Giometti, 57. Roberto Longhi hoped the exhibition would encourage American institutions
and collectors to offer reciprocal loans for the large exhibition of Italian art he was planning for the
Esposizione Universale Roma (E42). Among others, Longhi listed dozens of paintings in the Kress
Collection he hoped to borrow for the exhibition (see Appendice II in Carletti and Giometti, 200–12). E42
was supposed to be a World’s Fair planned to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the March on
Rome and the Fascist rise to power, but due to the war it never occurred (Carletti and Giometti, 85–95).
Longhi later defended his role in organizing this exhibition, arguing that it would demonstrate that
“durante il Fascismo mostrato la persistenza di una cultura italiana alta e libera” (Roberto Longhi,
Editoriale mostre e musei (un avvertimento del 1959), Critica d’Arte e Buongoverno (Opere complete di
Roberto Longhi, XIII (Florence: Sansoni, 1985), 59–74, cited by Carletti and Giometti, 190).
162
Carletti and Giometti, 187. The Golden Gate Exhibition opted to donate the 40,000 dollars they had set
aside for insurance costs to found the Istituto centrale del restauro (Carletti and Giometti, 97–8).
Mussolini had also opted not to insure the state-owned works of art lent to the exhibition at the Petit
Palais in 1935 (Emily Braun, “Leonardo’s Smile,” in Donatello Among the Blackshirts: History and
Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy, ed. Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum [Ithaca, New
York: Cornell University Press, 2005], 178).

175
from Italian collections including the same Birth of Venus and Portrait of Pope Paul III that
would travel to the United States later in the decade, as well as canonical pieces like Raphael’s
Doni portraits, Giorgione’s Tempesta, and the diptych portrait of the Duke and Duchess of
Urbino by Piero della Francesca.
163
Though the press described the enormously popular
exhibition as an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, five years later an even larger contingent of
Italian works of art travelled to participate in “L’Art Italien de Cimabue à Tiepolo” at the Petit
Palais in Paris.
164
Mussolini strongly supported these exhibitions, arguing that they served as “a
portentous sign of the eternal vitality of the Italian race” which was “always and everywhere in
the vanguard, leaving to others only the freedom to imitate.”
165
In the face of any resistance,
Mussolini’s government—particularly his ministers Giuseppe Bottai, Dino Alfieri, and Galeazzo
Ciano—pressured museums and private collectors to accede to loan requests, which made the
historic loans possible.
Through the exhibition of fifteenth– and sixteenth–century masterpieces, Mussolini
demonstrated the largesse of his government and presented the Fascist regime as emerging from
the same culturally rich landscape and peoples that produced ancient Rome and the Renaissance.
The earlier American enthusiasm for Mussolini’s government faded by the mid-1930s, largely in

163
Exhibition of Italian Art 1200–1900 (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1930). For more on the London
exhibition, see the chapter “Botticelli in the Service of Fascism” in Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral
Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), 107–27.
164
Exposition de l’art italien de Cimabue à Tiepolo, Petit Palais 1935 (Argenteuil: Imprimerie R.
Coulouma, 1935). For more on this exhibition, see Braun, “Leonardo’s Smile,”173–186.
165
Benito Mussolini, Questo capolavori, Corriere della Sera, January 3, 1930, cited by Carletti and
Giometti, 7. Though he was not personally interested in art, Mussolini understood the power of art in
shaping perception of the Fascist state both in Italy and abroad. See Kate Flint, “Art and the Fascist
Régime in Italy,” Oxford Art Journal 3, no. 2 (October 1980): 49–54; Marla Stone, The Patron State:
Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); D. Medina Lasansky,
The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum, eds. Donatello among
the Blackshirts.

176
response to the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–6).
166
In February 1939, when “Masterworks of Five
Centuries” opened, Italy had recently introduced anti-Semitic racial laws that surprised and
troubled Americans.
167
Italian fascism increasingly seemed brutish and violent, and thus served
to benefit from an association with humanism and culture.
168
During this moment of high
political tension, the “Masterworks” exhibition instead directed the American public to
contemplate Renaissance works of art as “the sublime manifestations of the Italian genius.”
169

The “Masterworks of Five Centuries” attracted record crowds and critical praise. In New
York, Valentiner tried in vain to obtain similar loans for the “Masterpieces of Art” exhibition at
the “World of Tomorrow.” As the fairs unfolded over the spring of 1939, Italy grew increasingly
bellicose; in March, Italian forces invaded Albania, and in May they signed the Steel Pact with
Germany.
170
Nonetheless, major American museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art
and Boston Museum of Fine Arts contacted the Italian government to request an extension of the
San Francisco loan to their own institutions. In Chicago, prominent members of the community
wrote Mussolini and Bottai directly to advocate for the Art Institute of Chicago as a second host
for the loaned Italian masterpieces.
The artwork loaned by the Italian government included masterpieces prized since the
sixteenth century as among the most important examples of Italian Renaissance art. Nonetheless,
in retrospect, the eagerness with which American institutions pursued this opportunity to

166
J.P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1972), 287-90.
167
Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 294–320.
168
Carletti and Giometti, 78–82.
169
“We are indebted above all to the Government of Italy for sending across the Atlantic and across the
American continent a unique group of paintings and sculptures that almost without exception consists of
national treasures of the highest order. Indeed, this group is so well chosen that it is eminently capable of
offering a clear and illuminating insight into the truly sublime manifestations of the Italian genius.”
(Walter Heil, foreword to Masterworks of Five Centuries, unpaginated).
170
“Six Fateful Months: March to September 1939,” World Affairs 102, no. 3 (September 1939): 139–41.

177
collaborate with the Italian Fascist government seems surprising, even untoward. However, Italo-
American relations were far from decided in 1939. Even as their esteem for Mussolini and his
government dwindled, the American public remained hopeful that Italy—whose citizens they
imagined as “freedom-loving compatriots”—would side with the Allies right up until the Italians
invaded France in June 1940.
171

Initially, the Italian government stated the loaned artwork would return immediately to
Italy after the “Masterworks” exhibition closed. In June 1939, the Bottai Law—a series of
restrictions intended to protect Italian racial purity—included the prohibition of exporting from
Italy objects of “such importance that their export would represent a tremendous loss to the
national patrimony.”
172
Nonetheless, the Italian government agreed to extend their loan to two
additional American cities, Chicago and New York, suggesting it might be the last time such
paintings would visit the United States. After leaving San Francisco, the twenty-seven Italian
paintings went to the Art Institute of Chicago from November 1939 to January 1940. In vying for
this honor, the Art Institute benefitted from their history of hosting a popular exhibition of Old
Masters in 1933, and from the fact that Chicago was home to a community of over a quarter
million Italian-Americans. During the brief two-month show, more than two hundred and sixty
thousand people visited—many taking advantage of the free days paid for by the Italian
government.
173
Following this run, the pictures made their final stop at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York from January to March 1940. As in San Francisco and Chicago, the “Italian
Masters” show at MoMA drew record-setting crowds. Finally, in April 1940, the packed Italian

171
Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 325–352. Samuel Kress did not comment on his view of Italian
Fascism in the late 1930s within the extant, public archival documents. He likely grew disillusioned with
Mussolini’s form of governance during this decade, as his peers did. Kress remained friendly with the
Continis throughout the 1930s, though their correspondence ceased during the war years.
172
John Henry Merryman, Albert E. Elsen, and Stephen K. Urice, Law, Ethics and the Visual Arts. 5
th

edition (Alphen aan den Rijn: Kluwer Law International, 2007), 171.
173
Carletti and Giometti, 113–53.

178
works of art went onto the “Rex” to return (many still uninsured) across the wartime Atlantic to
Genoa. They arrived in Italy only weeks before the Italians entered into the Second World
War.
174

From the perspective of the Italian officials who organized and advocated for this set of
loans, the exhibitions in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York served as the most “intense, best,
and most useful” propaganda for “Italy, il Duce, Fascism, and Italian art” ever planned in
America.
175
This hyperbolic claim did not play out in the American press, where reporters
skipped over discussions of the political context from which the exhibitions emerged to instead
stress the fame, rarity, and high value of the works of art on display.
176
The Italian government
agreed to send their twenty-seven “ambassadors” to the United States in 1939–40 to promote
admiration for Italian culture and national identity, and to encourage visitors to associate modern
(fascist) Italy with the greatness of the Italian Renaissance. The loans may have helped the
Italian government maintain una bella figura at a tense moment, but they fell short of truly
reshaping American public opinion about the Fascist government.
The Italian government overestimated the degree to which American museum visitors
would associate the art of Botticelli, Giorgione, Raphael, Titian and Michelangelo with modern
Italy. Prepared by their studies of Western Civilization, visitors to these exhibitions understood
the Italian Renaissance art on display as primarily representing a cultural highpoint in Western
culture, distanced from any exclusive ties to the contemporary Italian state. British, American
and German audiences had appreciated Italian Renaissance art in this manner for centuries. From

174
Alfred Barr, Italians Masters lent by the Royal Italian Government: January to March 1940 (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1940); Harris, “Old Wine”; Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary
Art? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 162–81; Carletti and Giometti, Raffaello on the Road, 147–71.
175
Eugenio Ventura wrote to Marino Lazzari, that “che con queste Mostre MAI propaganda più intensa,
migliore e più utile, l'Italia, il Duce, il Fascismo, e l'Arte italiana hanno avuto in America” (Carletti and
Giometti, 153).
176
Meyer, 179.

179
the era of the Grand Tours, elite Europeans travelers disdained modern Italy, which was viewed
as dirty, immoral, and antiquated, even as they studied and admired the history and material
culture of Italy’s classical and Renaissance past.
177
Appreciating and collecting Italian classical
and Renaissance art became a way of asserting one’s own place in history as an inheritor of the
classical tradition. In the nineteenth century, museums and galleries made this experience, once
restricted to wealthy Grand Tourists and collectors, accessible to middle- and working-class
individuals in Europe and the United States as well.
In the United States in the 1930s, popular exhibitions of Old Master paintings served this
kind of function for an even broader audience—in fairs, libraries, museums, and universities in
towns large and small, Americans learned to appreciate early modern European art as part of
their own cultural legacy. “An Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent by Mr. Samuel H. Kress”
certainly resonated with audiences in this manner, as did the loan shows enriched by the Italian
government.
In interwar American culture, Italian Renaissance art often figured at the center of
competing attempts to define the relationship between past and present. The exhibitions of Italian
art discussed above demonstrate how both Americans and Italians tried to associate the
Renaissance with their own national identities and political ideologies. Exhibitions also acted as
sites to debate whether modern American artistic traditions perpetuated the artistic legacy of the
Renaissance, or challenged it. Often, exhibitions simultaneously did both—to borrow Lisa Pon’s
phrase, casting the Renaissance “as the father of modernism’s Oedipus” by presenting it “as both
an origin for modern art, and the outdated norm against which modern art reacts.”
178

177
A. Wilton and I. Bignamini, eds. Grand Tour: the Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century (London:
Tate Gallery, 1996); Jeremy Black, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
178
Lisa Pon, “Do Art Historians in the Twenty-first Century Have a Renaissance?,” in Renaissance
Theory, James Elkins and Robert Williams, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 291.

180
For example, at MoMA, “Italian Masters” opened in 1940 in juxtaposition with an
exhibition of “Modern Masters,” which featured European and American art of the last fifty
years. Viewing the exhibitions side-by-side provided visitors with space to think about how
modern art drew on early modern Italian art, which Barr described as “the very heart of the great
tradition of European art.”
179
In a diagram included within the Italian Masters catalogue, Barr
traced the legacy of great Italian masters into the age of modern art, connecting Ingres and Seurat,
with their graceful use of line and painstaking compositions, to Raphael, and Masaccio (fig.
2.11).
Yet at the same time, the paired exhibitions invited comparison, and competition between
“the art of our time” and the Renaissance. Dorothy Miller, assistant curator at MoMA at the time,
spoke to this impulse in the foreword to Modern Masters, writing:
Imaginary contests between the heroes of antiquity and their modern counterparts have
always had a certain fascination. Here, within the Museum of Modern Art, some such
trial of strength may actually take place, for the Museum, believing in the power and
quality of the modern artist, has not hesitated to accept the challenge made possible by its
act of hospitality toward the Italian masters. Whichever side, the old or the new, seems to
triumph, one fact is sure: the great indebtedness of the modern masters to the work of
their ancestors of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque—a debt that is continually being
paid not only by the explicit homage which modern artists so often offer to the past but
by the ever-changing illumination which the art of the living throws upon the art of the
dead.
180

In describing Modern Masters as a competition between the Renaissance and modern artist,
Miller neatly evokes the spirit of admiration and competition with the classical world that defines
the Renaissance, thus further intertwining the two exhibitions.
Thus, Italian Renaissance art proved a fruitful element to incorporate into a wide range of
views about the “useable past.” Temporary exhibitions allowed Americans all over the United

179
Barr, preface to Italian Masters.
180
Dorothy Miller, foreword to Modern Masters from European and American Collections: The Museum
of Modern Art, New York 1940 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1940).

181
States to experience the art of the Renaissance for themselves, and to consider their own
relationship to it. In doing so, these popular exhibitions, including the ones enriched by the
Italian government, fulfilled progressive ideals by making art and elite culture more accessible to
the public.

Conclusion: Italian Renaissance Art for the American People
Through his gifts and loans, Samuel Kress contributed significantly to interwar efforts to
encourage American audiences to incorporate Italian Renaissance art into conceptions of their
own cultural heritage. Shaped by Progressive Era calls for expanded access to the arts, Kress
sought to make his collection accessible to audiences traditionally underserved by established
arts institutions. However, it quickly became clear that dividing his collection among many
institutions across the country would make it difficult, if not impossible, to provide a
comprehensive survey of early modern Italian art. In the mid–1930s, Kress and the Kress
Foundation embraced both goals, discussing opening their own museum while continuing to
donate works of art to museums all across the United States.
After viewing Kress’s collection in 1938, Smithsonian curator Jeremiah O’Connor
touched on Kress’s concern about serving the public to dissuade him from establishing a private
collection museum. He noted poor attendance at John G. Johnson’s collection, the Gardner
Museum, and the Frick Collection, and noted in contrast that visiting Washington, D.C. was
quickly becoming a “custom for graduating classes of schools and colleges.” In the letter, he
encouraged Kress to make his “splendid paintings, a heritage from the ages” into “a national
treasure” by donating them to the National Gallery of Art, where “they would do the maximum

182
of good.”
181
After a decade of experimenting with the differing methods of sharing his collection
with the public, Kress acceded to this request. In the National Gallery of Art, the Kress
Collection provided a good introduction to the history of early modern Italian art, while also
becoming a part of the Gallery’s efforts to serve the American public in the broadest possible
terms.
Shaped by Kress’s gifts, the Kress Foundation, and the philosophy of the past that shaped
the Kress Collection, the National Gallery powerfully expressed, and continues to express, the
foundational place of Italian Renaissance art in American cultural identity. In their study of
universal survey museums, Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach discussed how museums like the
Louvre use their collections and architecture to lead visitors through a narrative of art history,
beginning in classical antiquity and culminating in the art of the nation in which the museum is
located. The National Gallery of Art, they note, is unusual among grand survey museums in that
it does not include works of classical antiquity, but instead begins with the Italian
Renaissance.
182
Thus, Kress’s Italian primitives mark the beginning of the art historical narrative
within the National Gallery in Washington, an arrangement that must have proved deeply
satisfying to Kress and his team of advisors and friends.
In some respects, Kress’s decade of experimenting with alternative modes of sharing his
collection with the public came to an end with his decision to donate it to the National Gallery of
Art. This large museum located in a major urban center on the East Coast differed considerably
from the small museums, community centers, and libraries of the South and West where Kress

181
“Would it not be fitting for your splendid paintings, a heritage from the ages, to become a national
treasure.” Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 127, “Washington,
D.C.: National Gallery of Art: Correspondence: Early Communication Regarding the Gift (1 of 2, 1938–
1943)], New York, New York.
182
Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Universal Survey Museum,” Art History 3, no. 4 (December
1980), 464–7.

183
donated and loaned artwork throughout the 1930s. However, the National Gallery of Art was
new and ambitious, and Kress and his advisors demonstrated repeatedly their enthusiasm for
helping institutions grow, and for inspiring others to do so as well.
Critically, Kress also agree to donate his collection to the National Gallery during the
period in which war broke out in Europe. In the midst of these events, even established cultural
centers and institutions felt vulnerable. Creating a National Gallery of Art in the United States
became not only a patriotic act, but also a way to safeguard the culture of Western
Civilization.
183
Once committed, Kress invested first and foremost in helping the National
Gallery of Art fulfill its mission. However, his interest in expanding access to art in communities
across the country left a mark on the collection, one that would bring the Kress Collection back
to “the hinterlands” in the 1950s.

183
In his address at the opening of the museum, President Roosevelt stated that he accepted the gallery’s
masterpieces of German, Italian, French, and Spanish art “on behalf of the people of democratic nation in
a human spirit which now is everywhere endangered and which, in many countries where it first found
form and meaning, has been rooted out and destroyed…. …to assert the purpose of the people of America
that the freedom of the human spirit and human mind—which has produced the world’s great art and all
its science—shall not be utterly destroyed.” (“The Text of President Roosevelt’s Art Address,” Special to
the New York Times, March 18, 1941, 8).!

184
Chapter 3
Conserving the Kress Collection in Midcentury America

This chapter focuses on the conservation of the Kress Collection from 1927 to 1961.
During this period, two lead conservator-restorers managed the Kress Collection: Stephen
Pichetto from 1927 until his unexpected death in 1949, and then Mario Modestini from 1949
until the collection’s dispersal in 1961. Pichetto and Modestini shaped the Kress Collection in
critical ways, acting as curators as well as conservators. As private, artisanally trained
conservators, Pichetto and Modestini’s experiences placed them at the intersection of the art
market, museums, and the academy; thus, they were well equipped to guide Kress in developing
his collection. Their efforts transformed the collection materially and shaped the legacy of the
Kress Collection. In adhering to the taste and best practices of their era, Pichetto and Modestini
ensured a relative uniformity when it came to the paint surfaces, finishes, and framing of the
Kress Collection. Studying their conservation techniques helps us understand one of the key
ways in which the Collection developed a sense of cohesive identity.
The period between 1927 and 1961 represents a transformative period in the history of
art conservation. Building on late-nineteenth-century discoveries, scientific and technological
advances allowed conservators, curators, collectors, and art historians to study art in new ways in
the first decades of the twentieth century: the emergence of x-radiography, chemical analysis for
pigments and varnishes, and new transfer techniques promised to transform conservation and
restoration into empirical practices. Armed with new tools, many in the field hoped conservation
could be reframed as an objective process guided by scientific principles, rather than an
interpretive act. In the wake of these advances, the fields of conservation and restoration

185
professionalized rapidly—museums added departments, universities established programs, and
scholarly publications emerged. Yet by the late 1950s, in the wake of controversies on over-
cleaning and insensitive restorations, the positivist approach to conserving and restoring art lost
its luster.
The history of conservation remains an understudied topic within art history. Alessandro
Conti offered the first overview of the subject in his 1973 publication, Storia del restauro e della
conservazione delle opera d’arte.
1
His study stimulated further interest and research on the topic.
Conservators, reflecting on the history of their field, produce the majority of these publications.
2

Through major conferences on issues ranging from the relining of canvases to cleaning ancient
bronzes, conservators turned to study the practices and theories of their professional predecessors
in order to refine their own approaches and ethical guidelines.
3
To support continued dialogue,
the Getty Conservation Institute began their Readings in Conservation series, which gathers
seminal texts on the history, theories, and methodologies of conservation.
4
This series permits
scholars to trace the development of conservation as it is practiced today.

1
Alessandro Conti, Storia del restauro e della conservazione delle opera d’arte (Milan: Electa, 2005).
2
There is a noticeable shift within the field in the latter half of the 1970s. For example, from 1977 onward
the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation began to include more articles and book reviews
focused on the history of the profession.
3
For example, see papers from the Getty Research Institute Conservation Collection, Conference on
Comparative Lining Techniques: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, 23, 24 & 25 April
1974 (Greenwich: National Maritime Museum, 1974); David A. Scott, Jerry Podany, and Brian B.
Considine, eds. Proceedings of a Symposium on Ancient and Historic Metals organized by the J. Paul
Getty Museum and the Getty Conservation Institute, November 1991 (Marina del Rey, California: Getty
Conservation Institute, 1994).
4
The series includes Nicholas Stanley Price, M. Kirby Talley Jr. and Alessandra Melucco Vaccaro, eds.
Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage (Los Angeles: Getty
Conservation Institute, 1996); David Bomford and Mark Leonard, eds., Issues in the Conservation of
Paintings (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2004); Debra Hess Norris and Jennifer Jae
Gutierrez, eds. Issues in the Conservation of Photographs (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute,
2010); Mary M. Brooks and Dinah D. Eastop, eds. Changing Views of Textile Conservation (Los
Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2011); Sharon Sullivan and Richard Mackay, eds. Archaeological
Sites: Conservation and Management (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2013); Sarah Staniforth,
ed. Historical Perspectives on Preventative Conservation (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute,

186
Yet despite increased interest, scholarship on art conservation as a profession in the
United States remains thin. The majority of available literature consists of essays and memoirs
written by those engaged in, or close to, conservation labs and studios.
5
Francesca Bewer’s 2010
study, A Laboratory for the Arts: Harvard’s Fogg Museum and the Emergence of Conservation
in America, represents an exception to this trend.
6
A Laboratory for the Arts examines the Fogg
Museum’s role in professionalizing the practice of art conservation in the United States. Bewer, a
research curator at the Fogg, drew on extensive archival research in order to produce this critical
study. Her well-received book enriches our understanding of conservation in the United States in
the first half of the twentieth century, and hopefully will encourage further scholarship (one
could easily envision similar projects on the conservation centers at Oberlin College, New York
University, and Winterthur). It is important to remember, however, that most art conservators
practiced and continue to practice outside of an academic or institutional setting, and thus their
contributions to the field have been largely overlooked in the existing literature.
To date, histories of conservation tend to focus on centers of innovation in tracing the
development of the field. This limits our view of conservation practices in American museums
and the art market to primarily focusing on the then newly founded university-based training
programs for conservators. The impact of these institutions was substantial: the technologies,
methods, and ethical frameworks developed in places like the Fogg Museum and the
Intermuseum Art Conservation Center advanced and professionalized the field of conservation.
Yet traditional approaches to conservation and restoration continued to thrive concurrent to the

2013); Margaret Hoblen Ellis, ed. Historical Perspectives in the Conservation of Works of Art on Paper
(Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2015).
5
For example, Steven M.L. Aronson, “Lo and Behold! Eugene V. Thaw Recalls His Collaboration with a
Legendary Restorer,” Architectural Digest 64 (April 2007): 106–110; Edgar Munhall, “Remembering
Billy Suhr,” 1996, private collection.
6
Francesca G. Bewer, A Laboratory for the Arts: Harvard’s Fogg Museum and the Emergence of
Conservation in America, 1900–1950 (Cambridge: Harvard Art Museum, 2010).

187
creation of these programs. During the Gilded Age, European restorers trained to restore the
aesthetic appeal of artwork began practicing in the United States. Modestini, in particular,
belongs to this line of émigré master conservators that continues to the present. Studying the
Kress conservators permits us to trace this alternative narrative—one that attends to the standard
practices of conservation and restoration embraced by American museums, dealers, and
collectors in the mid-twentieth century, but that is rarely documented in historiography of
conservation.
To date, the conservation of the Kress Collection has been discussed only in a single
scholarly volume, published by the Kress Foundation.
7
Tracing this history more fully sheds new
light on conservation debates in the midcentury American art world and on the Kress
Foundation’s role in professionalizing the field of art conservation. In addition to enriching the
history of conservation, this study provides new insights regarding the differing conceptions
collectors and institutions held of art’s value and social function.

A note on terms: Conservation and Restoration
Only a small percentage of artworks created between the thirteenth and sixteenth
centuries survived into the twentieth century.
8
Those that did were—and are—prized as

7
Michele Marincola, ed., Studying and Conserving Paintings: Occasional Papers on the Samuel H. Kress
Collection (New York: Archetype Publications Ltd., 2006). Dianne Dwyer Modestini’s 2018 memoir,
Masterpieces—based on a manuscript written by her husband and collaborator, Mario Modestini—is also
a valuable resource for those interested in the Kress Collection’s history. Masterpieces pairs Dwyer
Modestini’s observations and insight with her husband’s stories about working with art all over the world.
Dianne Dwyer Modestini, Masterpieces: Based on a Manuscript by Mario Modestini (Florence: Cadmo,
2018).
8
Some scholars estimate that slightly less than a quarter of Italian Renaissance works survive (Laura
Cumming, A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits [New York: HarperPress, 2009], 13). These numbers
become slimmer in specific categories: for example, mass-produced prints and devotional objects survive
in disproportionately smaller numbers due to later disregard for their artistic value. On the other hand,
highly prized panel paintings often fell victim to the fragility of their supports. Scholars estimate that less

188
examples of Renaissance art that preserve a sense of the past for modern viewers. Yet as material
objects, these works of art should not be imagined as static objects: over the centuries their
supports and surfaces warp, crack, yellow, and chip. From nearly the moment of their creation,
works of art receive care from their creators, other artists, and restorers to protect and correct
them from the ravages of time. Restoration can also intentionally or unintentionally go beyond
repair, retouching or reframing artwork to better reflect the fashion of the day or respond to new
needs.
9

With the growth of the art market in the eighteenth century, especially in Amsterdam,
Paris and London, specialist picture restorers emerged to care for elite private art collections.
10

Controversies over their practices emerged almost immediately: already in 1796, the Louvre held
an exhibition of half-cleaned paintings to allay public fears about the alteration of treasured
masterpieces.
11
In addition to fearing the works might be damaged, many began to consider the
historical context that could be lost when artwork underwent restoration. This concern fueled a
heated debate over the restoration of architecture, monuments, and artwork in mid-nineteenth-
century Britain. The anti-Restoration movement, led by John Ruskin and William Morris, argued
restoration represented stylistic reconstructions, which destroyed the historical authenticity of the

than five percent of fourteenth-century panel paintings survive (Christopher Kleinhenz, ed. Medieval
Italy: An Encyclopedia [New York: Routledge, 2017], 834).
9
During the early modern period, paintings were often reworked for a variety of reasons. See for example
Cathleen Hoeniger, The Afterlife of Raphael’s Paintings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011);
Cathleen Hoeniger, The Renovation of Paintings in Tuscany, 1250–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).
10
Bomford and Leonard, 11. For more on the growth of the art market in the eighteenth century, see John
Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar
Straus Giroux, 1997).
11
Wendy Partridge, “Philosophies and Tastes in Nineteenth-Century Paintings Conservation,” in Studying
and Conserving Paintings: Occasional Papers on the Samuel H. Kress Collection, ed. Michele Marincola,
(New York: Archetype Publications Ltd., 2006), 19–30.

189
original creation. Instead they advocated for minimally invasive conservation, which would
preserve indications of age.
12

This debate continues to resonate in discussions about conservation ethics and practice to
the present day. Definitions for the terms conservation and restoration vary widely depending on
the period, place, and context in which they are defined. In French and Italian, the terms
restauration and restauro include all the activities often associated with conservation in English.
In nineteenth-century Britain, conservation and restoration represented two bitterly opposed
approaches to protecting cultural heritage. In English language publications, the connotations
around the terms “restoration” and “conservation” tend to reflect this history. In this chapter,
conservation refers to work to stabilize and protect artwork for the future, while restoration
indicates efforts to reinstate the aesthetic unity of a work of art. I will often refer to those
performing these tasks as conservator-restorers, since the two activities are closely linked and
usually historically performed by a single actor or team.
13

Conservation and restoration always represent acts of interpretation—a search for balance
between respecting the material history of an artwork and the desire to preserve its aesthetic
value. The way conservator-restorers manage the tension between these dual goals reflects
deeply held beliefs about the value and purpose of art and the artist, as well as the taste of their
own era.

Restoration and the Art Market
In the early twentieth century, the influx of Old Master paintings into the United States
created a new market for skilled conservator-restorers. Dealers, collectors, and museums alike

12
Jukka Jokilehto, A History of Architectural Conservation (New York: Routledge, 1999), 174–212.
13
Price, Talley, and Vaccaro, xii–xiii.

190
routinely sent off new acquisitions for conservation and restoration work upon entrance to their
collections. They all drew on the same relatively small pool of practitioners, meaning hundreds
of the Italian Renaissance paintings entering American collections underwent treatment by
conservator-restorers in New York. Stephen Pichetto, Kress’s primary conservator from 1927 to
1949, emerged from this milieu.
14

In the late 1920s, Pichetto was among the most prominent conservator-restorers working
in the United States. Nothing is known of his training as a restorer, which is not surprising in the
era before the establishment of conservation programs. Pichetto was born to Italian immigrant
parents in New York in 1887. He is virtually untraceable until 1908, when his name appears in a
New York City directory as offering restoration services on East Twenty-Eighth Street. Other
directory listings describe Pichetto as an artist and art-dealer; he likely engaged in all three
activities early in his career.
15
Through skilled practice and his charming personality, Pichetto
developed an impressive network of clients by the late 1920s. Joseph Duveen admired Pichetto’s
work, hiring him frequently to prepare paintings for sale at the Duveen Brothers gallery. Pichetto
also maintained an impressive roster of private clients including the Mellon, Lehman, and
Guggenheim families. From 1928 onward, he also served as consultant restorer at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
16
This powerful network introduced Pichetto to many significant
figures in the New York art world of the time, including Alessandro Contini Bonacossi.

14
William Suhr interview by Joyce Hill Stoner, April 20, 1977 and November 10, 1980. Winterthur
Museum, Library, and Archives [FAIC Oral History File], Winterthur, Delaware.
15
Ann Hoenigswald, “Stephen Pichetto, Conservator of the Kress Collection, 1927–1949,” in Studying
and Conserving Paintings: Occasional Papers on the Samuel H. Kress Collection, ed. Michele Marincola,
(London: Archetype Publications, 2006), 32–33.
16
Elizabeth Walmsley, “Italian Renaissance Paintings Restored in Paris by Duveen Brothers, Inc., c.
1927–1929,” in Facture: Conservation, Science, Art History, eds. Daphne Barbour and E. Melanie
Gifford (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 1:63–4, n. 26.

191
Contini admired Pichetto’s work, praising him as a master of his craft. In March 1927, he
hired Pichetto to conserve Kress’s newly acquired Madonna and Child Enthroned with Angels,
his first purchase from the Continis.
17
Thus, Pichetto became involved with the Kress Collection
at precisely the moment Kress began collecting ambitiously. From this point until his death in
1949, Pichetto worked closely with the Kress Collection. His workshop cleaned, stabilized, and
restored hundreds of Kress Collection paintings over the course of these two decades.
Pichetto’s conservation and restoration practices reflect the standard of the period. His
studio conserved paintings by protecting their structural stability, and restored unity to their
images through integrative inpainting and varnishing.
18
Like the early modern artists whose
pieces he handled, Pichetto developed a team of skilled assistants to help him perform his work.
The process of conserving and restoring a work of art unfolded over a series of steps, overseen
by different members of the studio. Pichetto or a member of his team would begin by cleaning a
painting. This process, using both tools and solvents, removed old layers of varnish along with
grime. Described in the seventeenth century by the Florentine writer Filippo Baldinucci as the
“skin” of a painting, varnish consists of a resin and a solvent. Together they create a clear coat
that protects the painted surface, saturates its colors, and creates a luminous sheen. As they age,
paintings often receive subsequent layers of varnish in order to restore their shine. Yet over time,

17
Contini wrote that as part of their agreement, Pichetto would “from time to time give the picture
whatever care it may need.” Alessandro Contini Bonacossi to Samuel H. Kress, March 1, 1927. Samuel H.
Kress Foundation Archives [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 110, Contini-Bonacossi, Alessandro: Bills of
Sale (1 of 3)], New York, New York. Contini wrote Rush Kress a letter praising Pichetto’s work in
greater detail after his death. Alessandro Contini Bonacossi to Rush Kress, January 23, 1949. Samuel H.
Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 111, Contini-Bonacossi, Alessandro:
Correspondence (1 of 2)], New York, New York.
18
In the 1930s, the Fogg Museum developed the term “inpainting” to mark a distinction between the
work of conservators and that of restorers, who performed “retouching.” The terms refer to the same task,
and I shall use both throughout. However, retouching indicates a greater concern with restoring a work of
art aesthetically. See Dianne Dwyer Modestini, “John Brealey and the Cleaning of Paintings,”
Metropolitan Museum Journal 40 (2005): 27.

192
varnishes—especially the organic varnishes used by early modern artists—yellow and darken.
Though Baldinucci described this effect as often enhancing the work of art, many, including
Dürer and Rubens, disagreed.
19

By the early twentieth century, conservator-restorers regularly stripped paintings’
surfaces of discolored varnish to allow bright colors and crisp details to reemerge. The best
practices of the mid-twentieth century called for removal to maintain a thin layer of existing
varnish so as not to interfere with the paint layer. Nevertheless, conservator-restorers understood
removal carried inherent risks, for stripping old varnish might carry away toned glazes and other
fine details added by the artist.
20
Aware of these dangers, Pichetto cleaned all paintings in his
studio himself, rather than entrust members of his staff with this responsibility.
21
He also deemed
it preferable to leave the painted surface untouched when possible.
22

At the same time, Pichetto’s studio sought to protect the structural stability of the early
modern Kress Collection paintings. In the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of Kress’s early modern
Italian paintings were painted on panel; before the late fifteenth century, painting on canvas was
unusual in Italy. Panel paintings present specific challenges to conservators because wood is
inherently unstable. Panels expand, contract, and curve in response to variations in humidity and
temperature. Many early modern Italian paintings consist of a composite of several panels, and

19
Cesare Brandi, “The Cleaning of Pictures in Relation to Patina, Varnish, and Glazes,” Burlington
Magazine 91, no. 556 (1949): 183–9. For Dürer and Rubens’s dislike of yellowed or darkened varnish,
see the introduction to Part II in Price, Talley, Vaccaro, 167–8. There is documentary evidence that Italian
artists varnished panel paintings as early as the fourteenth century, though the practice probably greatly
precedes this reference (Bomford and Leonard, xvi).
20
Brandi, “The Cleaning of Pictures.”
21
This is according to Pichetto’s assistant, Paul Kiehart. Hoenigswald, “Stephen Pichetto,” 39.
22
In February 1932, Kress sent Reginald Poland notes on the technique used to clean his fifteenth-century
Spanish altarpiece. Samuel Kress to Reginald Poland, February 1932. San Diego Museum of Art
[Curatorial files], San Diego, California.

193
as each individual piece of wood moves over time, gaps and cracks can emerge on the original
surface of the painting.
23

Pichetto’s team stabilized early modern panel paintings by fitting them with sturdy
cradles—lattices of wood that would hold the original panels in a fixed position (Fig. 3.1). First,
Angelo Fatta (one of Pichetto’s team of woodworkers) would thin the original panel. Next, the
woodworkers built a cradle on the panel’s verso side; usually this consisted of mahogany
members oriented vertically, with crosspieces of another hardwood like pine or maple. Once
complete, the cradle would be lightly waxed.
24

Though cradling was standard practice among American conservators during this period,
Pichetto’s heavy and carefully finished cradles are distinctive. The cradle prevented the panel
from bowing or warping, but it could also pose dangers since immobilized wood is more likely
to crack. Pichetto believed the benefits of cradling panel paintings outweighed the risks, and his
studio fitted many of Kress’s purchases with this form of backing. Three-quarters of a century
later, the Kress Collection paintings bound with Pichetto’s cradles have tolerated them well,
showing relatively few signs of cracking.
25

Paintings on canvas also received stabilizing treatment in Pichetto’s studio. As paintings
age, their canvas supports can wrinkle, stretch, shrink, and grow fragile; naturally, an unstable
surface disrupts the painted surface of an image. In the late seventeenth century, those caring for

23
Many early modern artists anticipate this separation and intentionally avoided placing faces or other
key aspects of the composition along panel joins (David Bomford, introduction to The Structural
Conservation of Panel Paintings, ed. Kathleen Dardes and Andrea Rothe [Los Angeles: Getty
Conservation Institute, 1998], xvii).
24
In the case of the Nativity by Francesco di Giorgio Martini, the panel was thinned to 5 mm (George
Bisacca, “Structural Considerations in the Treatment of a Nativity by Francesco di Giorgio Martini,” in
Dardes and Rothe, 346–7).
25
Dianne Dwyer Modestini and Mario Modestini, “Mario Modestini, Conservator of the Kress Collection,
1949–1961,” in Marincola, 46. Some cradles have been removed in recent decades. Of course, all thinned
panels have lost part of their history; the verso of a panel often bears stamps, seals, and inscriptions that
provide useful information about the painting’s provenance.

194
paintings on canvas began relining them, a process that involves using adhesives to attach a new
stronger canvas to the original support.
26
Pichetto’s assistants Henry Hecht and Girard
Roggeman regularly relined Kress’s paintings on canvas as a preventative measure.
27
They
followed the standard approach of American restorers in relining paintings, using a heavy hot
iron to adhere the old and new canvas supports. Today, Dianne Dwyer Modestini writes that she
still displays Pichetto’s “fifty-pound” iron engraved with “property of S.H. Kress Foundation” to
her conservation students to visually demonstrate how and why many early modern paintings
came to possess their flattened surfaces.
28
In addition to leveling impasto, the hot irons used to
reline paintings can impress the weave texture of the canvas onto the paint itself. Once a painting
is relined, the process must be repeated at regular intervals as the new backing loosens as its ages.
Today conservators recommend waiting to reline a painting until absolutely necessary.
29

However, in the 1920s and 1930s, Pichetto’s approach represented standard practice.
Aiming to return paintings to their original states, Pichetto’s team worked to preserve and
restore the painting’s surface once it had been cleaned and stabilized. Rosemary Sullivan worked
to consolidate flaking paint, while Steven Story, Dan Coppari, and Paul Kiehart retouched areas
of loss.
30
Pichetto and his studio used imitative inpainting techniques, seamlessly integrating
their additions into the work of art. Retouching would be executed in reversible paints, so it
could be removed in the future. However, viewers would not be able to visually distinguish
between original and restored portions of the painting. For example, photographs taken after

26
Westby Percival-Perscott, “The Relining Cycle (1974),” in Bomford and Leonard, 253.
27
Hoenigswald, 36.
28
Dianne Dwyer Modestini is professor of paintings conservation at the Institute of Fine Arts. This
account comes from Mario Modestini’s memoir. Modestini, Masterpieces, 195.
29
Caroline Villers, introduction to Lining Paintings: Papers from the Greenwich Conference on
Comparative Lining Techniques (Greenwich: Archetype Publications, 2003), xi.
30
Ann Hoenigswald, Renée Lorion, and Elizabeth Walmsley, “Stephen Pichetto and Conservation in
America: A Review of the Evidence,” in Past Practices–Future Prospects, ed. Andrew Oddy and Sandra
Smith (London: The British Museum, 2001), 125.

195
cleaning the painting The Healing of Blind Bartimaeus reveal areas of loss that are not visually
detectable after the inpainting process (Fig. 3.2–3).
31
In restoring lacunae in this manner,
Pichetto and his team sought to return the work of art to its original appearance, rather than
preserving indications of its age and history.
After cleaning, restoring, and stabilizing a work of art, Pichetto’s studio would provide
the painting with a fresh coat of varnish. The taste of the era called for a smooth and shiny
surface, one that imitated the glossy and highly saturated images available in magazines and
reproductions at the time. Yet Pichetto remained cognizant of the demands of early modern
Italian paintings. He understood, for example, that the gilded surfaces of gold ground paintings
should not be varnished, as the varnish could destabilize and flatten the gilded surface.
Nonetheless, his studio used varnish liberally—applying “thick layers of shellac and natural
resins”—that later conservators and curators have noted are notoriously difficult to remove.
32

Pichetto’s contemporaries performed similar interventions in cleaning and restoring
works of art. His studio received newly acquired paintings often directly from dealers, whose
own staff had already conserved or restored the painting prior to its sale. For this reason, it is
difficult to document when particular restoration campaigns occurred.
33
Pichetto and his
contemporaries kept limited records of their interventions, and the few documents he maintained
were lost after his death.
34
Nonetheless, contemporary conservators associate particular sets of

31
Pichetto did not clean or restore this panel, which Kress acquired after his death. However this method
of restoration is consistent with his practice.
32
Walter Liedtke, Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 2007), 1: 624.
33
Mario Modestini argued that on the contrary, Pichetto rarely cleaned Kress’s pictures since the dealers
routinely cleaned paintings before offering them for sale (Modestini, Masterpieces, 194). Of course,
Pichetto worked with art dealers—in fact, as discussed above, he met Kress through Contini.
34
Mary Davis to Fern Rusk Shapley, February 21, 1963. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2:
Kress Institutions, Box 126, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art: Correspondence: General (4 of
5)], New York, New York.

196
practices—thick, layered varnish, particular inpainting materials and methods, and cradling
techniques—with Pichetto.
35

Through the process of restoration, Pichetto’s studio made Kress’s early modern
paintings smooth and planar, erased their lacunae, and buffed them to the high shine thought
desirable at the time. Pichetto and his team privileged the painted image over other material
aspects of the painting; returning the painting to its “original state” did not, in their estimation,
require maintaining its original structure and backing. The paint film, as the record of the artist’s
hand, provided for Pichetto and for Kress the most compelling information about the work.
Shaped by the art historical preoccupations of the era, both men expected the Kress Collection to
convey the history of art as a progression of style, one that highlighted the development and
interconnections of individual artists and schools. Thus, in his work as an interpreter of the Kress
Collection, Pichetto’s restoration work was guided not only by the taste of his era, but by its
driving questions and concerns. The preoccupation with attributions shaped the art market and
museums equally during this period, and explains why restoration in this market varied little in
these differing contexts.

Framing the Kress Collection
Once conservation and restoration work concluded, Pichetto’s studio reframed paintings.
A small number of Kress Collection paintings possess their original frames; these rare examples
are usually quattrocento pictures whose engaged frames were constructed in tandem with the
panel (Fig. 3.4–5).
36
In other cases, paintings exist within antique frames—often modified to

35
Ken Sutherland, “Bleached shellac picture varnishes: characterization and case studies,” Journal of the
Institute of Conservation 33, no. 2 (September 2010): 142–3.
36
For example, Vittore Carpaccio’s panel painting, Christ Blessing, retains its original frame. Museum
label for Vittore Carpaccio, Christ Blessing, New Orleans Museum of Art.

197
make them lighter and more suitable to the taste of the day—that were added by later collectors
and dealers.
37
Pichetto’s studio retained original and antique frames when possible, but most
Kress Collection paintings had modern frames. Often these frames came from the dealers that
sold artwork to Kress, but in other cases Pichetto’s studio constructed them themselves.
Pichetto’s studio produced a variety of frame styles, but they favored a distinctive
shadow box vitrine. This style, seen for example on the Kress Collection painting of the
Madonna by Domenico di Bartolo (Fig. 3.6), was popular during this period.
38
The shadow box
vitrine, which can also be seen on a fourteenth-century painting of St. Margaret Holding the
Cross from the Portland Museum of Art, was an appealing option as it addressed both practical
and aesthetic issues raised by displaying Renaissance art in a twentieth-century museum (Fig.
3.7). Pichetto’s shadowbox frames are thickest at their back edges, progressively receding until
the frame meets the flush plane of the painting. The protruding outer edges of the frame
protected Kress’s paintings from the careless brushes and bumps of viewers moving through
galleries. The overhanging frames also improved viewing conditions by partially shielding the
painting from the heat and glare produced by overhead lighting. For security and purposes of
climate control, the frame easily converted into a true shadow box with the addition of a glass
front.
39
Finally, shadow boxes lent small paintings a sense of gravitas; many Italian Renaissance

37
Often, dealers and collectors found Old Master frames too heavy and cumbersome for their new
contexts (Timothy J. Newbery, The Robert Lehman Collection XIII: Frames [New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 2007], xii).
38
Duveen selected the frame encasing this Madonna in the mid-1920s (Walmsley, “Italian Renaissance
Paintings,” 72–7).
39
Kress had glass attached to the shadow box frames when they were in his home, because it was not
climate controlled. He had the glass removed upon donating them to the National Gallery of Art since
they had a system in place to ensure a steady temperature and humidity level within the galleries. Samuel
Kress to David Finley, March 13, 1941. Library of Congress [Box 33, David E. Finley Subject File NGA:
Samuel H. Kress Collection Correspondence, March 1944–July 1942], Washington, D.C.

198
panel paintings in the United States are fragments of dissembled altarpieces that could otherwise
risk appearing inconsequential on large gallery walls.
40

Beyond encasing the paintings, frames construct context for a work of art. Prior to the
twentieth century, paintings routinely received stylish rather than historicizing frames. Though
the efforts to restore and recreate period frames would not come until the latter part of the
century, Pichetto’s studio strove to evoke a sense of the past through their framing strategies.
The shadow box is a pastiche, drawing on the visual vocabulary of early modern Italian material
culture. In terms of their structure, shadowbox frames resemble cassetta frames. This adaptable
style was popular all over Italy throughout the early modern period. Cassetta frames consist of
molded back and sight edges divided by a frieze, often decorated by painting, inlay, or carving.
For example, sgrafitto embellishes the frieze of a frame created in the Veneto in the mid-
sixteenth century (Fig. 3.8). Pichetto’s shadow boxes are also constructed of molded back and
sight edges separated by a frieze, in this case usually decorated by panels of velvet selected to
complement the painting. The crimson velvet embedded in the frame of St. Margaret Holding
the Cross is faded and threadbare now, but the color continues to add warmth and luminosity to
the painting’s gilded surface (Fig. 3.7). In echoing the structure of a cassetta frame, the shadow
box visually reinforced the painting as a work of Italian Renaissance art.
Frame makers further imbued the shadow box vitrine with a sense of the past by lining
the frieze with period velvets. During this period, collections of early modern painting often
appeared in tandem with (roughly) contemporaneous examples of fine textiles. Firms like
Duveen Brothers, French and Company, and White, Allom and Company collected velvets,
brocades, and lace created from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries to decorate their clients’

40
Modestini, Masterpieces, 190.

199
homes.
41
When appropriate examples could not be obtained, they also used modern
reproductions of early modern textiles. Pichetto likely acquired examples of early modern
velvets himself. However, Kress also gave him clippings from his own collection. He purchased
hundreds of examples of European velvets, brocades, and lace, predominately from Italy.
Kress purchased textiles from Alessandro Contini Bonacossi in the late 1920s, but not
exclusively.
42
His inventory records purchases from some of the most prominent dealers of fine
and decorative arts working in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. In Venice, Kress bought valuable
velvets from Adolph Loewi, a German dealer of decorative arts.
43
In Florence, he acquired
antique textiles from famed dealers like Giuseppe Salvadori, Achille de Clemente, and Luigi
Bellini.
44
In Rome and New York, he also frequented sales held by the American Art
Association.
45
Though he purchased paintings exclusively from Contini, Kress knew and gave
business to other prominent dealers.

41
Christa C. Mayer-Thurman, The Robert Lehman Collection XIV: European Textiles (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), vii–xx.
42
Bill of sale from Alessandro Contini Bonacossi to Samuel H. Kress (Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 110, Contini-Bonacossi, Alessandro: Bills of Sale (1 of 3)], New
York, New York).
43
For example, there is a seventeenth-century plum velvet altar cloth from Loewi, purchased June 15,
1932, in storage at the Birmingham Museum of Art. For more on Loewi, see John Harris, Moving Rooms:
The Trade in Architectural Salvages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 184.
44
Simone Bargellini, Antiquari dei ieri (Florence: Casa Editrice, 1981).
45
For example, Kress purchased the aforementioned velvet used to cover his sitting room desk from De
Clemente in Florence on May 24, 1922. For the full list of dealers, see pages 102–106 of the 1941
inventory of Kress’s apartment (Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box
115, Collection: Inventories and Valuations: 1020 Apartment Inventory (Secretary’s Copy, May 10,
1941)], New York, New York). On Salvadori, see Denise M. Budd, “Charles Mather Ffoulke and the
Market for Tapestries in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” in Dealing Art on Both Sides of the Atlantic,
1860–1940, ed. Lynn Catterson (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 167. For more on Achille de Clemente and his
collection see Elizabeth E. Gardner, A Bibliographical Repertory of Italian Private Collections, vol. II
(Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 2002), 18; American Art Association, Italian Furniture of the Renaissance
– Rare Majolica, Brocades, Velvets, Renaissance Bronzes, Sculptures, Stone and Terra Cotta Groups,
Primitive and Renaissance Paintings. The Collection of Achille de Clemente, Florence, Italy, Sold by his
Order (New York: Anderson Galleries, 1931). For Bellini, see Lucia Mannini, “Luigi Bellini, antiquario,
collezionista, e mecenate,” in Le Stanze dei Tesori: Collezionisti Antiquari a Firenze tra Ottocento e
Novecento, ed. Lucia Mannini (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2011), 245–50.

200
Kress admired finely wrought textiles as examples of decorative art, displaying a panel of
brocade and a fine cut-velvet cope in his sitting room alongside his art collection (Fig. 3.9). He
also repurposed historic textiles to decorate his home.
46
Cuttings and fragments served to
recover furniture as well as enhance new picture frames. Finer pieces functioned as independent
decorative elements. For example, in the same sitting room, a large square of green sixteenth-
century Florentine cut-velvet edged with gilt embroidery served to cover a desk (Fig. 3.10–11).
47

The velvet provides a ground for the Renaissance-style sculpture of a kneeling woman
(presumably a Madonna or saint) and for a sixteenth-century mortar displayed on top of the desk.
In layering early modern brocaded velvets over his furniture, Kress echoed the sixteenth-century
Italian practice of displaying Islamic carpets on tables and railings; in both cases, rare textiles
serve to indicate luxury and worldliness (Fig. 3.12).
48
Thus, in his apartment, Kress’s textiles
served to provide an appropriate context for his art, demonstrating his investment in evoking a
Renaissance aesthetic.
Collectors often used textiles in crafting their method of displaying artwork. Bernard
Berenson, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Arthur and Hortense Acton all hung fourteenth- to
sixteenth-century paintings on top of antique textiles (Fig. 3.13). Florentine dealers, most notably

46
In the inventory of Kress’s penthouse, the five-page section dedicated to his velvets distinguishes
between those valued as decorative objects and those either considered suitable for or already used as
“cuttings” (1941 Inventory of Kress’s residence, 102–6. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1:
Kress Collection, Box 115, Collection: Inventories and Valuations: 1020 Apartment Inventory
(Secretary’s Copy, May 10, 1941)] New York, New York).
47
I believe the velvet table covering in this photograph to be Kress no. Ve-21. The Kress Foundation
donated this velvet cover to the Columbia Museum of Art in 1963. For documentation of the gift, see F.C.
Geiger to Richard Craft, December 2, 1963. Columbia Museum of Art [Curatorial Records, 1963.58],
Columbia, South Carolina.
48
See Lisa Monnas, Renaissance Velvets (London: V&A Publishing, 2012); Rosamond Mack, From
Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300-1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001); Rosamond Mack, “Lotto: A Carpet Connoisseur,” in Lorenzo Lotto: Rediscovered Master of the
Renaissance, ed. David Alan Brown, Peter Humphrey, Mauro Lucco (Washington, D.C.: National
Gallery of Art, 1999), 59–67.

201
Stefano Bardini, popularized this style of display in the late nineteenth century, believing that
juxtaposing objects of varying media infused works of fine art with life. Often pairing items that
emerged from differing periods and regions, this approach did not attempt to recreate the historic
context in which these works of art originally appeared.
49
Nevertheless, one could draw a parallel
between this mode of display and the common motif in fifteenth-century Italian painting of
presenting the Madonna before a curtain of fine Italian cloth, seen for example in paintings by
Benozzo Gozzoli and Masolino (Fig. 3.15–16). Whether or not nineteenth- and twentieth-century
collectors had this precedent in mind, their use of early modern textiles aimed to create a
Renaissance aesthetic that would engage the modern viewer. Within his home, Kress adopted
this pattern of displaying Renaissance art alongside textiles that evoked this period. In doing so,
Kress displayed his desire to be perceived as a collector invested in and attentive to the past.
However, as soon as they left his apartment, Kress’s Italian Renaissance paintings ceased
to exist within this aesthetic arrangement. Kress’s gifts and traveling exhibition did not include
Renaissance velvets and brocades in the 1920s and 1930s. However, by embedding early modern
velvets into the frame itself, the shadow box vitrines made this aesthetic mode of display mobile.
Furthermore, the frames visually united the Kress Collection paintings while they were on tour.
As dealers and collectors did with their collections at large, Pichetto drew on historic materials
and styles in order to create something that suited contemporary taste while evoking the
Renaissance. In this respect, Pichetto acted as a valued partner to Samuel Kress, who relied on
him to help bring to life his vision for his collection of Italian Renaissance art.

49
Francesca Baldry, “Rooms of Taste. Houses and House Museums of Collectors and Antique Dealers in
Florence between the 19
th
and 20
th
Centuries,” in Mannini, 45–64. Gardner even chose to pair her prized
Titian, The Rape of Europa, with a panel from one of her Worth of Paris gowns (Fig. 3.14). Fausto
Calderai and Alan Chong, Furnishing a Museum: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Collection of Italian
Furniture (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2011), 242.

202
Technological Connoisseurship
Pichetto quickly became one of Kress’s most trusted advisors. The collector sought his
counsel in making acquisitions not long after their initial meeting. Pichetto’s experience as an
artist, conservator, and dealer prepared him for this task. He provided opinions about the relative
quality of available works, helped negotiate sales, and offered suggestions about the future
growth of the collection.
One of Pichetto’s primary jobs was to help Kress avoid purchasing fakes. Forgeries long
represented one of the chief sources of anxiety for Americans collecting early modern European
art.
50
In the nineteenth century, James Jackson Jarves warned American collectors of the dangers
of buying forged and heavily restored works of art in Italy, “that exhaustless quarry of ‘originals’
and ‘old masters’.”
51
In the latter half of the 1920s, Jarves’s words proved to be prescient: a
series of forgery scandals, including the aforementioned Demotte affair, rocked the antiquities
markets.
52

To avoid embroiling Kress in similar controversies, Pichetto examined paintings to
determine their authenticity. For American collectors suspicious of elite connoisseurs,
conservators like Pichetto offered assessments perceived to be more objective and reliant on
scientific evidence. This is one of the reasons conservator-restorers enjoyed a more elevated role
in the American art world than did their European contemporaries; they were seen as having a

50
Albert Boime, “America’s Purchasing Power and the Evolution of European Art in the Late Nineteenth
Century,” in Saloni, Gallerie, Musei e loro influenza sullo sviluppo dell’arte dei secoli XIX e XX, ed.
Francis Haskell (Bologna: Editrice CLUEB, 1981), 123–140.
51
James Jackson Jarves, “Italian Experiences Collecting Old Masters,” Atlantic Monthly (1860): 578–586.
52
For example, in addition to the Demotte case discussed in Chapter 1, a scandal erupted in 1928 when
Alceo Dossena revealed he had forged Renaissance and antique sculptures. Dossena argued the dealers
knowingly sold his works as antiquities to prominent collectors including Helen Clay Frick. Patrizia
Cappellini, “The Art Dealer and the Devil: Remarks on the Relationship of Elia Volpi and Wilhelm von
Bode,” in Dealing Art on Both Sides of the Atlantic 1860–1940, ed. Lynn Catterson (Boston: Brill, 2017),
193–200.

203
specific and tangible form of expertise.
53
Pichetto advised Kress against purchasing works with
complicated conservation histories, aware of the dangers of wishful restoration. However,
Pichetto’s ability to confirm attributions was limited to what he could perceive from the painted
surface of a picture. For assurance, he encouraged Kress to engage with new research that
applied scientific advances to the process of determining attributions.
In 1932, Kress invited Alan Burroughs, a researcher at the Fogg Museum, to use x-
radiography to study his collection. The son of the Metropolitan Museum curator Bryson
Burroughs, Alan Burroughs was curator of paintings at the Minneapolis Art Institute. In the early
1920s, he grew intrigued about how x-radiography might allow art historians to study paintings
in new ways. In 1925, he left Minneapolis to join Edward Forbes’s team at the Fogg Museum in
order to pursue this new avenue of research.
54

Burroughs was not the first to deploy x-radiography to study art. Shortly after Röntgen’s
discovery of x-rays in 1895, paintings underwent x-radiography scans to ascertain details of their
condition.
55
Materials of differing densities allow x-rays to pass through them to a greater or
lesser degree: for example, nails and pigments heavily composed of lead appear opaque in the
image, while other lighter pigments permit x-rays to penetrate them. By studying x-radiograph
images, specialists can determine where repainting occurred or detect unseen structural issues.
Beyond understanding the condition of paintings, Burroughs believed x-radiography
would help scholars understand the working methods of artists.
56
X-rays record variations in
thickness, and thus make it possible to trace brushwork. Burroughs argued that the study of

53
For more on the tension between connoisseurs and conservators, see John Brewer, The American
Leonardo: A Tale of Obsession, Art and Money (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 143–155.
54
Alan Burroughs, Art Criticism from a Laboratory (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1938), viii.
55
Charles F. Bridgman, “The amazing patent on the radiography of paintings.” Studies in Conservation 9,
no. 4 (1964), 135–9; Burroughs, Art Criticism from a Laboratory, vii-ix.
56
Bewer, 95–7.

204
brushwork, which required “noting general tendencies and eccentricities,” could allow scholars
to begin reconstructing the individual habits of an artist.
57
For Burroughs, x-radiography
promised to make attributing paintings a more scientific practice.
In order to make attributions, Burroughs needed to develop a database of images to study.
The Fogg Museum tasked him with creating “shadowgraphs”—the images created by x-
radiography—of the works in their collection. In the late 1920s, the Fogg also sent Burroughs on
two expeditions to x-radiograph paintings at European institutions including the National Gallery
in London, the Louvre and the Kaiser Friedrich Museum.
58
The collections Burroughs produced
on this trip proved invaluable for his work; he created hundreds of x-radiographs of signed or
documented paintings that allowed him to begin categorizing individual artist’s working styles.
59

Burroughs’s approach provided a welcome counterbalance to the authority of
connoisseurs. In the art market as well as in museums, connoisseurs’ opinions determined
attributions. The connoisseur’s expertise emerged from a lifetime of studying artwork in public
and private collections. The prolonged study, travel, and social connections necessary to develop
a connoisseurial eye meant connoisseurs were a privileged group. They often wrote art criticism
or history, but they also provided opinions for dealers—as Bernard Berenson famously did for
Joseph Duveen. In offering works of art to Kress, Contini routinely provided photographs
bearing the written opinions of connoisseurs. Kress carefully maintained these statements—
written by critics like Roberto Longhi, Lionello Venturi, and Bernard Berenson—in his files as
evidence of the painting’s authorship.

57
Burroughs, Art Criticism from a Laboratory, 25.
58
Ibid, viii.
59
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 108, Collection: Burroughs,
Alan: Reports and Correspondence (1 of 4)], New York, New York.

205
However, connoisseurship did not represent an exact science. Beyond an educated eye,
connoisseurs rarely possessed clear professional credentials. Furthermore, competing critics
often disagreed, underlining the seemingly subjective nature of their opinions.
60
Kress’s files
reflect this disarray; few Kress Collection paintings possess unanimous attributions among the
half-dozen critics that offered their opinions to Contini. Though still an interpretive mode of
studying images, Burrough’s use of shadowgraphs seemed to promise evidence-based
attributions.
Kress invited Burroughs to x-ray the paintings in his collection and provide written
opinions regarding their authorship. He sent Burroughs the existing array of attributions he held
from art critics, which Burroughs could support or contradict. The trove of shadowgraphs
Burroughs created in European museums served as a powerful comparative tool in his
assessment of the Kress Collection. He drew upon them to settle disputed attributions. For
example, scholars disagreed whether Titian or Giorgione painted Kress’s Portrait of a Venetian
Gentleman (Fig. 3.17–18). Differentiating between these two closely related artists represented,
in Burroughs’s own words, “a boiling problem, one of the most complex and confounding
subjects in art history.” In fact, he argued this would represent “an insoluble problem” if not for
the fact that they differed significantly in their brushwork.
61
To determine the authorship of
Kress’s panel, Burroughs compared an x-ray of the Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman to
shadowgraphs of art attributed to Titian and to Giorgione. He concluded the “coarse brushwork”
and “linear drawing of the features, flatly painted in underpaint” visible under the surface of
Kress’s painting were unmistakable signs of “Giorgione’s graphic manner.”
62
In many cases,

60
Brewer, The American Leonardo, 136–62.
61
Burroughs, Art Criticism from a Laboratory, 110–11. The National Gallery of Art now attributes this
painting to Cariani.
62
Ibid, 116.

206
Burroughs affirmed the connoisseurs’ opinions of Kress’s paintings, but he did not hesitate to
overturn attributions. For example, he argued against Berenson’s attribution of a portrait of a
monk to Simone Martini, writing that the work did not resemble other paintings by the master x-
rayed to date.
63

Burroughs offered his assessments of the Kress Collection confidentially, promising to
keep the shadowgraphs of Kress’s paintings private as well.
64
Though this project built on his
research at the Fogg Museum, it was a private enterprise. The staff at the Fogg distanced
themselves from Burrough’s efforts for Kress, undoubtedly hesitant to become involved in
evaluating private collections. Nonetheless, letters between Burroughs and Pichetto suggest that
Kress intended to release all the images for the public in the future as a resource.
65
This proved
true to a degree; in the years to come, the Kress Foundation often included Burrough’s reports
and images in the dossier of documents sent with donated works of art.
For collectors and their milieu, Burroughs’s research promised to bring scientific
certainty to the long-plagued field of attributing artwork. X-radiography allowed conservators
and art historians to analyze aspects of a painting previously undetected by the human eye.
Nevertheless, interpreting this evidence remained a connoisseurial exercise, dependent on the
reviewer’s knowledge and assessment of other works of art. Kress kept Burroughs’s reports filed

63
Notes from Burroughs to the Kress Foundation, December 13, 1939, Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 108, Collection: Burroughs, Alan: Reports and Correspondence],
New York, New York.
64
He published the shadowgraph of Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman in Art Criticism from a Laboratory
courtesy of Kress, as indicated in the caption for Figure 37.
65
Alan Burroughs to Stephen Pichetto, July 25, 1944. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1:
Kress Collection, Box 109, Collection: Burroughs, Alan: Reports and Correspondence (2 of 4)], New
York, New York.

207
alongside the attributions offered by connoisseurs, demonstrating his belief that both provided
valuable interpretations of the works in his collection.
66

In partnering with Burroughs, Pichetto engaged with new modes of studying paintings.
However, Burroughs’s studies with x-radiographs employed new technology to investigate
questions long-posed by his connoisseur predecessors. For this reason, the introduction of
shadowgraphs did not significantly change Pichetto’s practices as a conservator-restorer. Their
conversations nonetheless demonstrate the growing interest across the field in investigating the
material make-up of early modern artwork.

Curating the Kress Collection
In the 1930s, Pichetto began to surpass the Continis as Kress’s primary advisor.
67
In
addition to conserving the Kress Collection, Pichetto became its de facto curator. He helped
Kress select art to acquire and organized the growing collection. As discussed in the previous
chapter, he played an integral role in organizing the traveling “Exhibition of Italian Paintings lent
by Mr. Samuel H. Kress” in 1932–5. He worked intensively to make the exhibition a reality,
performing tasks ranging from writing the catalogue entries to designing traveling cases for the
paintings.

66
From 1932 until his program folded in 1946, Burroughs produced shadowgraphs and reports for the
Kress Foundation. When Harvard shut down the department in 1946, Burroughs asked Pichetto if the
Kress Foundation might consider sponsoring his research (Alan Burroughs to Stephen Pichetto, October 4,
1946, Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, “Collection: Burroughs, Alan:
Reports and Correspondence (2 of 4)], New York, New York). The Kress Foundation did not assume
responsibility for Burrough’s research project as a whole, but in 1943 they gave him a large grant to copy
his original x-radiographs, made with highly flammable cellulose nitrate, onto safe film. In exchange,
Burroughs provided prints and reports regarding Kress Collection pictures. He continued to research
paintings from the Kress Collection until the early 1950s (Bewer, 226).
67
John Walker, Self-Portrait with Donors (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974), 142.

208
Pichetto also helped Kress hone his vision for his collection. For the traveling exhibition,
he encouraged Kress to boldly claim that he intended the traveling exhibition “to encourage a
more cultured understanding” not only of Italian art, but of art in the broadest sense.
68
According
to John Walker, Pichetto also pushed Kress to collect more boldly. He steered the collector away
from his sole reliance on the Continis, persuading Kress to acquire prized examples of art from
major dealers like Duveen Brothers and Knoedler.
69
It is not accidental that Pichetto joined the
board of trustees for the Kress Foundation in 1936; that same year, Kress tasked the organization
with planning the future of his collection. Once Pichetto joined the board, Kress and the Kress
Foundation entered a new, more ambitious phase of building the Kress Collection.
70

Once Kress decided to donate the majority of his collection to the National Gallery of Art,
he again turned to Pichetto to ensure the museum fulfilled his vision. Pichetto participated in
discussions over which Kress Collection works would go to the National Gallery in 1941 and in
subsequent years. During the initial building and redesign campaigns, Pichetto structured the
gallery spaces; he selected wall colors, oversaw lighting configurations, and provided installation
plans for artwork.
71

Pichetto also conserved and restored Kress’s artwork in preparation for its unveiling in
the National Gallery. In arranging his gift to the museum, Kress proudly described Pichetto’s
work to date on his collection to be “of the highest quality.” In the 1939 indenture documents,
Kress stipulated that in the future, the National Gallery of Art must always obtain written

68
Correspondence from Stephen Pichetto to Samuel Kress, August 16, 1932. Samuel H. Kress
Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 109, Correspondence: Pichetto, Stephen: Reports
and Correspondence], New York, New York.
69
Walker, Self-Portrait with Donors, 142.
70
“Past Presidents and Trustees,” Kress Foundation, accessed November 4, 2018, http://www.kress
foundation.org/about/past_presidents_and_trustees/ The shift in planning and collecting is discussed in
Chapter 1.
71
Hoenigswald, 33.

209
approval from himself or the Kress Foundation before moving forward with any restoration work
on his collection.
72
At his request, the National Gallery of Art named Pichetto a consultant
restorer, so he remained responsible for the Kress Collection when it moved to Washington,
D.C.
73

The title of “consultant restorer” proved advantageous both for Pichetto and the National
Gallery. Pichetto maintained his studio in New York, and continued to provide restoration
services for other museums and lucrative private clients.
74
The Gallery also benefitted financially,
as this arrangement meant they did not have to establish a full conservation lab within their
facilities. By the late 1930s, a number of major museums including the Louvre, the British
Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had started developing in-house conservation
departments. However, this was a costly and difficult venture. Few programs existed to train
conservators, so finding competent staff could prove challenging. Housing a team of
conservators and their increasingly technical equipment represented a significant expense for the
museum. By outsourcing their conservation and restoration work, the National Gallery avoided
these issues. Furthermore, they distanced themselves from the controversies that often arose
around conservation departments.
75

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the National Gallery would ship paintings requiring
conservation or restoration to New York to be treated in Pichetto’s studio. During this early
phase, then-curator John Walker explained that, despite his title, Pichetto cleaned only Kress
Collection artwork. The Mellon and Widener collections—which constituted the rest of the

72
Indenture, 10. Samuel H. Kress Foundation [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 122, Washington, D.C.:
National Gallery of Art: Indenture], New York, New York.
73
John Walker, interview by Anne G. Ritchie, October 23, 1990, Amberley, England. National Gallery of
Art Archive [National Gallery of Art Oral History Program, Interview 90-14], Washington, D.C.
74
Hoenigswald, 38–39.
75
Neil Harris, Capital Culture: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the
Museum Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 220–3.

210
National Gallery’s collection at that point in time—never went to Pichetto’s studio.
76
Walker did
not elaborate on why he did not send works from these collections to their consultant restorer. As
recently developed collections, the Mellon and Widener paintings probably received specialist
attention shortly before their donation to the National Gallery and thus may not have required
further intervention before going on display. The Mellon and Widener families likely preferred
to oversee the conservation of their collections themselves. Walker does not suggest that this
decision emerged from a lack of confidence in Pichetto’s work. Though he notes later
generations of conservators criticized the heavy-handed nature of Pichetto’s restorations, Walker
states he was a good restorer, one whose work protected the Kress Collection.
77

Following the opening of the National Gallery of Art in 1941, Kress continued to build
his collection—now with the new museum in mind. Pichetto advised Kress on this new wave of
purchases, often negotiating on the collector’s behalf.
78
He also helped determine which works
belonged in the National Gallery, and where they should be hung.
79
Kress included Pichetto in
his correspondence with David Finley and John Walker, the director and curator of the National
Gallery of Art respectively, so that he could stay abreast of all developments concerning the

76
Walker interview by Ritchie.
77
Walker interview by Ritchie; Walker, Self-Portrait with Donors, 143. In 1945, the US Army selected
Pichetto to protect and conserve the paintings brought to the United States from the Kaiser Friedrich
Museum in Berlin. This assignment likely stemmed from a recommendation from someone at the
National Gallery, indicating they trusted and approved of Pichetto’s work (Hoenigswald, Lorion, and
Walmsley, 126).
78
For example, see the letter from Henry Sabbath Bodin to Stephen Pichetto, dated September 9, 1946.
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 108, Collection: Acquisition
Correspondence, 1946–57], New York, New York.
79
There are lists of opinions for paintings for the National Gallery of Art in the Samuel H. Kress
Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 108, Collection: Berenson, Bernhard:
Correspondence: General (2 of 5), 1939–44], New York, New York. In order to plan the collection’s
installation, Walker provided Pichetto with scale drawings of all the Kress Collection galleries in the
National Gallery of Art and scale microphotographs of all the collection’s paintings (Walker to Guy
Emerson, November 22, 1949. National Gallery of Art Archive [A2 Central Files, Central Files Subject
Files, 1939–70, C-10 Artistic Matters General, Kress Correspondence and Equipment, 1941–9],
Washington, D.C).

211
collection. When Samuel Kress suffered an incapacitating stroke in 1946, Pichetto’s deep
knowledge of the collection, its condition, and Samuel’s wishes for its future made him an
invaluable advisor to Rush Kress. In 1947, Pichetto officially received the title of curator of the
Samuel H. Kress Collection at the National Gallery of Art.
80
At the same time, Pichetto engaged
in early discussions and planning to distribute artwork from the Kress Collection to museums
across the country, a plan that developed into the Kress Foundation’s Regional Galleries
Program.
81

In the midst of all this activity, Pichetto died suddenly of a heart attack on January 20,
1949. He was only sixty-one years old. His death shocked his community of friends and
colleagues, particularly at the Kress Foundation. After relying on his help and knowledge for
many years, Rush Kress felt lost without Pichetto.
82
Conservation and restoration work in
Pichetto’s studio ceased, and dozens of Kress Collection pieces remained stranded in storage
awaiting treatment.
83

The Kress Foundation sought a replacement for Pichetto immediately. On February 1,
Rush Kress wrote Alessandro Contini Bonacossi and Bernard Berenson requesting
recommendations for a gifted restorer.
84
Before even receiving this letter, Berenson had written
Rush to offer his condolences. Unable to proffer an individual name, he suggested Rush discuss
the issue with the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Francis Taylor.
85
Above all, he

80
Hoenigswald, 33–34.
81
Modestini, “Mario Modestini,” 44.
82
Hoenigswald, 38.
83
Modestini, “Mario Modestini,” 44.
84
In this letter, Kress informs Contini that he sent the same information to Berenson (Rush Kress to
Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, February 1, 1949. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress
Collection, Box 111, Contini-Bonacossi, Alessandro: Correspondence (1 of 2)], New York, New York).
85
Guy Emerson, trustee for the Kress Foundation, dissuaded Rush from following Berenson’s latter
advice, noting the many “blunders” committed by the Metropolitan Museum’s restorers (Guy Emerson to

212
urged patience in seeking a replacement noting that an insensitive restorer could “skin an Italian
picture before they know what they are doing, and a picture once skinned can be faked up but
will never be itself again.”
86
The anxiety that a poorly trained restorer might damage the
collection echoes throughout correspondence related to the Kress Collection in early 1949.

Postwar Conservation Controversies
Pichetto died in the midst of a period in which the art world debated the best practices of
conservation and restoration with renewed vigor. The Second World War had displaced and
damaged works of art and cultural heritage sites, necessitating a flurry of conservation and
restoration work. As beloved treasures sequestered during the war reemerged in public galleries
after 1945, so too did a flood of responses to their condition.
This occurred most acutely in the “cleaning controversy” at the National Gallery, London.
In 1939, to protect their paintings from aerial bombing—which significantly damaged the gallery
over the course of the war—the National Gallery staff moved the collection to safety in the
Manod slate quarry in Wales.
87
Forced to take their paintings off view, the National Gallery
sought to use this time productively. Conservator-restorers worked on more than seventy
National Gallery pictures during the war years. Following VE Day, the National Gallery placed
paintings back on public display as quickly as possible. Within the galleries, cleaned pictures
hung alongside untouched works and the juxtaposition startled audiences, many of whom found
them stripped, harsh, and overly bright. The outcry grew strong enough that the National Gallery

Rush Kress, January 22, 1949. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 111,
Contini-Bonacossi, Alessandro: Correspondence (1 of 2)], New York, New York).
86
Correspondence from Bernard Berenson to Rush Kress, January 22, 1949. Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 108, Collection: Berenson, Bernhard: Correspondence: General
(4 of 5)], New York, New York.
87
David Bomford, “The Conservation Department of the National Gallery,” National Gallery Technical
Bulletin 2 (1978): 3–10.

213
organized an “Exhibition of Cleaned Pictures” in 1947 to explain and justify their
interventions.
88
Nonetheless, persistent public criticism led to a government inquiry conducted
by the Weaver Committee. Though this committee concluded the restorers did not damage the
paintings in question, they encouraged the newly formed Conservation Department (established
in 1946) to work closely with the gallery’s Scientific Department and Chemical Laboratory in
planning future conservation and restoration projects.
89

The cleaning controversy sparked vigorous debate within the art world. In December
1947, the Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs dedicated their entire issue to “The Problem of
Cleaning” in response to the exhibition.
90
The Burlington editorial dismissed criticism of the
National Gallery’s cleaned pictures as “not only hysterical but senseless.”
91
Describing the
“upholders of dirt and varnish” as a “sorry band of martyrs,” this piece re-centered the debate on
“not whether pictures ought to be cleaned, but how certain pictures ought to be treated.”
92

Furthermore, the editorial asserted that since the war many in Britain and continental Europe
viewed “not merely cleaning in order to preserve, but cleaning in order to improve” as
justifiable.
93
More than its accompanying articles, this editorial provoked continued discussion of
the issue.
The first strong rebuttal to the editorial emerged from Cesare Brandi, the director of the
Istituto Centrale di Restauro (ICR) in Rome. Throughout 1948, Brandi criticized the National
Gallery’s “total cleaning” approach in lectures given at European institutions including the

88
Philip Hendy, An Exhibition of Cleaned Pictures at the National Gallery (1936–1947) (Plaistow:
Curwen Press, 1947).
89
Bomford, “The Conservation Department of the National Gallery,” 3–5.
90
Benedict Nicholson, ed. “The Problem of Cleaning” a special issue of The Burlington Magazine 89, no.
537 (December 1947).
91
Benedict Nicholson, “Editorial: The Problem of Cleaning,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs
89, no. 537 (December 1947), 329–30.
92
Nicholson, “Editorial,” 329–30.
93
Ibid.

214
Louvre. In 1949, the Burlington Magazine published his critique of the National Gallery’s
methods, which he argued destroyed the subtleties of patina, varnish, and glazes used by artists
to temper and complete their final paintings.
94
National Gallery staff members responded to
Brandi’s criticism the following year in their own article, “Some Factual Observations about
Varnishes and Glazes.”
95
For the next decade, an ever-wider number of critics, conservators, and
art historians weighed in on this debate within the pages of Burlington Magazine.
96

The same year Brandi critiqued the National Gallery, he faced his own cleaning
controversy. From almost the time it was founded a decade earlier, tensions existed within the
ICR between Brandi and the institute’s chief conservator, Mauro Pellicioli. Pellicioli felt
Brandi’s systematic approach and embrace of scientific tools and techniques led to works being
treated insensitively by ICR conservators. Most famously, Pellicioli was distressed by the ICR’s
handling of the fifteenth-century Madonna and Child painting attributed to Filippo Lippi, from
the collection of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in Rome. After studying the painting’s
surface and submitting it to spectrographic analysis, Brandi’s team determined that several
campaigns of repainting obscured the original painting.
97
The subsequent cleaning removed these
layers, which stripped the Madonna and Child down to essentially a sketch (Fig. 3.19). Pellicioli
complained of the work going on under Brandi to his friend and ally, Roberto Longhi. As a
professor, editor, and critic, Longhi was among the most well-known and vocal art historians
writing in Italy in the mid-twentieth century.

94
Cesare Brandi, “The Cleaning of Pictures in Relation to Patina, Varnish, and Glazes,” The Burlington
Magazine 91, no. 556 (July 1949): 183–8.
95
Neil Maclaren and Anthony Werner, “Some Factual Observations about Varnishes and Glazes,” The
Burlington Magazine 92, no. 568 (July 1950): 189–192.
96
This dialogue continued up until 1963. See Ernst Gombrich, “Controversial Methods and Methods of
Controversy,” The Burlington Magazine 105, no. 720 (February 1962): 56–9.
97
Simona Rinaldi, Memorie al magnetofono Mauro Pellicioli si racconta a Robert Longhi (Florence:
Edifir-Edizione, 2014), 33.

215
In 1948, Longhi expressed his concerns about the ICR publicly in a polemical article. He
criticized Brandi’s leadership, arguing that the ICR did not function effectively.
98
He called for
art historians to become more actively involved in guiding the ICR’s campaigns, believing that
restoration should always aid criticism. Brandi, on the other hand, sought to reframe
conservation as a critical act in and of itself, rather than being only a set of technical or artistic
skills. This distinction emerged from their differing relationships with art objects, as a scholar-
connoisseur and conservator. Longhi’s accusations led to an inquiry, which concluded with the
removal of himself and Pellicioli from the ICR’s board of directors.
99
Ironically, the Italian state
founded the ICR—the first national institution dedicated to conservation and restoration—in
1939 to avoid precisely these kinds of controversies.
Flourishing art restoration studios in Italy long predate the twentieth century, particularly
in the urban centers of Rome, Florence, Milan, Venice, Bergamo, and Naples.
100
Yet, as in the
American context, no formal training centers existed until well into the twentieth century.
Restorers developed their approach and technique through self-study and the mentorship of
established practitioners. Texts like Giovanni Secco-Suardo’s late-nineteenth-century manual Il
Restauratore dei Dipinti proved invaluable in transferring knowledge of conservation and
restoration practices. Published posthumously in 1894, Secco-Suardo’s book emerged from a
series of courses he held in Florence.
101
Il Restauratore dei Dipinti explained processes of

98
Roberto Longhi, “Buongoverno: una situazione grave (1948),” in Opere complete. Critica d’arte e
Buongoverno 1938-1969 Vol. XIII (Florence: Sansoni, 1985), 1–6.
99
Modestini, Masterpieces, 103.
100
Licia Borrelli Vlad, “Cesare Brandi’s contribution to the modern history of restoration,” in Cesare
Brandi and the Development of Modern Conservation Theory, ed. Giuseppe Basile and Silvia Cecchini
(Lurano: Il Prato Casa Editrice, 2011), 25.
101
Jaynie Anderson, Collecting Connoisseurship and the Art Market in Risorgimento Italy: Giovanni
Morelli’s Letters to Giovanni Melli and Pietro Zavaritt (1866–1872) (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze,
Lettere ed Arti, 1999), 50–6.

216
restoration in simple terms, and advocated for thoughtful, limited interventions.
102
Secco-Suardo
compellingly argued that restorers too often succumb to the desire to creatively intervene in the
work of art by over-cleaning, updating, and excessively retouching it. Urging restraint, Secco-
Suardo wrote: “…the best restoration is the one that is noticed least.” This axiom resonates in
conservation literature today, which is why this older text remains a classic in the field of
conservation.
103

The 1930s represented a pivotal period for the field of conservation and restoration in
Italy. In Italy, as in much of Western Europe and the United States, a subset of restorers eagerly
embraced scientific and technical tools for studying and conserving art. In October 1930, Rome
served as the host city for an international conference dedicated to the study of scientific
methods of examining and preserving works of art. Organized by the International Office of
Museums—an organization founded by the League of Nations—this conference introduced
technical approaches to art history to the wider world.
104
It brought restorers, art historians, and
scientists together to discuss the potential for collaboration in their research and practices. The
conference also represented an early concerted effort to develop international guidelines for
conservator-restorers.
105

102
Giovanni Secco-Suardo, Il Restauratore dei Dipinti (Milan: U. Hoepli, 1894).
103
Bomford and Leonard, 331–4.
104
Marco Cardinali, “Technical Art History and the First Conference on Scientific Analysis of Works of
Art (Rome, 1930),” History of Humanities 2, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 221–243. The reason the Italians
requested the conference move from Paris to Rome remains unclear, according to Cardinali. He identified
prestige and political opportunities as probable motivating factors (Marco Cardinali, “Dalla conferenza di
Roma del 1930 nella Technical Art History: una storia non italiana,” in Storia dell’arte come impegno
civile: Scritti in onore di Marisa Dalai Emiliani, ed. Angela Cipriani, Valter Curzi, and Paola Picardi
[Rome: Campisano Editore, 2014], 221–222). I contend that the political environment in Italy at the
moment cannot be dismissed, as this conference provided Fascist Italy a platform to demonstrate both
modern technological prowess and a commitment to preserving cultural heritage.
105
Michele D’Arcy Marincola, “Opening Remarks,” in Cesare Brandi and the Development of Modern
Conservation Theory, ed. Giuseppe Basile and Silvia Cecchini (Lurano: Associazione Giovanni Secco
Suardo, 2011), 16. In the wake of the conference, the Musée du Louvre founded its laboratory. See

217
Two years later, the International Office of Museums conducted a survey to learn more
about the position and training of art restorers among its member countries. Italy was one of
eight nations that agreed to participate. Alfredo Rocco, President of the Italian National
Commission for Intellectual Cooperation, wrote the response in conjunction with Giorgio
Nicodemi. In the early 1930s, Nicodemi was at the forefront of technical research in Italy. In
partnership with Giuseppe Castellani and Renato Mancia, he founded a prominent restoration
school in Milan in the mid-1930s. In addition to discussing their efforts, Rocco also highlighted
the Neapolitan Sopraintendenza’s sponsorship of Sergio Ortolani’s experimental research into
paintings conservation.
106
The report also discusses more traditional forms of pictorial restoration
carried out in other studios. However, the presence of figures like Nicodemi, Castellani, Mancia,
and Ortolani in the report indicates that culture ministers in Rome were aware of and receptive to
innovative research in the field of conservation and restoration. This is significant as Italian art
historians and critics largely remained skeptical of the benefits of technical-scientific analysis in
the early 1930s.
107

The tension between those in favor of new modes of analysis and those opposed to them
grew throughout the 1930s. Technical-scientific analysis promised—or threatened, depending on
one’s perspective—to unseat the connoisseur as the foremost authority in guiding art restoration.
For example, in his 1936 treatise, Mancia stated that diagnostics would “make it possible to

Segolene Bergeon Langle, “Cesare Brandi and France: Central Institute for Restoration in Rome and the
Louvre Museum (till 1988),” Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage 7 (2007), 145.
106
Silvia Cecchini, “L’Italia e l’Europa negli anni Trenta. Musei, storia dell’arte, critica, e
restauro nei documenti dell’inchiesta internazionale sulla formazione dei restauratori (1932),” Il
Capitale culturale: Studies on the Value of Cultural Heritage 14, Special Issue: Musei e mostre
tra le due guerre (2016): 443–4; Rinaldi, 26–28.
107
Cardinali, “Technical Art History,” 233–34.

218
establish, with absolute certainty, that which until yesterday was a subjective assumption.”
108

Rather than relying on the art critic’s connoisseurial eye, Mancia argued new modes of study
might yield objective scientific data about works of art. Thus armed, Mancia stated that now the
“restorer must be a guide to the archaeologist and the art historian.”
109
Mancia’s provocative
claim directly opposed the views of scholars like Roberto Longhi, who supported technical
research but felt criticism should always guide conservation and restoration.
By the latter half of the 1930s, the growing interest in technical and scientific approaches
to studying and conserving artwork in Italy worried a number of critics and scholars who shared
Longhi’s perspective. Inspired by discussions with Longhi, the art historian Giulio Carlo Argan
proposed that the state establish a central institute for restoration at a conference of the
Sopraintendenti in July 1938. The institute would educate conservator-restorers, develop a
unified approach to their practices, and monitor restoration practices within the Italian state.
Giuseppe Bottai, minister of education, supported the proposal.
110
Italy founded the ICR in 1939.
Longhi had hoped to direct this new institution, but Bottai appointed Cesare Brandi to the
position. A scholar of Sienese painting, Brandi opened a conservation center in Bologna prior to
his appointment.
111
He welcomed new technologies and modes of studying and caring for works
of art. In preparation for the opening of the Institute, Bottai sent Argan and Brandi to the United
States from December 1939 to March 1940. In addition to accompanying the masterpieces lent
by the Italian government touring the country at the time, they were tasked with visiting and

108
Renato Mancia, L’Esame scientifico delle opere d’arte e il loro restauro (Rome: U. Hoepli, 1936), 11.
Mancia’s book was the first scientifically oriented treatise on art restoration published in Italy.
109
Mancia, 245.
110
Rosalia Varoli-Piazza, “ICCROM and Italy,” Museum International 61, no. 3 (September 2009): 36–
42.
111
Laurence Kanter, “The Reception and Non-Reception of Cesare Brandi in America,” in Cesare Brandi
and the Development of Modern Conservation Theory, ed. Giuseppe Basile and Silvia Cecchini (Lurano:
Associazione Giovanni Secco Suardo, 2011), 97.

219
studying important American conservation centers and labs. Though Brandi’s report on their trip
is no longer extant, it is clear he and Argan both hoped to incorporate the new equipment they
studied in the United States in the Central Institute’s labs.
112
Though Brandi rejected Mancia’s
total trust in science to assign attributions and guide conservation campaigns, he remained
optimistic about the usefulness of scientific tools.
Through the ICR, Brandi sought to develop systematic approaches to conservation
treatment. His theories of conservation called for conservators to consider the entire life of a
work of art, rather than trying always to return it to an imagined original state. For this reason,
Brandi opposed pictorial restoration. Instead, he advocated techniques like tratteggio—a method
of inpainting that filled areas of loss with striated lines. Tratteggio and other similar methods of
inpainting and repair eased the disjunction created by lacunae in the image for the viewer, while
maintaining a clear distinction between the original and repaired sections of the artwork. While
many conservator-restorers embraced Brandi’s methods, many others continued to practice more
traditional forms of restoration. The ICR created a center for dialogue, but unsurprisingly failed
to eliminate controversy.
As the creation of a generation of connoisseurs, critics, and collectors including Bernard
Berenson, Herbert Horne, and Roger Fry, it is natural that the Burlington Magazine engaged
intensely with discussions of the best practices for conservation and restoration.
113
However, in
the postwar period the question of how to conserve art gripped the art world at large. The

112
Bottai asked Brandi to produce a report on what he learned. It seems he did, but this report is
unfortunately lost. Donata Levi, “Brandi and the Anglo-Saxon world: a difficult dialogue,” in Basile and
Cecchini,108; also see Lorenzo Carletti and Cristiano Giometti, Raffaello on the Road: Rinascimento e
propaganda fascista in America (1938–40) (Rome: Carocci editore, 2016).
113
On the founding of the Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, see Rachel Cohen, Bernard Berenson:
A Life in the Picture Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 146. The magazine simplified its
name in 1948, dropping the “for connoisseurs” from the title. The editor explained at that point that the
addition felt old-fashioned and limited the scholarly ambitions of the publication.

220
widespread damage to and loss of cultural monuments invigorated many to develop new
strategies for restoring and preserving the art of the past. These developments, paired with the
rise of new scientific-technical modes of analysis and repair, brought large questions about the
ethics and practice of conservation to the forefront.

A National Center for Restoration
Throughout the latter half of the 1940s, the Kress Foundation remained distanced from
these larger debates. Samuel Kress did not select his first conservator, as Contini hired Pichetto
on his behalf. Samuel and Rush Kress grew to trust and rely on Pichetto over the years.
Following his death in 1949, the Kress Foundation did not have this luxury. Rush Kress had to
hire a replacement unknown to him with full knowledge of the serious implications this would
hold for the Kress Collection.
The anxiety created by this decision spurred Rush Kress to think about conservation
practices in American museums more broadly. On February 18, 1949, a month after Pichetto’s
death, he wrote a memorandum to the National Gallery of Art proposing that they form a
“central organization of all American museums where owners and responsible keepers of
paintings could apply for advice in order to keep cultural treasures…from falling into bad hands.”
He suggested they might name this center after Stephen Pichetto.
114

The idea of developing a national center for restoration did not originate with Rush
Kress; it circulated in discussions among museum professionals throughout the mid-twentieth
century.
115
A national center for conservation and restoration would aid the kind of small and

114
William Suida, National Gallery of Art Memorandum, February 18, 1949, as cited by Hoenigswald, 31.
115
History of Conservation Roundtable Interview in Mexico City, September 4, 1975, with George Stout,
Richard Buck, Katherine Gettens, W.T. Chase, and Joyce Hill Stoner. Winterthur Museum, Library, and
Archives [FAIC Oral History File], Winterthur, Delaware.

221
growing museums that the Kress Foundation targeted for gifts, institutions that would not be able
to equip and staff their own studios and laboratories. Furthermore, through research and practice,
a centralized center for conservation could set standards for conservator-restorers working all
over the nation.
The Pichetto Center for Conservation never materialized. In part, this stems from a
distinctly American reluctance to involve the government in cultural endeavors. The National
Gallery of Art trustees may also have perceived the potential cost and danger of assuming such a
great responsibility for museums across the country. John Walker resisted even establishing a
full conservation lab within the National Gallery of Art, and thus was unlikely to embark on this
much more ambitious project.
Nonetheless, the idea lingered within the Kress Foundation. Discussions continued
throughout the 1950s about potentially establishing their own center and training program in the
future.
116
This never came to pass, but similar programs emerged around the same time. For
example, in 1952, six Midwestern art museums partnered to form the Intermuseum Conservation
Association. Housed at Oberlin College, this program offered services to smaller institutions and
training for a new generation of conservators under the leadership of Richard Buck, formerly of
the Fogg Museum. Unlike Pichetto, Buck trained in a conservation institute.
117
His approach
differed from that of the Kress restorers, which might explain why the Kress Foundation
continued to sense a need for an alternative conservation school or program in the United States.

116
Modestini, Masterpieces, 308–209.
117
Harris, Capital Culture, 224–6.

222
A New Kress Conservator
The Kress Foundation selected Pichetto’s replacement against this backdrop of rigorous
debate about the practices of conservation and restoration. Thus, their choice provides insight
into how the Kress team believed the Collection should function. In contrast to Berenson’s
hesitation, Contini quickly proposed a candidate in whom he had “complete and unconditional
confidence,” a young Italian named Mario Modestini (1907–2006).
118
Modestini served as
Contini’s own primary conservator-restorer, replacing Mauro Pellicioli after he joined the ICR.
Contini praised his artistic sensibilities, technical skill, and ability to lead and manage a studio.
119

Modestini developed as a conservator-restorer during a period of innovation and argument in
Italy; his own pragmatic approach incorporated new technologies but continued to privilege the
aesthetic qualities of artwork.
Initially trained in his father’s frame-gilding workshop, Modestini grew up in Rome on a
street populated with artists’ studios. He intended to become a painter, and entered the Scuola
Preparatoria alle Arti Ornamentali in 1921. However, in 1924, Modestini discontinued his formal
education to assume responsibility for the family workshop after his father died.
120
The
establishment failed not long after, but during this period Modestini developed a strong network
of contacts among art dealers and museums in Rome.
Amongst his many projects, Modestini—like his father—restored frames for the Galleria
Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome as well as for private clients. The practices of the frame-

118
Alessandro Contini Bonacossi to Rush Kress, February 9, 1949. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive
[Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 111, Contini-Bonacossi, Alessandro: Correspondence (1 of 2)], New
York, New York.
119
According to his wife, Mario became Contini’s primary restorer after World War II. Prior to 1945,
Mauro Pellicioli (chief restorer at the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro in Rome) performed most of
Contini’s restorations (Modestini, Masterpieces, 147).
120
Modestini closed the workshop, which struggled following his father’s death, within a short period of
time (Modestini, Masterpieces, 47–51).

223
gilder and the restorer are closely related, and in the mid-1920s Modestini began restoring
paintings as well as their frames. As was often the case, art dealers drew Modestini into
restoration work, calling on him to conserve pieces prior to presenting them for sale. According
to his wife and partner, Dianne Dwyer Modestini, Modestini restored his first Renaissance
painting, a quattrocento Tuscan work on panel, at the request of Kurt Cassirer, a German art
dealer. He wanted Modestini to recreate the damaged gold ground of the painting. As an antique
frame restorer, Cassirer trusted Modestini would work sensitively with the panel’s surfaces. This
project stirred Modestini’s curiosity, and he began to study the techniques and philosophy of art
restoration. Like his contemporaries, Modestini did so informally, relying heavily on Secco-
Suardo’s manual as well as his earlier education as an artist and gilder.
121

Through study, practice, and his network, Modestini developed an impressive roster of
clients by the early 1930s. His first major project emerged, again, through his relationship with
art dealers, in this case the Roman Sestieri brothers. In the late 1920s, they introduced Modestini
to Prince Gerolamo Rospigliosi. Fortuitously, this introduction occurred exactly at the moment
Rospigliosi prepared to auction off hundreds of early modern paintings in his personal collection.
Modestini cleaned around two hundred paintings in advance of the sales, which took place in
1931 and 1932. Though the sales were lackluster (unsurprisingly given the state of the global
economy), Modestini’s work received praise. Through the sales, he came into contact with other
collectors, restorers, and art critics—including the art historian Roberto Longhi.
122

By the late 1930s, Modestini worked as an artist, restorer and art dealer in Rome. He
increasingly developed mastery of restoration techniques and enriched his field of contacts in

121
Modestini, Masterpieces, 54–55.
122
Mario Modestini interview by Alfred C. Viebranz, November 5, 1993, New York, New York. National
Gallery of Art Archive [National Gallery of Art Oral History Program, Interview 93-10], Washington,
D.C.

224
both the Italian and international art world. Modestini never joined the National Fascist Party, a
membership prerequisite for conservator-restorers at the ICR. Therefore, from 1939 on he had to
focus on working for private collectors.
123

However, Modestini still knew of and engaged with the debates regarding conservation
going on in Italy in the 1940s. Due largely to his friendships with Longhi and Pellicioli,
Modestini knew the politics of the ICR well. He heard Pellicioli’s complaints firsthand when he
visited his studio.
124
The same year that Longhi published his critique of Brandi and the ICR,
Modestini signed a letter written by a group of restorers to cultural minister Guido Gonella in
which they condemned the privileges—granted under the Fascist government—extended to the
ICR.
125
Modestini always stated that he consciously chose to remain outside of this central
institution, in order to retain a greater degree of control over his practice.
In 1944, Modestini partnered with Pietro Maria Bardi, a journalist and art critic, to open a
new gallery in Rome, the Studio d’Arte Palma. Modestini had been associated with the Galleria
Bubuino, but left it to help establish a more ambitious enterprise with Bardi.
126
At Studio d’Arte
Palma, Modestini worked in a restoration studio equipped with the new scientific and technical
equipment.
127
Modestini incorporated these new tools into this practice, but he remained a fairly
traditional restorer. As might be surmised by his employment by Contini, Modestini practiced
conservation and restoration in a manner similar to Pellicioli. Both men aimed to respect the
historical integrity of the work of art while privileging its aesthetic purpose. They sought not
only to clean paintings, but also to maintain or restore their color balance and harmony, and to

123
Modestini, Masterpieces, 100.
124
Modestini met Pellicioli while restoring the Rospigliosi collection; around the same time he developed
a friendship with Roberto Longhi (Modestini, Masterpieces, 73).
125
Rinaldi, 39.
126
Modestini interview by Viebranz.
127
Rinaldi 39.

225
ensure visual unity to the work of art. In some but not all cases, Modestini performed the
integrative inpainting that Brandi opposed. Even as new ideas about the ethics of conservation
emerged in Italy, most institutions and collectors preferred to work with traditional conservator-
restorers like Modestini.
128

Modestini’s aesthetic approach to conservation and restoration appealed particularly to
the art market. In addition to his work as a conservator, Modestini assessed and acquired Old
Master paintings on behalf of the Studio d’Arte Palma. He helped organize exhibitions, including
a notable one on seventeenth-century Italian painting that brought him to Federico Zeri’s
attention. This work required Modestini to travel to London regularly to acquire Old Masters for
the gallery.
129

In this capacity, Modestini met and befriended Gualtiero Volterra, an associate and
buying agent for Alessandro Contini Bonacossi. Volterra first recommended that Contini hire
Modestini to conserve works in his collection. By the time Pichetto died in 1949, Volterra and
Contini knew Modestini well. They associated with him professionally as a well-connected
member of the Italian art world, and knew his work as a conservator. It is unsurprising then that
his name came to mind so quickly when Rush Kress reached out to Contini for suggestions.

Modestini Joins the Kress Foundation
In March 1949, Modestini flew to New York to meet the Kress Foundation team. At
Contini’s request, Volterra also went to New York to facilitate the meeting between Modestini

128
For example, Pellicioli was always in high demand. He restored Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper in
two campaigns before and after the Second World War (See Martin Kemp, Living with Leonardo: Fifty
Years of Sanity and Insanity in the Art World and Beyond [London: Thames & Hudson, 2018].)
129
On his first trip to London in 1945, Modestini remembered buying around one hundred paintings for
around six hundred pounds (Modestini, Masterpieces, 135).

226
and Rush Kress. His services were especially valuable as Modestini did not yet speak English
comfortably, and Rush Kress did not speak Italian.
130

The Kress team requested that Modestini clean one of the paintings left in Pichetto’s
studio to provide an example of his work. Modestini selected Paolo di Giovanni Fei’s
Assumption of the Virgin, a fifteenth-century Sienese panel painting. Centuries of dirt and
candle-smoke had left the surface of the panel heavily encrusted. Modestini did not care for the
lighting conditions in Pichetto’s studio, nor could he find the fats, oils, and soaps necessary to
prepare a cleaning solution among Pichetto’s equipment. According to his own account,
Modestini brought the Assumption back to his room at the Plaza Hotel where the window
afforded him natural light. Using an improvised unguent composed of Pond’s Cold Cream,
Marseilles soap, and linseed oil obtained at a local drugstore, Modestini removed the surface dirt
from the painting (Fig. 3.20). He performed minor retouching and then presented the work to
John Walker, whom Modestini stated “told Kress I had done a beautiful job.”
131
The Kress
Foundation hired Modestini following this interview.
Modestini joined the Kress Foundation team in the spring of 1949. In his
recommendation letter, Contini had written that Modestini would “naturally only be able to
assume the strictly technical side” of Pichetto’s responsibility for the Kress Collection.
132
Given
Modestini’s experience curating exhibitions at the Studio d’Arte Palma and elsewhere, this
comment is curious. Contini may have been considering Modestini’s inability to speak and write

130
Modestini, Masterpieces, 199.
131
Modestini and Modestini, “Mario Modestini,” 44.
132
In his letter to Rush Kress, Contini claimed that Berenson also knew Modestini’s work and approved
of it highly (Alessandro Contini Bonacossi to Rush Kress, February 9, 1949. Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 111, Contini-Bonacossi, Alessandro: Correspondence (1 of 2)],
New York, New York). Yet in late March 1949, Berenson wrote of Modestini “if you had not named him,
I could not have.” Bernard Berenson, note, March 29, 1949. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series
1: Kress Collection, Box 108, Collection: Berenson, Bernhard: Correspondence: General (4 of 5)], New
York, New York.

227
in English at the time. He may also have wished to regain the considerable influence he held over
the Kress Collection before Pichetto replaced him as Kress’s primary adviser. Either way, the
Kress Foundation dismissed this comment, naming Modestini conservator and curator of the
Kress Collection. Modestini’s English grew stronger and he became a key advisor to Rush Kress,
as Pichetto had been before. In the 1950s, Modestini became a driving force in developing the
Kress Collection as it exists today. His central role in managing acquisitions and installations for
the Kress Foundation’s Regional Galleries Program will be discussed in the next chapter.

Huckleberry Hill & the Regional Galleries Program
Modestini initially committed to work for the Kress Foundation for six months of the
year. Contini had warned the Kress Foundation that Modestini would not be able to dedicate
more time than this to their projects.
133
He intended to spend the other half of the year in Rome,
working for private clients and continuing his relationship with the Studio d’Arte Palma.
134

However, there was a great deal of work to be done on the Kress Collection.
Modestini started working in Pichetto’s old studio space, and found a backlog of
paintings that sat untouched since the restorer’s death. Concurrently, the Kress Foundation was
busy preparing for two significant events. First, they needed to prepare artwork for the 1951
display of new acquisitions from the Kress Collection at the National Gallery of Art. Every five
years, the National Gallery highlighted new pieces from the Kress Collection for visitors. Second,
the Kress Foundation had decided by 1949 to develop their Regional Galleries Program, which
required the conservation and restoration of hundreds of works of art. Modestini only worked on

133
Alessandro Contini Bonacossi to Rush Kress, February 9, 1949. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive
[Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 111, Contini-Bonacossi, Alessandro: Correspondence (1 of 2)], New
York, New York.
134
Modestini, Masterpieces, 202.

228
the collection’s paintings; sculpture went to New York-based restorer Joseph Ternbach.
135
As the
Foundation continued to primarily collect paintings however, this only slightly lessened his
enormous workload. Adding to this pressure, Rush Kress seriously underestimated the time
necessary to conserve and restore paintings. In a July 1949 memo, Rush Kress inquired whether
Modestini needed additional paintings to occupy the next weeks, despite noting he currently had
30 in his studio. By the end of the summer, Rush Kress pressured Modestini to dedicate himself
full time to the Kress Foundation’s projects.
136

To manage this influx of paintings, Modestini hired members of Pichetto’s studio
including Angelo Fatta, Henry Hecht, Paul Kiehart and Frank Sullivan.
137
He also convinced
conservator-restorers from Studio d’Arte Palma to join him in New York, including Amleto De
Santis, Giuseppe Barbari, Claudio Rigosi, Bartolo Bracaglia, and the frame restorer Emilio
Quarantelli.
138
They worked in a studio located in midtown Manhattan, in a building that also
housed offices for the Kress Foundation. The space quickly proved insufficient for the scale of
the project; there was not enough room for the whole team to work, and paintings had to be
stored in offsite warehouses.
139

135
His studio was in Forest Hills, New York. Note by Mary Davis, August 23, 1956. Samuel H. Kress
Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 126, Correspondence: General (4 of 5)], New York,
New York. Ternbach worked for years as a restorer at the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna before
emigrating to the United States in 1938. From that point forward, he was a private restorer. In this
capacity, he served museums, auction houses, and private collectors. See D. Scott Atkinson and Steven
Weintraub, Joseph Ternbach: Conservator/Collector (New York: Queens County Art and Cultural Center,
1984); Inge Sonn interview re: Joseph Ternbach by Rebecca Rushfield, conducted on May 20, 2004,
Winterthur Museum, Library, and Archives [FAIC Oral History File], Winterthur, Delaware.
136
Modestini, Masterpieces, 202–3.
137
Modestini, Masterpieces, 205–6. Frank Sullivan left shortly after Modestini arrived to conserve art for
John Walker at the National Gallery of Art (Robert Feller, interview by John J. Harter, March 30, 1989,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 30. National Gallery of Art Archive [National Gallery of Art Oral History
Program, Interview 89-04), Washington, D.C.)
138
Modestini, Masterpieces, 205–7.
139
Modestini, interview by Viebranz.

229
In 1950, Rush Kress decided to build larger conservation and restoration studios, as well
as storage space for the Kress Collection on his country estate. Huckleberry Hill, the Kress
property, was located in the Pocono Mountains, a remote region north of the Kress family home
in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Its remove from New York proved inconvenient for the restorers,
but promised greater security for the collection.
140
The United States’ entry into the Korean War
in June 1950 worried Rush Kress. Like many of his contemporaries, he feared the possibility of a
nuclear strike. Moving a substantial portion of the Kress Collection to this remote site would
protect it from possible attacks on New York.
141

More immediately, the new facilities provided ample working space for Modestini and
his team. Modestini helped design the conservation and restoration studio at Huckleberry Hill to
his own specifications. The studios had good natural lighting and ample storage. They were
equipped with the latest technical equipment including microscopes, a relining press, an x-ray
machine, and a photography studio.
142
Huckleberry Hill became the primary site for conserving
and restoring the Kress Collection in 1951.
As under Pichetto, Kress Collection paintings received cradles, new linings, cleaning, and
retouching in Modestini’s studio. However, he operated in a less systematized way, urging more
limited interventions. His disliked Pichetto’s heavy cradles, and asked Angelo Fatta to use lighter
supports when they were needed to reduce stress on the panel.
143
He also cleaned paintings

140
Modestini and his team commuted to Huckleberry Hill every week from New York. They lived onsite
during the week in dormitories built for this purpose. The isolation of Huckleberry Hill wore on the
conservator-restorers and after seven years, they insisted on returning to New York. At that point, the
Kress Foundation agreed to open studios in the city, though Huckleberry Hill also continued to operate.
Modestini and Modestini, 59.
141
Oral History Interview with Mario Modestini and Dianne Dwyer Modestini by Joyce Hill Stoner,
March 18, 1996, New York, New York. Winterthur Museum, Library, and Archives [FAIC Oral History
File], Winterthur, Delaware.
142
Modestini, Masterpieces, 209.
143
Modestini interview with Stoner.

230
conservatively, arguing a conservator should always maintain a thin layer of original varnish to
avoid accidently stripping away delicate glazes.
144

Modestini performed pictorial restorations, meaning he used integrative inpainting to
restore the work after cleaning it. He seamlessly blended his inpainting with surviving portions
of the paint; other restorers commented on how difficult it was to discern between original and
restored portions of the painted surfaces.
145
Modestini also used glazes to restore balance to
pictures. Light and dark pigments within a painting often differ in the way they age, which can
disrupt the balance of the painting. Earlier cleanings can also do this, since they may have
stripped away original highlights and shading. In both cases, Modestini believed glazes should
be applied to address the imbalance.
146

In most cases, Modestini’s approach to restoration obscured the marks time left on
paintings. Yet, Modestini stated that he always strove to preserve the integrity of a work of art.
He repeatedly commented on how restorations reflect the historical moment in which they are
performed, and thus should always be reversible.
147
For this reason, he isolated his own
restoration work. After cleaning a painting, Modestini applied a layer of dammar varnish to its
surface. This varnish would saturate the colors of the painting, allowing him to better match his
inpainting to the original. The varnish also served though to create a clear boundary between the
original and repainted layers. After completing the inpainting, the piece would be varnished
again.
148
For this final layer of varnish, Modestini preferred a slightly matte finish. He argued
that the thick, glossy varnishes Pichetto used reflected the taste of the nineteenth and early

144
Modestini, interview by Viebranz.
145
Selma Holo shared recollections with the author of Modestini showing her his nearly imperceptible
inpainting. See also Modestini, “John Brealey and the Cleaning of Paintings.”
146
Modestini, interview by Stoner.
147
Modestini, interview by Viebranz.
148
Ibid.

231
twentieth centuries, and distracted from the paintings they covered.
149
The materials used to
varnish paintings in early modern Italy would likely have created a flatter finish, but Modestini’s
opinion is also a reflection of changing taste.
Modestini’s approach to conservation and restoration differed significantly from the
schools at ICR and the Fogg Museum. He polished and perfected paintings, rather than allowing
their ragged edges to show. Even those with an educated eye often failed to see how Modestini
intervened in a work of art. Nonetheless, Modestini distanced himself from restorers who
primarily performed commercial work. Restorations performed for dealers focused on making
paintings more beautiful, while Modestini stated he only ever sought to replace missing aspects
of the work and to preserve it for posterity.
150
Of course, this claim masks the judgments required
to determine what degree of change on the painted surface constitutes a loss.
Modestini wanted to restore paintings aesthetically as well as technically, which meant he
went further than some of his contemporaries. Modestini developed as a conservator-restorer in
the old manner, outside of academies, in workshops that were always closely intertwined with
both museums and the art market, both settings in which one needed to restore the painting to
something resembling its original beauty for the spaces themselves to function.

Collaboration in Art Conservation & Chemistry
Though Modestini’s approach to conservation drew on the conservative, aesthetic
tradition, he welcomed technological innovation in his field and practice. As mentioned,
Modestini fitted his studios in Rome and the United States with microscopes, x-ray machines,
and other tools to study the paintings under his care. Not long after he arrived in New York, he

149
Modestini, interview by Viebranz.
150
Ibid.

232
also began to communicate with a research chemist at the Mellon Institute, Dr. Robert Feller.
Throughout the 1950s, the two men would collaborate to develop new methods of caring for
early modern paintings.
In 1950, the National Gallery of Art had partnered with the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh
to create a fellowship for a chemist studying issues related to art conservation. They hired a
recent PhD from Rutgers University, Robert Feller. The position allowed Feller to study any
research question he thought might be fruitful for the conservation of art.
This arrangement proved ideal: it provided Walker with access to a chemist without
having to create a laboratory within the National Gallery of Art. He could draw on Feller’s
knowledge when necessary with minimal interference.
151
Modestini’s relationship with the
National Gallery of Art was similarly structured. He consulted with the National Gallery on
restoration projects, but never worked for them directly. In 1950, Walker did hire an in-house
conservator: Frank Sullivan, originally part of Pichetto’s studio, joined the National Gallery to
provide simple repairs and varnishing of paintings. More delicate and substantial restoration
projects continued to be entrusted to outside conservator-restorers like Modestini.
152
The
National Gallery’s reliance on outside experts preserved their resources, while also limiting their
exposure to potential cleaning controversies.
153

Feller studied a range of issues, but initially chose to focus on the properties of varnishes.
In the 1930s, conservators at the Fogg Museum had begun experimenting with synthetic
varnishes. By the postwar period, this was a hot topic. A synthetic varnish appealed because it
held the promise of a longer life, which would spare paintings from the ordeal of cleaning and re-

151
Feller, interview by Harter.
152
Oral History Interview with Dr. Robert Feller conducted by Maura F. Cornman, April 5, 1977.
Winterthur Museum, Library, and Archives [FAIC Oral History File], Winterthur, Delaware.
153
Harris, Capital Culture, 220.

233
varnishing every twenty to fifty years. However, these new formulae also created understandable
anxiety, as curators and collectors did not know how their chemicals might affect the painted
surface over time. Feller studied the properties of both natural and synthetic varnishes to better
understand how they aged and interacted with paintings. As he learned more about varnishes, he
also sought to develop a new and better formula for conservator-restorers to use.
After only two years of research, Feller believed he found the ideal varnish. Feller’s
formula 27H, named for its place in a series of experiments, consisted of a methacrylate resin
and a solvent. Feller and his team tested the varnish extensively. They found it ideal in that it did
not discolor or become brittle, and it produced a subtle and pleasant patina to the surface of a
painting.
154
On Walker’s recommendation, Feller shared 27H with Modestini and Sullivan.
Sullivan did not use the varnish, likely because of the comparative difficulty of applying a
synthetic varnish, which was more viscous than fluid natural varnishes like dammar.
155

Modestini, on the other hand, used 27H and loved it. Four decades later, he described 27H as a
beautiful varnish, “transparent like water.”
156
Modestini also encouraged his assistants to
experiment with the new product.
Modestini and his team were pleased with 27H, and applied coats of this new varnish to
dozens of Kress collection paintings. They did not limit use of this new product to paintings of
lesser value; they applied to it masterpieces in the Kress collection including The Nativity by

154
Feller, interview by Harter.
155
Feller remembers that John Walker was pleased, and told him to share it with Modestini to test it out
(Feller, interview by Harter).
156
Modestini, interview by Viebranz.

234
Lorenzo Lotto and Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation (Fig. 3.21–22).
157
However, around 1955, Feller
discovered potentially serious problems with 27H.
New research emerged indicating that methacrylate polymers—which were present in
27H—would crosslink when exposed to ultra-violet radiation or heat.
158
Crosslinking refers to
the joining together of distinct molecules; they could form one larger unit that would then prove
insoluble for future restorers.
159
Feller started testing 27H at the Mellon Institute, exposing
samples coated with the resin to a fadeometer owned by the Union Carbide Corporation. The
tests confirmed that 27H did cross-link under exposure.
160
Feller informed Modestini, and he and
his team ceased using the varnish immediately.
161

John Walker, now director of the National Gallery of Art, held an emergency meeting
with Feller and Modestini to discuss the risk 27H posed to the Kress collection. Modestini did
not use 27H after learning of its risks, but he maintained that the tests conducted exposed the
varnish to unrealistically intense degrees of heat and UV, far more severe than they would
encounter within a museum. Feller concurred to a degree, estimating that under normal lighting
conditions the varnish would not grow insoluble for approximately fifty years. Regardless,
Modestini assured everyone at the meeting that his practice of applying a layer of dammar

157
See Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 24, K504: Lorenzo Lotto],
New York, New York. The file for the Lippi painting is in the same archive and series, [Box 41, K1241:
Filippo Lippi].
158
A.Y. Drinberg and A.D. Yakovlev, “Transformation of Polybutyl Methacrylate into a Tridimensional
Polymer,” Zhurnal Prikl. Khim. 26 (1953): 532–37.
159
Robert L. Feller, “Appendix A: Early Studies on the Cross-Linking of Methacrylate Polymers,” in On
Picture Varnishes and Their Solvents, ed. Robert L. Feller, Nathan Stolow, and Elizabeth H. Jones
(Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1985), 195–201.
160
Feller interview with Harter.
161
Modestini said this discovery happened within 6 to 7 months of receiving the varnish from Feller in
the oral history, but based on the conservation reports connected to Kress collection paintings, this
assertion does not make sense. It seems more likely it was in the mid–1950s, though it is noteworthy that
neither Feller nor Modestini precisely identify the date that they stopped using 27H. Modestini, interview
with Viebranz.

235
varnish—a traditional, natural varnish—underneath his restoration work and the final coat of
27H should, in theory, ensure that the synthetic varnish could always be removed by dissolving
the dammar underneath.
162
Modestini’s confidence assuaged Walker’s concern, and though 27H
would eventually be removed in later cleaning campaigns, they did not embark on immediately
removing it in its entirety.
In producing and testing 27H, Feller and Modestini benefitted from one another’s
expertise. Through discussions with Modestini and his peers, Feller gained a fuller sense of the
qualities they desired in a new varnish (its handling as well as performance). He brought his
expertise as a chemist to bear on this issue, and produced a varnish that Modestini praised
decades later despite the dangers they learned it could pose.
163
This collaboration was not an
isolated incident. In the 1950s, Modestini and Feller discussed a number of products and issues
in which they were both invested.
164
For example, Feller shared samples of resins his laboratory
developed with Modestini. Modestini then played with these resins and found that they could be
tinted and used for inpainting. This new inpainting varnish blended well with the existing painted
surface and was easy to remove later.
165

Modestini fostered a culture of experimentation at Huckleberry Hill, and his team also
tested materials Feller provided them. For example, Feller remembered Paul Kiehart
experimented readily with new materials in his inpainting work. The new products often yielded
unsatisfactory results, which meant Kiehart often had to remove and redo inpainting. Kiehart and
Modestini accepted failure as part of the process of studying new materials. For this reason,

162
Feller, interview by Harter.
163
Modestini, interview by Viebranz.
164
Ibid.
165
Feller, interview by Harter.

236
Modestini encouraged the staff at Huckleberry Hill to test new products despite their heavy
workload.
Beyond benefitting the National Gallery of Art and the Kress Foundation, Modestini and
Feller’s combined efforts served the wider community of conservator-restorers. They shared 27H
almost immediately with the community at large for restoration use and research, and discussed
its flaws as soon as they became known. Feller’s position through the Mellon Foundation served
the art community at large, and through his partnership with the chemist, so did Modestini’s
experiments. Independent of his work with Feller, Modestini also helped educate American
museum directors, curators, and trustees in the 1950s about the best methods of storing,
preserving, and displaying art when they visited Huckleberry Hill in preparation for the Regional
Galleries Program.

The Public Reaction to Kress Conservation Campaigns
In addition to the demands of the Regional Galleries Program, the Kress Foundation
continually planned for celebratory exhibitions of the Kress Collection at the National Gallery
that occurred every five years. From 1945–1961, the Kress Foundation used the quinquennial
celebration of Samuel Kress’s first gifts as an opportunity to donate additional art to the National
Gallery. Between these two programs, Modestini and his team engaged in a whirlwind of activity
throughout the 1950s.
In 1961, this flurry of activity came to an end. The Kress Foundation disseminated the
entirety of their collection through the Regional Galleries Program. They then finalized all gifts
to the museums that participated in this program, and to the National Gallery of Art. To celebrate,
the National Gallery of Art held the exhibition, “Art Treasures for America from the Samuel H.

237
Kress Foundation.” This show highlighted over a hundred paintings and more than a dozen
examples of sculpture, tapestry, and decorative arts; it drew examples from twenty-one
institutions that received Kress collection pieces.
166
The exhibition allowed the public to view
highlights from the Kress collection gathered together at a single site.
Modestini and his team conserved and restored virtually every painting on display in “Art
Treasures for America.” The Kress Foundation drew attention to their efforts in a press release
preceding the exhibition, stating that to assure “the good condition of every object” their
conservators used the “most modern techniques… …involving x-rays, infra-red, ultra-violet and
raking light, and a new synthetic form of tempera that substitutes a polyvinyl acetate base for the
egg-whites of the old masters.”
167
The Kress Foundation celebrated the introduction of new
materials and methods for conserving and restoring early modern artwork.
Not all critics viewing the Kress collection agreed. In a review of “Art Treasures for
America” for ART News, Thomas Hess described the Kress paintings as “brutalized,” possessing
surfaces that looked like “leatherette.”
168
Hess criticized the Foundation’s embrace of new
technologies for cleaning and restoring pictures, noting that the results left their paintings
looking “sadly new.”
169
In Hess’s estimation, the Kress Collection’s thorough restoration
undermined its stated intent. On this, he wrote:
The situation has a comic side: the Kress vision of Italian art coming to America has
created a system in which much of this art is itself changed to conform to brand-new
American eyes; why shouldn’t a civilization that is increasingly obsessed by detergents
and deodorants relive a cultural heritage among objects as scrubbed and odorless as Miss
Rheingold?
170

166
Charles Seymour, Jr. Art Treasures for America: An Anthology of Paintings and Sculpture in the
Samuel H. Kress Collection (London: Phaidon Press, 1961).
167
Thomas Hess, “Culture as the Great American Dream,” ARTNews 60, no. 8 (December 1961), 54–55.
168
Hess, 54–55.
169
Ibid.
170
Hess, 55. From 1941–64, a half-dozen well-groomed young women competed for popular votes to be
crowned “Miss Rheingold” for the year. The winner represented Rheingold beer in advertisements,

238

Hess suggests that the Kress Collection paintings have been rendered as uniformly pretty—and
banal—as the young women who competed annually to represent Rheingold beer (Fig. 3.23). His
critique reflects his investment in the work of art as a historic document, as well as an aesthetic
object. From this perspective, Modestini’s efforts to obscure signs of aging from paintings
threatened their authenticity.
Hess’s harsh language in describing the Kress collection was unusual, but he was not
alone in questioning the Kress restorers’ work. Five years earlier Arts Digest ran an article in
which Robert Rosenblum ascribed the Kress paintings’ “brilliant surfaces” to the “skilled hands
of Mario Modestini.”
171
Yet Rosenblum pondered whether a painting might not be better served
by being left “in its most truthful state with all the scars of history clearly visible.”
172
The
language in this statement alone speaks volumes about which of these approaches Rosenblum—
and presumably his readers—perceived to be the ethical course of action. Yet at the same time,
Rosenblum acknowledged that Modestini’s attempt to recreate the original appearance of the
work of art, which placed “the highest value on visual palatability … of the painting” was one
suited for “museum audiences composed primarily of layman rather than of connoisseurs.”
173

Rosenblum concluded that perfecting the painting for general audiences necessarily obfuscated
essential qualities of the work of art.
Significantly, both Rosenblum and Hess tied the over-restoring of Kress paintings to the
context in which they were viewed: the art museum, and in Hess’s case, particularly the
American art museum. Yet the desire of modern museum viewers, familiar with glossy, colorful

parades, and other events throughout the following year. For more on the Miss Rheingold campaigns, see
the documentary Beauty and the Beer (Anne Newman, 2016).
171
Robert Rosenblum, “The Kress Collection: Past and Future,” Arts Digest 29, no. 11 (1955), 23.
172
Ibid.
173
Ibid.

239
images in magazines, posters, books, and film, to view unblemished, richly saturated pictures is
hardly an American phenomenon. Modestini’s pictorialist approach to conservation, the old
tradition of European restorers, took shape centuries earlier to serve the needs of public galleries
and museums. Modestini recognized the tendency of restorers to recreate the taste of their own
historical moment in their work, and he strove to avoid this in his practice. Yet his training, like
his contemporaries, prepared him to understand works of art as objects in flux, and to view their
own responsibly handled interventions as merely another iteration in the work of art’s long life.
With this perspective in mind, Modestini was comfortable taking the audience into consideration
when determining how fully he and his team would restore a painting. This is particularly the
case because he believed his interventions to be reversible. In openly criticizing the conservation
of the Kress Collection, Rosenblum and Hess’s articles stand out in a field of flattering reports.
However, their comments reverberate in whispered critiques of the Kress Collection that
continue to the present.
Rather than reflecting an assessment of Modestini’s talent, this persistent criticism stems
from the nature of the Kress Collection itself. Building their massive collection over four
decades, the Kress brothers acquired art rapidly, often paying limited attention to details of
provenance and condition. As a result, the collection includes paintings of differing quality. This
aspect of the collection is well known, as is demonstrated by the cartoon accompanying an
otherwise flattering report about the Kress Collection in Harper’s Magazine (Fig. 3.24). In the
cartoon, a stuffily clad man leans over an abyss labeled “Kress Collection: Watch Your Step!”
His bowtie, jacket, and captoe oxfords inform the viewer he is an elite and conservative figure.
His pince-nez glasses serve as further visual shorthand, letting us know he is a connoisseur, one
eager and equipped to look closely. He leans, nervously, over the open hole that represents the

240
“Kress Collection”—one foot held aloft, he hesitates. This cartoon succinctly captures the
anxiety that the large and varied Kress Collection might evoke in an art critic or connoisseur; in
such a vast and variegated landscape one could easily misstep. An open trap door, the collection
could plunge the connoisseur into uncertain territory.
174

The presence of damaged, heavily reworked, or undocumented paintings within the Kress
Collection fed into to long-standing fears about forgeries entering American collections and
museums. Suspicion regarding fakes can unduly color perceptions of any collection created
during this period, though they are not unfounded. Even sophisticated collectors acquire
forgeries occasionally—there is no reason to believe the Kress brothers represented an
exception.
175
Indeed, while preparing the comprehensive catalogues in the 1970s, the Kress
Foundation relabeled a number of pieces originally understood to be early modern Italian works
of art as nineteenth and twentieth centuries forgeries.
176
Kress’s decision to collect the work of
minor masters further complicates the process of documenting his paintings, because their work
was less likely to be discussed in contemporaneous sources like Vasari’s Vite de’ più eccellenti
pittori, scultori, e architetti. In the mid-twentieth century and today, this aspect of the collection
can make curators and scholars wary as incorrect judgments undermine their reputation for
expertise.

174
“After Hours,” Harper’s Magazine vol. 212, no. 1271 (April 1956): 78–82. The piece addressing the
Kress Collection specifically carries the heading “Treasure Trove,” and praises the many masterpieces
within the collection.
175
For example, respected scholar and museum director Wilhelm von Bode famously purchased a wax
bust of Flora attributed to Leonardo da Vinci that proved to be a nineteenth-century forgery (Brewer,
American Leonardo, 79).
176
Among these works there was a thirteenth-century Italian panel proven to be a modern imitation
(K1301), a modern copy in the manner of Filippo Lippi (K516), and a nineteenth-century copy after
Titian’s Philip II of Spain (K1534). See Fern Rusk Shapley, Complete Catalogue of the Samuel H. Kress
Collection: Italian Paintings, XVI–XVIII Century (London: Phaidon Press, 1973), 395–400, 445–455.

241
The condition of the Kress Collection is further complicated by the fact that many of its
paintings circulated widely within the European art market in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Many of the Kress brothers’ dealers offered artwork heavily acquired from dismantled
British collections, which had in turn been put together from continental European collections in
the previous decades and centuries. The more times a painting changes hands, the more likely it
is to have undergone multiple restoration efforts. Modestini encountered many works of art
scarred by earlier interventions that could be covered up, but not undone.
Finally, some critical comments from curators stem from the changes wrought on the
Kress Collection by time. Taste changes, restorations age and discolor themselves, and our ideas
about conservation have continued to evolve. Today, one would be hard pressed to find a curator
or conservator that did not state they were in favor of limited interventions in restoring artwork.
Nonetheless, the field of conservation and restoration contains a range of practices that conform
to this ideal; the practice is not uniform.
Unlike Pichetto, no one cast aspersions on Modestini’s knowledge and talent as a
conservator-restorer. He was a respected leader in the field. In the years to come he conserved
paintings for major museums and private collectors, including Norton Simon. Rather, the
criticisms leveled against his work reflect the active debates about how one should approach
conservation and restoration in the 1950s.
With the opening of “Art Treasures for America” in 1961, Modestini’s project at the
Kress Foundation formally came to an end. However, he continued to play an important role in
the life of the Kress Collection and Foundation until his death in 2006. Upon request, he checked

242
on and treated Kress Collection pieces later in his career.
177
He also agreed to act as a consultant
restorer for the National Gallery of Art and for recipient museums across the United States.
Throughout the decade Modestini worked for the Kress Foundation, they had discussed
the possibility of one day establishing a program to train conservators. However, preparing to
disseminate the Kress collection absorbed all of their energy and resources. New tensions also
emerged during this period. The value of S.H. Kress & Co. stock—the major source of the Kress
Foundation’s endowment—dropped precipitously in the latter half of the 1950s.
178
In 1958, the
Kress Foundation’s board of trustees acted dramatically to protect their resources by forcing
Rush Kress to cede control of the S.H. Kress & Co.’s board.
179
During this tumultuous period,
developing additional programs was untenable.

The Kress Program in the Conservation of Paintings
Conservation remained a central focus of the Kress Foundation nonetheless. From
Kress’s donations in the 1920s to Italian cultural heritage sites until the present, the Kress
Foundation has offered grants for restoration campaigns on significant structures and works of
art around the world. They also developed fellowships to help train art conservators as well as art
historians. In 1990, the Kress Foundation initiated the Kress Program in the Conservation of
Paintings at the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. Through this
program, graduate students clean and conserve Kress Collection paintings under the supervision

177
Modestini, interview by Stoner.
178
As postwar families moved into suburbs, they shopped at conveniently local malls rather than going
into the downtown where most S.H. Kress & Co. stores were located. See Bernice Thomas, America’s 5
& 10 Cent Stores: The Kress Legacy (New York: John Wiley & Sons for the National Building Museum,
1997).
179
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 6: Kress Stores, Box 176, Kress Stores: Correspondence:
General], New York, New York. For a concise summation of the conflict, see Margaret Leslie Davis, The
Culture Broker: Franklin D. Murphy and the Transformation of Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007), 264–7.

243
of program’s lead conservator, Dianne Dwyer Modestini.
180
This program benefits all involved:
young conservators receive critical training working on Old Master paintings, while also
ensuring the stability of Kress Collection paintings for their home museums.
The Kress Program in the Conservation of Paintings teaches conservators to use the latest
tools and techniques to study the condition of early modern paintings. Students investigate
materials and methods of making used by artists in order to better understand early modern art.
Their research sheds new light on workshop practices, artists’ techniques, and the ways in which
early modern objects have aged in differing contexts.
181
Conservators are no longer primarily
focused on establishing authorship; instead the program trains them to use their knowledge about
the material object to answer the questions driving art historical research today.
Yet like Modestini, the conservators trained in this program approach the work of art not
only as a historic artifact, but an object of aesthetic value. Paintings brought into the center for
conservation receive a thorough analysis. Once their condition is assessed, the conservation
students aim to restore the work’s appearance to something approximating its original state. To
restore lacunae, conservation students study alternate examples of the artist’s work and that of
their contemporaries.
182
In this respect, the Kress Program maintains elements of the earlier
pictorial approach to restoration.
This continuity with earlier tradition is unsurprising given the structure of the program. It
is funded by the Kress Foundation, but more importantly, students learn under the direction of

180
“Conserving the Kress Collection,” Samuel H. Kress Foundation,
http://www.kressfoundation.org/collection/conserving_the_collection/.
181
Nica Gutman Riepi, “From Florence to Bologna: Examination and Treatment of Giuliano Bugiardini’s
Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist,” accessed April 2, 2018,
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/conservation/kress/bugiardini/IFA-Kress-Bugiardini.pdf.
182
Annika Finne, “Examination and Treatment of the Madonna and Child by Agostino da Lodi,” Kress
Paintings Research, 15–16, accessed April 2, 2018,
https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/conservation/kress/agostinodalodi/Kress_AgostinoDaLodi.Web.pd
f.

244
Dianne Dwyer Modestini. Dwyer Modestini worked as a conservator at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art with John Brealey, one of the most influential conservators in the United States
in the latter half of twentieth century. Brealey advocated for conservators to attend to the
aesthetic qualities of paintings throughout his career.
183
Dwyer Modestini is an aesthetically
oriented conservator-restorer herself. After working with Brealey, she went on to work closely
with Mario Modestini for decades. A respected conservator-restorer, Dwyer Modestini employs
elements of the pictorial approach in her own practice. Most recently, she restored the Salvator
Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. It was widely known that the painting’s condition
required heavy restoration. After the Salvator Mundi sold for a record-setting price at auction in
November 2017, former Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Campbell suggested that
“inch for inch, conservator Dianne Modestini must be among the most highly-valued living
artists in the world!”
184
(Fig. 3.25–26)
The debate over the conservation of the Salvator Mundi again underlines the distance that
lies between the way academic and popular audiences imagine conservation and restoration
campaigns, and their actuality. Dwyer Modestini and her students at the Kress Program for
Conservation are respected members of the conservation community. Their practices reflect
fairly common approaches to treating and maintaining early modern works of art. American
museums, auction houses, and collectors regularly use integrative inpainting and other methods
of restoration to restore works of art to improve their appearance, if not to return them to an

183
John Brealey, “Who Needs a Conservator? (1983), in Bomford and Leonard, 118–123; Modestini,
“John Brealey and the Cleaning of Paintings.”
184
Anna Brady, “Former Met Director sparks Instagram spat over $450m Leonardo da Vinci,” The Art
Newspaper (November 21, 2017), https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/former-met-director-sparks-
instagram-spat-over-usd450m-leonardo-da-vinci.

245
imagined original state.
185
Within American institutions, it is rare for these kinds of interventions
to be detectable to the untrained eye. In spaces dedicated to viewing art, the aesthetic experience
remains central to the conservator’s considerations.

Conclusion
The history of the Kress Collection’s conservation provides an alternative, and more
complicated, narrative about the development of professional art conservation in the United
States in the first half of the twentieth century. It would be reductive to conflate Pichetto and
Modestini’s practices, but they both welcomed technological innovation while continuing to
focus first and foremost on restoring aesthetic unity to the work of art. Reviewing their prolific
careers makes it clear that Pichetto and Modestini played a significant role in determining the
condition of paintings in major American museums throughout this period; in addition to their
substantial work on the Kress Collection, both men accepted additional projects for other
prominent collectors and institutions. Yet their place within the history of conservation has been
largely overlooked to date. This silence is especially noteworthy as their approach continues to
thrive in the conservation practices of many institutions to the present. Though the academic
conservation programs founded in the early twentieth century have formalized training and
developed invaluable new tools and techniques, these programs have not transformed the field as
entirely as is commonly assumed. Though any conservator today would confirm Secco-Suardo’s
call for limited intervention, pictorial restoration nevertheless remains the norm in most art
museums and private collections.

185
On touring the National Gallery of Art’s conservation studio in 2011, interns and staff members
explained to me how they researched an artist’s style and technique in order to restore lacunae. They
worked in a manner similar to that described by Finne. Also see Rebecca Ellison, Patricia Smithen and
Rachel Turnbull, eds., Mixing and Matching: Approaches to Retouching Paintings (London: Archetype
Publications, Ltd., 2010).

246
For reasons related equally to the focus of the discipline and a lack of resources, art
historians are often inattentive to the conservation histories of the artwork that we teach and
study, and thus fail to attend to the consequences of past and present interventions. Studying the
conservation history of individual objects and collections reminds us that works of art are labile;
the layered histories of Italian Renaissance paintings convey centuries of changing views on the
value and societal role of art. There are hundreds of rich stories embedded in the material history
of the paintings and sculpture of the Kress Collection, many worthy of further exploration.
Instead of pursuing these individual stories, I have instead sought here to convey how this
diverse body of objects came to possess a greater sense of unity through the intervention of the
Kress conservators over a thirty-five-year period. This serves as an important reminder of how
collectors, conservators, and scholars continue to craft new contexts and narratives through
which to understand Italian Renaissance art.

247
Chapter 4

Italian Renaissance Art from Coast to Coast: The Kress Regional Galleries Program

In the postwar period, Americans envisioned museums as instruments for creating a more
peaceful world. In May 1946, the American Association of Museums held its first annual
postwar conference at the National Gallery of Art. In his opening remarks, Librarian of Congress
Archibald MacLeish issued a powerful call for museums to create a more peaceful world by
building up “the defenses of the human spirit.”
1
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it became clear
that technical advances alone could not ensure the safety of humanity. MacLeish and many in his
audience that day believed society needed to prioritize cultural values for their potential to unite
and protect people.
This concept resonated strongly with the Kress Foundation, which sought to make the
Kress Collection widely accessible in order to fulfill their mission statement to “promote the
moral, physical, and mental well-being of the human race.”
2
As Samuel Kress’s health declined
in 1946, his brother Rush assumed leadership of the Foundation.
3
Together in close collaboration
with the staff at the National Gallery of Art, Rush and the Kress Foundation determined the
Kress Collection artwork in storage would do more good if it were given to other institutions.
The Kress Foundation’s Regional Galleries Program distributed art from the Kress Collection to
dozens of American museums. Through this campaign of giving, the Kress Foundation sought to
equip American art museums with the resources to engage in the cultural work called for by
MacLeish and his contemporaries.

1
Archibald MacLeish, “Museums and World Peace,” Museum News 24 (1 June 1946): 6–7.
2
“Kress Foundation: Foundational Documents,” Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 4: Kress
Foundation, Box 162, “Kress Foundation: Foundational Documents”], New York, New York.
3
On his health, see “Memorandum for the Record,” Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 5:
Kress Family, Box 172, “Kress Family: Correspondence: General],” New York, New York.

248
The aim of the Kress Regional Galleries Program was to create a network of Kress
Galleries across the United States. This kind of program was unprecedented at the time, and
nothing similar had been attempted in its wake until quite recently.
4
Nonetheless, there is little
scholarly literature on the Kress Regional Galleries Program beyond brief references to Kress’s
generosity in regional gallery catalogues. The most substantial account of the program appears in
a 1994 catalogue for the exhibition, A Gift to America: Masterpieces of the European Painting
from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Four museums that received Kress Regional Collections
collaborated on this exhibit to celebrate Kress’s legacy and provide a fuller account of their
collections’ histories. Articles in the exhibition catalogue by the Kress Foundation President,
Marilyn Perry, and National Gallery of Art curator, Edgar Peters Bowron, provide the
authoritative account of the Kress Collection’s dispersal. Perry and Bowron offer richly detailed
narratives of the Kress Regional Galleries Program, which they present as a natural outgrowth of
Samuel Kress’s earlier philanthropic initiatives.
5

Outside of academic scholarship, Colin Eisler studied the Kress Regional Galleries
Program in order to interpret the “mystery” of the Kress Collection itself in an article for
Partisan Review in 2006.
6
Drawing on the anti-communist rhetoric prevalent in Rush Kress’s
correspondence during the late 1940s and early 1950s, Eisler argued that a desire to limit the

4
In 2008, Dorothy and Herbert Vogel announced a joint initiative with the National Gallery of Art to
donate fifty works of art from their personal collection to one museum in each of the fifty United States.
As discussed below, this project drew inspiration in part from the Kress Foundation’s Regional Galleries
Program. Vogel 50x50, accessed November 2, 2018, https://vogel5050.org/#.
5
The North Carolina Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Seattle Art Museum; and Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco worked together to develop this exhibition (Chiyo Ishikawa, Lynn Federle Orr,
George T.M. Shackelford, and David Steel, eds, A Gift to America: Masterpieces of European Painting
from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation [New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994]).
6
Eisler opened this article by stating “why the major American merchant, Samuel H. Kress (1863–1955),
a Lutheran, steeped himself in the most Catholic art work of Italy… …has long remained a mystery”
(Colin Eisler, “Gold-Ground Art and the Cold War: Solving the Great Kress Mystery,” Partisan Review
[Winter 2002]: 67–74).

249
spread of communism undergirded the creation and dispersal of the Kress Collection. Eisler’s
larger argument, that patronage provides the wealthy an opportunity to justify their privilege,
could be made about almost all donors to American art institutions. Eisler raised compelling
questions with this article, though his brief (dare I say partisan) discussion paints the complicated
history of the Kress Collection with too broad a brushstroke. In particular, he elides the differing
motivations of Samuel and Rush Kress as leaders of the Kress Foundation in ways that are
misleading. Nevertheless, Eisler’s article spurred me to consider how the political context of the
Cold War reshaped the existing philanthropic goals of the Kress Foundation.
The Kress Foundation’s Regional Galleries Program ran from 1947 to 1961, the heart of
the Cold War. During this period, Americans drew on cultural resources to wage ideological
battles. The State Department famously exhibited modern American art internationally, hoping
that art and culture could win the hearts and minds of people at home and abroad.
7
Cold War
anxieties also provided a new impetus for making art accessible to American citizens. Yet for
political and economic reasons, the United States government did not engage in ambitious
programs domestically. In fact, between the end of the Works Progress Administration in 1943
and the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965, the United States resisted
providing federal support for the arts, despite many debates concerning the issues and proposals
to do so.
8
David Finley, director of the National Gallery of Art, was among those opposed to
federal arts programs; he, like many other detractors, viewed them as a danger to creativity and

7
Michael L. Krenn, Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Margaret Lynne Ausfeld and Virginia M. Mecklenburg,
Advancing American Art: Politics and Aesthetics in the State Department Exhibition, 1946–1948
(Montgomery, Alabama: Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, 1984).
8
Between the collapse of the Works Progress Administration in 1943 and founding of the National
Endowment for the Arts in 1965, the United States provided little to no federal support for the arts (Gary
O. Larson, The Reluctant Patron: The United States Government and the Arts, 1943–1965 [Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania, 2016]).

250
innovation.
9
For this reason, Finley proceeded cautiously when his trustees called for the
National Gallery to play a larger role in American cultural life beyond the capital.
In collaborating on the Kress Regional Galleries Program, the teams at the National
Gallery of Art and the Kress Foundation endeavored to expand the reach of the National Gallery
into communities across the United States through private enterprise. The Kress Foundation
clearly envisioned their program of sending collections of Italian Renaissance art as a model to
reinforce the ideals of liberal democracy. Studying the Kress Regional Galleries Program offers
an alternative narrative about how Renaissance art served in the cultural cold war as much to
reinforce values in American citizens as to articulate a vision of American identity abroad.

From Empty Walls to Surplus: The Kress Collection within the National Gallery of Art
Despite Samuel Kress’s commitment to the National Gallery of Art in 1939, the Kress
Collection remained in flux as the Second World War drew to an end. On founding the National
Gallery, Andrew Mellon had stipulated that all donated works of art should match or exceed the
quality of his own collection. John Walker, curator and later director of the museum, spoke
openly about the hesitation he felt in accepting the Kress Collection in 1939, as he believed it
contained many paintings that did not meet this standard.
10
Yet the collection included important
works, and he felt confidant Kress would continue to improve its quality. Pragmatically, Walker
and Finley also knew Mellon’s fine collection would only fill a small portion of their vast new

9
Larson, 85–90. Also see David A. Doheny, David Finley: Quiet Force for America’s Arts (Washington,
D.C.: National Trust for Historic Preservation, 2006). The National Gallery of Art is a public-private
partnership. The federal government only provides funds each year to cover operations and maintenance;
thus, in theory, it cannot exercise control over acquisitions, exhibitions, or research.
10
John Walker, Self-Portrait with Donors: Confessions of an Art Collectors (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1974), 140. He repeated these sentiments in his oral history interview in 1990 (Oral History
Interview with John Walker, October 23, 1990, National Gallery of Art Archives [Records of the Oral
History Program, General, Transcripts-Reference Set, 10, Record Group 32A2], Washington, D.C.).

251
museum; they needed the Kress Collection to stock the galleries. To solve this dilemma, Finley
proposed creating a study collection at the National Gallery that would hold some of the lesser
works in the Kress Collection.
11

The June 1939 indenture between the National Gallery, the Smithsonian Institute, Samuel
Kress, and the Kress Foundation formalized the agreement. The National Gallery committed to
incorporate all the proposed sculpture and seventy-five percent of the paintings Kress donated
into their permanent collection. This indenture confirmed that a portion of the collection would
be displayed in study galleries. In 1943, an amendment to the indenture stipulated that no more
than fifteen percent of the Kress Collection gifts could be placed in the study collection.
12

The National Gallery of Art committed to never deaccession works of art from their
permanent collection. Thus, accepting all of Kress’s gifts represented a significant commitment.
However, the 1939 indenture with the Kress Foundation included a significant provision
permitting National Gallery trustees to substitute or replace artwork donated by Kress for more
desirable acquisitions he or the Kress Foundation might offer them in the future.
13
Furthermore,
Kress and the Kress Foundation continued to make loans as well as gifts to the National Gallery.
This permitted a degree of fluidity to the Kress Collection within the National Gallery in the
1940s.
14

11
Oral History Interview with John Walker, July 27, 1987, National Gallery of Art Archives [Records of
the Oral History Program, General, Transcripts-Reference Set, 16, Record Group 32A2], Washington,
D.C.
12
“Washington, D.C.: Indenture Amendments 1943,” Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2:
Kress Institutions, Box 122, “Washington, D.C.: Indenture Amendments 1943,”], New York, New York.
13
Indenture, 9. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 122, “Washington,
D.C.: National Gallery of Art: Indenture], New York, New York.
14
See for example, Huntington Cairns to S.H. Kress regarding the installation and labeling of the Kress
Collection artwork at the National Gallery of Art, January 29, 1946. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive
[Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 124, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art: Collection: Kress
Installation Plans], New York, New York. Kress and the Kress Foundation also continued to donate
artwork to other institutions in the 1940s. Charlotte received two paintings in 1943 and 1946. Hunter

252
Despite this program of exchange, by the end of World War II there was a surplus of
Kress Collection artwork at the National Gallery of Art. In 1947, the National Gallery of Art held
more than one hundred paintings from the Kress Collection in storage. On top of this, the Kress
Foundation stored another hundred paintings at the S.H. Kress & Co. flagship in New York.
15

The National Gallery of Art could not and did not desire to display the entirety of Kress’s
collection.
On May 23, 1947, the Kress Foundation’s board of trustees held a special meeting to
discuss the future of the Kress Collection. They agreed that the artwork languishing in storage
should be distributed elsewhere. Inspired by Samuel Kress’s early gifts, they decided to again
donate art to galleries located in “cities in which there are Kress stores so that we may obtain the
best benefit from it as well as do the most good for the people of the communities in which we
are doing business.”
16
The Kress Foundation’s endowment consisted heavily of S.H. Kress & Co.
stock in 1947, so their “best benefit” would align with the business’s success. However, it would
prove more complicated to determine where the collection might do the most good. As the
trustees began formulating this new campaign of donations, they agreed to “take our time in
donating these paintings.”
17
The Kress Foundation did take its time. The Regional Galleries
Program, initiated though not fully formed at this meeting, would take over a decade to complete.

College in NY received one in 1943, the Met a Velasquez in 1942, Tulsa in 1944, Stockton 1944 (List,
November 30, 1948, Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 125, List of
Museums, Etc., to Whom Gifts Have Been Made by Mr. S.H. Kress and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation],
New York, New York).
15
In 1947, the National Gallery of Art documented 605 works of art from the Kress Collection and kept
135 paintings in storage (Marilyn Perry, “The Kress Collection,” in A Gift to America: Masterpieces of
European Painting from the Samuel H. Kress Collection, ed. Chiyo Ishikawa, Lynn Federele Orr, George
T. Shackelford, and David Steel [New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994], 26).
16
Perry, “The Kress Collection,” A Gift to America,” 34, n. 66.
17
Ibid.

253
Initially, the board of trustees kept their intentions private. However, in February 1948,
Rush Kress confidentially informed Bernard Berenson that they planned to extend the Kress
Collection to an additional fifteen galleries across the United States. He explained these gifts
would follow the pattern of their donation to Allentown, which received twenty-six paintings
several years earlier from Samuel Kress.
18
Rush Kress wanted “every Kress painting” on public
exhibition; he was willing to extend the collection beyond the National Gallery to make this
possible.
19

The National Gallery of Art supported the Kress Foundation’s Regional Galleries
Program. Their staff helped execute the program by determining which works held by the
museum might be better suited for one of the regional galleries.
20
Through this program, the
National Gallery of Art edited their holdings from the Kress Collection to highlight its strengths.
The Kress Foundation’s Regional Galleries Program also extended the reach of the National
Gallery. Each institution to receive a subset of paintings from the Kress Foundation agreed to
clearly indicate that these works belonged to the larger Kress Collection. Thus the Kress
Collection connected dozens of museums across the country and the National Gallery of Art.
The Regional Galleries Program dispersed the Kress Collection, but did not disband it.
This distinction is critical. Collections represent more than their contents; they embody the
cultural concerns of their creators. Yet when a private collection enters an institution, its identity
tends to be subsumed into the overarching institutional narrative. Paradoxically, the Kress
Collection avoided this fate by becoming a distributed whole—that is to say, by existing in
dozens of locations, the Collection’s identity surpassed that of any individual institution. The

18
Rush Kress to Bernard Berenson, February 3, 1948. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1:
Kress Collection, Box 108, Collection: Berenson, Bernhard: Correspondence: General (4 of 5)], New
York, New York.
19
Perry, “The Kress Collection,” A Gift to America, 34, n. 71.
20
Ibid.

254
Regional Galleries Program provided the Kress Foundation with an opportunity to clarify the
collection’s identity as one that provides a survey of Italian Renaissance art, while also
instantiating the relevance of this material to American cultural life. Moreover, the Kress
Regional Galleries Program managed this task while simultaneously reinforcing the National
Gallery’s mission to serve all Americans. The dispersal of the Kress Collection in the 1950s
represents an exceptional chapter in the history of collecting, one that enriches our understanding
of how collections participate in the construction of collective culture.
The Kress Foundation’s Regional Galleries Program represented a new approach to
enriching American art museums. The trustees clearly drew on Samuel Kress’s early gifts as
their inspiration; in organizing this new program, they honored his original desire to enrich
communities without strong collections of Renaissance art. The program also drew on long-
standing debates within the museological field about how to best apportion cultural resources.

National Museums and National Culture
Through the Kress Regional Galleries Program, the Kress Foundation and the National
Gallery of Art experimented with the structure of a national art collection. From their inception,
national art museums have served as more than repositories for treasured artifacts. They were
and are important sites for civic education and the celebration of national culture. The concept of
a national museum emerged as part of larger nation-building efforts in nineteenth-century Europe.
Over the course of the previous century, Europeans increasingly viewed royal collections as
national cultural patrimony. Princely collectors in Florence, Dresden, and Vienna provided the
public increased access to their collections.
21
The French took this a radical step further during

21
Paula Findlen, “The 2012 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: The Eighteenth-Century Invention of the

255
the revolution in 1792; they declared the Louvre a national museum—its contents belonging to
all citizens. As a national collection, the Louvre invited a wider range of the citizenry to engage
with the cultural values it espoused than had previously been the case. Through the objects it
displayed, and the order and settings in which the visitor encountered them, the Louvre presented
a powerful narrative about French cultural might. Visitors moved through galleries of increasing
grandeur as they wandered between the art of early civilizations into spaces dedicated to classical
Greek and Roman antiquities, through the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance, and finally
culminating in rooms celebrating contemporary French art and culture.
22
The museum’s
sophisticated collection and modern ideals presented a compelling counter-narrative about the
French state to the international community during a period of ongoing violence.
23

The Louvre inspired other European nations to open their own national galleries of art.
By 1825, nearly every Western nation boasted its own national collection.
24
Almost all examples
contained the same combination of canonical works from a range of countries and prized
examples of national artistic production. Through the museum, each nation presented its own
society as the cultural heir to Western Civilization. The United States arrived late to this game. In
the nineteenth century, multiple collectors tried and failed to establish a national museum for

Renaissance: Lessons from the Uffizi,” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Spring 2013), 1–34;
Carole Paul, ed. The First Modern Museums of Art: The Birth of an Institution in 18
th
- and 19
th
-Century
Europe (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012).
22
Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “Universal Survey Museum,” Art History 3, no. 4 (December 1980):
448–69.
23
Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in
Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
24
Gabriella Elgenius, “National Museums as National Symbols,” in National Museums and Nation-
Building in Europe, 1750–2010, ed. Peter Aronsson and Gabriella Elgenius (London: Routledge, 2015),
150–3.

256
Americans. Finally, the National Gallery of Art opened in 1941, more than a century after many
of its European forebears.
25

The National Gallery of Art served as an important symbol of American cultural
achievement as well as a center for the development of public knowledge and appreciation of
fine art. In its early years, the National Gallery of Art presented the history of European art from
the earliest days of the Italian Renaissance through the American art of the late-nineteenth and
early twentieth-century. In the manner of the Louvre and other great survey institutions, the
National Gallery of Art created a narrative through their collection that tied the United States to
the history of art.
26
Touring the collections of European art in the National Gallery, Americans
could come to view their own cultural identity as one crucially connected to centuries of
European art and culture. Above all else, this museum celebrates art as an expression of the
triumph of Western Civilization. Thus, through the National Gallery art history served as a
powerful tool in crafting a unified national identity for the United States, despite its large
landmass, widespread and diverse population, and shallow conception of its own history.
Though the National Gallery of Art aims to serve all Americans, its location in
Washington, D.C., makes it geographically distant for many. Particularly in the mid-twentieth
century, most Americans would spend little time in the capital and many would never have the
opportunity to visit. The size of the United States made this problem especially acute, but all
national museums grapple with how to fulfill their mandate to serve the entire populace.
In many countries, a system of regional museums serves to extend the reach of the
primary national museum or gallery. For example, in the early nineteenth century, French

25
Alan Wallach, Exhibiting Contradictions: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts, 1998).
26
Wallach and Duncan, “The Universal Survey Museum,” 465–69. The American press acknowledged
this connection as well when it opened (“A Louvre for Americans,” Newsweek March 24, 1941).

257
legislators established fifteen provincial museums to partner with the Louvre. The provincial
museums received excess paintings from the Louvre’s collection and works of art purchased by
the state at the Salons.
27
In return, they were expected to send requested art and antiquities from
their own collections back to Paris. The French hoped to use the exchange to reinforce narratives
about national identity articulated in Parisian museums, while also honoring the distinct history
and culture of the particular place. Regional identities are often stronger and more entrenched
than a sense of national identity, making this a complicated task. Within the regional museums
therefore, the French sought to present regional differences as critical elements of the larger
national identity.
28
In this respect, the relationship between the regional and national museums in
nineteenth-century France helped convert diverse people into a unified citizenry. Through their
provincial galleries, the French museums could flex their soft power across a greater expanse of
the country.
In the 1940s, the United States government had only recently agreed to partially support a
National Gallery of Art. It was not interested in allocating additional resources to develop
satellite campuses or donation programs to expand the new museum’s reach to other regions of
the United States.
29
Rather, the American government—in a pattern that largely continues to the
present—relied on private funding to support the arts and culture. The Kress Foundation stepped
into this role; though their board and staff ran the Kress Regional Galleries Program, they clearly
envisioned it as extending access to the collections and philosophy of the National Gallery of Art.

27
Daniel Sherman, “The Bourgeoisie, Cultural Appropriation, and the Art Museum in Nineteenth-
Century France,” Radical History Review no. 38 (1987): 38–58.
28
Stefan Berger, “National Museums in Between Nationalism, Imperialism and Regionalism, 1750–1914,”
in National Museums and Nation-Building in Europe 1750–2010, ed. Peter Aronsson and Gabriella
Elgenius, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 25–6.
29
Larson, The Reluctant Patron.

258
The name of the Kress Foundation’s campaign is telling. In designating the recipient
museums participating in this program as “regional galleries,” the Kress Foundation placed them
in a peripheral relationship to the cultural center of the National Gallery itself. The Kress
Foundation attended to the distinctive history and culture of each site when planning their gifts,
but their primary goal was to use the Kress Collection to cultivate a shared experience for
Americans engaging with Italian Renaissance art. This decision cannot be entirely explained by
their existing holdings, as the Kress Foundation purchased hundreds of examples of Italian
Renaissance art in the 1950s to support this program. The Regional Galleries Program aimed to
create a series of “Miniature National Galleries” across the United States by bringing aspects of
the collection in D.C. to smaller museums. The Kress Foundation consistently described the
Kress Regional Galleries as subsets of a whole Kress Collection; this distinction served to
underscore how the many Kress Galleries presented a common cultural heritage.
In constructing and exporting narratives about culture and national identity, the
museum—both in the nineteenth-century French and the twentieth-century American contexts—
exercised a form of power that has been critiqued by scholars like Carol Duncan, Alan Wallach,
and Tony Bennett as hegemonic.
30
Recent scholarship examines how the museum can serve to
re-inscribe the status quo, naturalizing the power of elites and silencing alternative voices.
31
One
could read the history of the Kress Foundation’s Regional Galleries Program through this lens,
but this approach can over-determine understanding of museum history. My study seeks to pair
an awareness of these ideological implications with attention to the specific political and cultural
contexts in which the Kress Regional Galleries Program emerged and developed.

30
Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995); Carol
Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Universal Survey Museum,” 448–69.
31
For example, see Daniel Sherman, ed. Museums and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2007).

259

War and Peace, Art and Culture in Midcentury America
In the aftermath of the Second World War, many embraced with optimism the sweeping
cultural narratives that came to be critiqued by the end of the century. In the 1930s and 40s,
regional museums dedicated to local folk life and culture had flourished in Europe. The
provincial museums of Vichy France dedicated to peasant life and the Heimatmuseum system in
Nazi Germany celebrated distinctive national customs in ways that contributed to the growth of
ethnic nationalism. Originally celebrated as a modern turn for museums, the role of this form of
regional museum in propagating fascist ideology discredited it as a model moving forward.
32

Instead, postwar museums sought to emphasize how art and culture served to unite people by
demonstrating their shared humanity and values.
Toward the end of the war, James Soby, director of the Department of Paintings and
Sculpture at MoMA, described art as a medium for peace. He encouraged his colleagues to
embrace “the arts as vehicles of that international communication and understanding on which
the future of everyone depends.”
33
After a war marked by lethal technological advances, it is
natural that people turned to lasting cultural forms for healing. The belief that engagement with
the arts promotes empathy, creativity, and connection undoubtedly motivated individuals and
institutions in the postwar period even as it continues to do so today.
34

32
Dominique Poulot, “Identity as Self-Discovery: The Ecomuseum in France,” in Museum Culture:
Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, ed. Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1994), 66–84.
33
Krenn, 12.
34
For example, James Cuno, president of the Getty, wrote in a blog post: “Art helps us to know ourselves;
it fosters creativity and empathy for people of other cultures, times, and places. It prompts us to question
what is and imagine what could be” (James Cuno, “A Commitment to Generosity, Inclusiveness, and
Truth,” The Iris: Behind the Scenes at the Getty, December 16, 2016, http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/getty-
values-generosity-inclusiveness-truth/).

260
However, as the United States emerged as a global leader in the mid-twentieth century,
the sense of mission that infused museums and other cultural organizations cannot be separated
from political ideology. From the 1930s onward, American museums increasingly embraced
their role as protectors and promulgators of Western Civilization. President Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s speech at the opening of the National Gallery of Art in 1941 demonstrates how this
sense of responsibility permeated American thought even before the United States’ entry into the
war. He described the “ancient arts” within the museum to be “not only works of art” but
“symbols of the human spirit, symbols of the world the freedom of human spirit has made.” In
accepting the paintings on the nation’s behalf, especially those by German and Italian artists,
Roosevelt stated that he was affirming
…the belief of the people of this democratic Nation in a human spirit which is now
everywhere endangered and which, in many countries where it first found form and
meaning, has been rooted out and broken and destroyed. To accept this work today is to
assert the purpose of the people of America that the freedom of the human spirit and
human mind—which has produced the world’s great art and all its science shall not be
utterly destroyed.
35

Only in a liberal democracy, Roosevelt argued, can the human spirit and mind flourish in the
manner necessary to create and appreciate the arts.
After 1945, American institutions continued to feel the need to protect the “freedom of
the human spirit” as the fight against fascism shifted to one against communism. The United
States government drew on fine art, as well as music and film, to engage in cultural diplomacy
internationally throughout the Cold War. In perhaps the best-known example of this kind of
programming, the United States Information Agency (USIA) sent exhibitions of modern and
abstract American art to Soviet bloc countries in the 1950s and 60s. Through the diverse display
of artwork, the USIA hoped to convey a visual lesson about the freedom of expression permitted

35
“The Text of President Roosevelt’s Art Address,” New York Times, March 18, 1941, 8.

261
to citizens of democratic nations.
36
In other instances, art exhibitions reinforced diplomatic
relationships. In this spirit, the Inter-American Office—a small department established within the
National Gallery of Art—organized loan exhibitions of American art to send to South and
Central American republics.
37

The blend of calculation and idealism that drove the creation of these programs could not,
however, stem widespread criticism of them within the United States. Congressional members
decried exhibitions as a waste of tax-dollars and, in the case of controversial works of art, a
misrepresentation of American values. At the same time, figures within the government and art
world expressed misgivings about state-sponsored art programs, arguing that the politicization of
art could undermine artistic freedom and aesthetic integrity.
38
These arguments echoed earlier
critiques of the Federal Art Project, a program that ceased to exist after being subsumed into the
Graphic Section of the War Services Program in 1942.
39

For these reasons, it is unsurprising that the United States government did not develop
equivalent art exhibitions programs for domestic audiences. Nonetheless, the belief that the arts
contributed to a healthy democratic society remained strong. As it had in the past, the American
government viewed supporting the arts as the responsibility of private organizations. The Kress
Foundation’s Regional Galleries Program and its ambitions must be understood against this
historical backdrop.

36
Frances Stoner Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New
York: The New Press, 1999; Krenn; Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, & American
Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
37
Krenn, 9–178.
38
Ibid.
39
In March 1942, the Federal Art Project, originally part of the Works Projects Administration, was
subsumed into the new Graphic Section of the War Services Program. Their existing projects came to a
close by early 1943 (Jonathan Harris, Federal Art and National Culture: The Politics of Identity in New
Deal America [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 150).

262
In 1949, Rush Kress expressed concern that the National Gallery of Art was “as yet
unprepared to meet the broader challenges of art education on a nationwide basis” despite
agreement that it should serve “as an active educational influence in the cultural, spiritual, and
moral lives of the people.”
40
He proposed studying possible opportunities for the Gallery to
extend itself to new audiences—particularly “younger people”— through television programs,
publications, lectures, and the distribution of slides and reproductions.
41
In a similar manner, he
wanted to learn more about the relationships between American museums and “what might be
done to make these relations more intimate and more fruitful.” He felt that as a national
institution, the National Gallery of Art must strive to make art “part and parcel of a rich and
valuable experience in the lives of our people.”
42
Rush Kress believed developing an
appreciation for art would counter the “communistic and socialistic thoughts which have been so
disastrous to the thinking of people.”
43
Like his contemporaries at the USIA, Kress envisioned
using art as a resource to attract hearts and minds. Yet he also acknowledged it would be difficult
for the National Gallery of Art to plan and execute extension programs since they relied upon
government appropriations for funding.
44
In creating the Kress Regional Galleries Program,

40
Honorable Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, March 9, 1949. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series
2: Kress Institutions, Box 125, National Gallery of Art: Correspondence: General (1 of 5)], New York,
New York. The previous fall, H.A. McBride asked Rush Kress to suggest an outside agency that could
assess the National Gallery of Art. He particularly sought comments on how the Gallery’s “cultural
resources” could be used “for a nationwide educational program” (H.A. McBride to Rush Kress, October
12, 1948, National Gallery of Art, Gallery Archive [Series 2A1, Box 7, General and Miscellaneous: Kress,
Samuel H. Correspondence [Part 2, April 1947–August 1949]],” Washington, D.C.).
41
Ibid. Some of these programs were already in place. The National Gallery had developed programs to
circulate slide collections and reproductions around the country, and they facilitated loans as well.
42
Ibid.
43
Rush Kress to David Finley, November 21, 1949. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2:
Kress Institutions, Box 125, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art: Correspondence: General (1/5)],
New York, New York.
44
Honorable Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, March 9, 1949. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series
2: Kress Institutions, Box 125, National Gallery of Art: Correspondence: General (1 of 5)],” New York,
New York.

263
Rush Kress and his team embarked on a campaign to bring Italian Renaissance art into
communities without government funding and oversight.
As a private foundation, the Kress Foundation could pursue this project in a manner
unavailable to the National Gallery of Art. Finley and Walker pointedly avoided engaging the
National Gallery in political endeavors. They argued that the museum’s integrity relied upon its
apolitical status.
45
This is not to suggest that the museum is free of an ideological position. As
stated above, national museums clearly celebrate the history and political traditions of their own
nation, usually in no small part by claiming lineage with great civilizations of the past. However,
the National Gallery’s celebration of liberal democracy is a far cry from the issues of selection
and representation that would accompany a federally managed regional galleries program. Finley
and Walker supported Kress’s vision for a private program however, and agreed to help execute
it. In partnering with the Kress Foundation, they had an opportunity to engage in the kind of
national educational work Rush Kress called for in his 1949 letter.

Cold War Cultural Concerns and the Kress Collection
In the United States, collections of Old Master paintings had long functioned as symbolic
capital through which Americans could negotiate their own national identity, heritage, and
relationship to European culture. This practice evolved over the course of the twentieth century,
but never ceased. Thus, it is not surprising that the Kress Collection acquired additional
ideological salience during its dispersal in the 1950s.
From the late 1920s, Samuel Kress’s decision to place his collection—born of vast
private wealth—into public institutions represented what Eisler described as a “silent yet potent

45
Krenn, 61. Walker became the National Gallery’s second director in 1956.

264
sermon” to free enterprise.
46
Rush Kress and Guy Emerson, art director of the Kress Collection,
shared Samuel Kress’s conservative political views. In the years following the Second World
War, they viewed American investment in education, healthcare, and the arts as critical for the
country to thrive. Yet, they also believed these fields must remain in the private sector in order to
flourish.
47
Under their leadership, the Kress Foundation strove not only to strengthen these fields,
but also to provide a philanthropic model for their compatriots.
In 1951, as they celebrated the tenth-anniversary Kress Exhibition at the National Gallery
of Art, Kress and Emerson prepared a memorandum that celebrated the Foundation’s
accomplishments to date and articulated its goals for the years to come. Rush Kress wanted to
ensure that his brother’s collection would be distinct in history not only for its size and quality,
but also for its “usefulness.”
48
Rush’s desire to make the collection accessible was in keeping
with his brother’s legacy. He made it clear that he hoped this audience would include individuals
like himself for whom a love and appreciation of art was not innate.
49
Kress pushed the

46
Eisler, "Gold-Ground Art,” 72. At least two critics commented on this at the time of Kress’s donation to
the National Gallery of Art. The Daily Sentinel of Grand Junction, Colorado, ran a piece in which the
author argued that Kress’s legacy would have been better served by paying the “great army of girls” who
worked in his stores a better wage (“There are Greater Things,” Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colorado,
July 19, 1939). Similarly, art critic Emily Genauer, of the New York World-Telegram wrote that Kress’s
gift to the National Gallery “…like that of other gifts made by Mr. Frick, Mr. Mellon and many others,
provokes other emotions besides deep gratitude. There will be many to feel that these are not gifts really
but repayment (in another medium, and not by any means in full) of enormous debts contracted by
America’s financial giants to the people from whose labor their wealth was extracted and to the
government which made their opportunities and exploits possible” (Emily Genauer, “America Supreme in
Art Collections: Kress Gift Inspires Survey of Wealth in Great Paintings,” New York World-Telegram,
July 15, 1939).
47
See Guy Emerson’s letter to Rush Kress regarding “Giving in the United States”, March 23, 1948.
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 3: Exhibitions & Publications, Box 163, Kress Foundation:
Administration: Emerson, Guy (1/2)], New York, New York.
48
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Memorandum, March 13, 1951. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive
[Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 123, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art: Collection: General (2
of 5)], New York, New York.
49
For example, see a memorandum written March 10, 1951. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series
2: Kress Institutions, Box 123, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art: Collection: General (2 of 5)],
New York, New York.

265
connoisseurs and art historians with whom he worked to consider how the Kress Collection
might help this group—which he identified as the majority—develop a personal and lasting
interest in fine art. In doing so, he hoped the Kress Collection would “act as a perpetual and
powerful stimulus to beauty and rightness of living among this varied and still youthful people
spread across the American Continent.”
50
As it had in the 1930s, in the 1950s the Kress
Collection was consciously positioned to serve to promote civic virtue and a deeper appreciation
of Western culture.
In crafting their 1951 statement about the Kress Collection’s future, Kress and Emerson
wrote first and foremost that they envisioned it as being a source of “joy and inspiration for our
children’s children.” Though this language refers to future generations, the decision to single out
children is intentional. Beginning in 1946 and continuing throughout the 1950s, the United States
witnessed a historic surge in the birthrate. The ever-growing number of children spurred public
debate about the best way to educate this newest generation of Americans.
51
This context shaped
Rush Kress’s thinking about the Kress Collection as well; he committed the Kress Foundation to
supporting many educational programs when he became de facto president in 1947.
52
To a
greater extent than his brother, the former schoolteacher, Rush also spoke of making Italian
Renaissance art accessible for “the American youth.”
53
Insisting that “children are the main

50
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Memorandum, March 13, 1951. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive
[Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 123, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art: Collection: General (2
of 5)], New York, New York.
51
Amy Ogata, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
52
This extended beyond the arts; the Kress Foundation provided support for universities, medical schools,
and nursing programs (Samuel H. Kress Foundation Items Approved, Action Taken to August 31, 1953.
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 4: Kress Foundation, Box 162, Kress Foundation:
Administration: Correspondence: General (3/6)], New York, New York).
53
Booz, Allen, and Hamilton Business Survey, February 1948, 14. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive
[Series 4: Kress Foundation, Box 162, Kress Foundation: Foundation Documents)], New York, New
York.

266
objective of my brother’s Foundation,” Kress criticized art museums that banned them.
54
In his
comments about the Kress Collection, Rush consistently stressed that he wished to see it made
available to schoolchildren and university students, in order to enhance their education.
55

As he watched his own young daughters engage with their uncle’s collection, Rush also
felt strongly that the foundation should work to make this art intelligible for young and
uninitiated viewers. To this end, he led the Kress Foundation to sponsor the publication of Signs
and Symbols in Christian Art. Kress commissioned his own minister, Reverend George Ferguson,
to write the book. Signs and Symbols uses line drawings and illustrations of Kress Collection
paintings to explain the basic religious iconography of Italian Renaissance paintings.
56
Enid
Bell’s line drawings include direct references to works of art within the Kress Collection. For
example, her rendering of the peacock repeats the bird’s form in Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo
Lippi’s tondo painting, The Adoration of the Magi, which is also reproduced in this volume (Fig.
4.1-2). Likewise, Bell’s drawing of the “eye” replicates the form of St. Lucy’s disembodied eyes
in the fifteenth-century painting, Saint Lucy, by Francesco del Cossa (Fig. 4.3-4). Traditionally,
St. Lucy presents her eyes on a plate. Francesco del Cossa’s representation of them on a stem,
like a flower, is unique.
57
Thus, Signs and Symbols served as more than a general manual; it

54
In this letter, Rush discussed his hope that they might encourage the San Diego Museum of Art to
change its policy in this regard (Rush Kress to Reverend George Ferguson, St. Philip’s-in-the-Hills, July
5, 1951. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 150, Tucson, Arizona: St.
Philip’s in the Hills], New York, New York). Institutions like the Frick Collection continue to ban entry
to young children, but most American museums dropped these policies by the mid-twentieth century.
Instead, children became a focus audience for museums. John Walker’s impatience with this practice
rings out in his memoir; he wrote, “Museums do not exist solely for the noise and turmoil of hordes of
schoolchildren!” (Walker, Self-Portrait with Donors, 304).
55
See for example, Memorandum, June 7, 1954. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 4: Kress
Foundation, Box 162, Kress Foundation: Administration: Correspondence: General (4/6)], New York.
56
George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954).
Enid Bell executed the line drawings.
57
Joseph Manca, “Francesco del Cossa,” in Miklós Boskovits and David Alan Brown, Italian Paintings
of the Fifteenth Century: The Collections of the National Gallery of Art: Systematic Catalogue
(Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2003), 220.

267
specifically prepared visitors to engage meaningfully with the Kress Collection. Beyond helping
new audiences grapple with Italian Renaissance art, Kress also wrote that he hoped this book
would encourage readers to reflect on the benefits of Christian heritage.
58

Indeed, throughout his tenure as leader of the Kress Foundation, Rush Kress often
intertwined the Kress Collection’s role as an educational resource for children with another goal,
that of reinforcing Christianity in the United States. The contents of the Kress Collection made it
well suited for this task.
59
As would be the case with any representative collection of Italian
Renaissance art, it consists heavily of Catholic religious images. The Kress Collection contains
well over two hundred images of the Madonna and Child alone.
60
Samuel Kress was Lutheran,
which led Eisler to characterize his collecting of distinctly Catholic art “the great Kress
mystery.”
61
As discussed in detail in the first chapter, there was nothing unusual about an
American Protestant collecting Catholic art in the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, the Kress
brothers’ relationship to the religious content of the work they collected is intriguing. Eisler
overlooked the fact that Rush—though raised Lutheran as well—belonged to an Episcopalian
church by the postwar period. Thus, the Kress Collection’s contents would have more closely
reflected Rush’s religious environment than Samuel’s.
Rush Kress’s personal belief should not be discounted in his statements that he hoped the
Kress Collection would reinforce Christian faith. However, these comments must also be

58
Rush Kress, introduction to Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford University Press,
1954), x.
59
In 1959, the Kress Foundation published The Four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles; the book
interspersed reproductions of Kress Collection paintings throughout the text to illustrate the first five
books of the New Testament. Richard Ellis, ed. The Four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles (New
York: Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1959).
60
The images on this theme are numerous enough that Fern Rusk Shapley excluded it from the
iconographical index of the Kress Collection catalogues cumulative index (Fern Rusk Shapley, Paintings
from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation: Italian Schools, XVI–XVIII Century [London: Phaidon Press for
the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1973], 404).
61
Eisler, “Gold-ground art,” 67.

268
understood in light of their political context. With the onset of the Cold War, religion—
particularly Christianity—acquired complicated political salience in the United States. The
United States presented itself as a Christian nation, as opposed to the atheist Soviet Union.
Particularly under President Eisenhower, religion came to represent an essential element of
American patriotism. Thus, a strong American society depended upon a religious populace.
62

Distinctions between Catholic and Protestant beliefs mattered little in this context. Eisenhower
even stated in a 1954 speech, “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply
felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.”
63
The sociologist Robert Bellah argued that in
the United States, past and present political and cultural leaders, including Eisenhower, use
discussions of God, Christianity, and religion to refer to American civil religion. Bellah defined
American civil religion as “a set of belief, symbols, and rituals…selectively derived from
Christianity” that “served as a genuine vehicle of national religious self-understanding”
throughout the nation’s history.
64
Although American civil religion traditionally embraced the
view of the United States as a chosen people, it was not intended as a form of self-worship.
Rather, American civil religion crafts a discourse on the ethical principles that will guide and
define the nation.
65
In the postwar years, civil religion in the United States experienced a revival
as Americans reconsidered their nation’s role in the global community.
This political climate makes Kress’s statements about the Kress Collection’s dispersal
clearer. From 1947 on, Kress described his brother’s foundation as “an education program to

62
Dianne Kirby, “The Cold War and American Religion,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion
2017. Accessed October 4, 2018. http://religion.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.
001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-398.
63
Kirby, “The Cold War and American Religion.”
64
Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 1–21.
65
Ibid.

269
imbed a deeper Christian spirit in all the public through the influence of fine objets d’art.”
66

Kress framed his hopes for the Regional Galleries Program in similar language, telling Berenson
he intended his brother’s collection to be “used in the education of our children and
grandchildren through the public schools, colleges, and universities and Sunday schools and
churches in the development of Christian character and high morality in the youths of America.
This will offset the damage of Marxism as had occurred in fascism, nazism, socialism, and
communism.”
67
Berenson’s reply praised Kress for “raising the level of our civilization,” noting
his efforts would serve “to Christianize it as you will say, to humanize it.”
68
Whether or not
Kress would conflate these terms himself, Berenson’s language demonstrates that those around
him interpreted language promoting Christian principles to be interchangeable with liberal
democratic values.
Berenson’s letter also sheds light on how, precisely, Kress believed art would cultivate “a
deeper Christian spirit.” Beyond its religious subject matter, Berenson stated that early modern
Italian art represented “the most rational, traditional and classical of all the arts since the Greeks.”
He lamented that their contemporaries failed to appreciate these qualities, and feared that “Italian
art …has already fallen into disfavor and risks indifference and neglect.”
69
By bringing Italian

66
Memorandum, June 7, 1954. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 4: Kress Foundation, Box
162, Kress Foundation: Administration: Correspondence: General (4/6)], New York, New York.
67
The capitalizations here are Rush’s. “Samuel H. Kress Collection Art Gallery Work,” January 28, 1948.
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 123, Washington, D.C.: National
Gallery of Art: Correspondence: General (1/5)], New York, New York. See similar statements in a March
10, 1951, memorandum to officers of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and National Gallery of Art.
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 123, Washington, D.C.: National
Gallery of Art: Correspondence: General (2/5)], New York, New York.
68
Bernard Berenson to Rush Kress, February 10, 1948. Villa i Tatti Archive [76.5 Kress, Rush. 1947–
1953], Florence, Italy.
69
Bernard Berenson to Rush Kress, February 10, 1948. Villa I Tatti Archive [76.5 Kress, Rush. 1947–
1953], Florence, Italy. Note: Berenson argues that only those who learn to write and lecture about Italian
Renaissance art will truly be able to preserve its legacy for the future. In this letter, he is advocating in
part for the Kress Foundation to fund a fellowship at Villa I Tatti in the future (which they do). He folds
in his praise for Kress’s program in the same discussion.

270
Renaissance art into communities and classrooms across the country, the Kress Regional
Galleries Program aimed to cultivate an appreciation for the classical. American visitors viewing
Kress Collections across the country would absorb the traditional compositional forms and
iconography of Renaissance art. At the same time, the existence of the Kress Regional Galleries
conveyed a message about the value of patronage both in the early modern and the contemporary
world. In this respect, the program helped preserve and propagate the legacy of Western
Civilization—and in doing so, contribute to the kind of civic religious values Kress wanted to see
inculcated in American youth.
In addition to instilling reverence for the cultural heritage of the past, the Kress
Collection could prove useful to American youths by inspiring new creation. Kress and Emerson
regretted that the United States, in their estimation, did not yet “have a great art of its own.”
70
To
remedy this matter, they intended the Kress Regional Collections to provide “all over America,
examples of the great creative beauty which has been the highest self-expression of mankind
everywhere.”
71
This would strengthen American artists, they argued, because “[great] art is not
static. It is a dynamic and living force which constantly inspires others to their own creative
expression.”
72
From its inception in the late eighteenth century, the art museum has always been
expected to inspire as part of its educational mission. The Kress Foundation hoped for nothing
less from their own collection; they believed the regional collections of Italian Renaissance art
could strengthen American art and contribute toward a more creative citizenry. Beyond the

70
Memorandum to officers of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and National Gallery of Art, March 10,
1951. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 123, Washington, D.C.:
National Gallery of Art: Correspondence: General (2/5)], New York, New York.
71
Ibid.
72
Ibid.

271
benefits to American art, the Kress Collection could thus enrich American individual and
original thought, which was key to maintaining a position of international leadership.
73

Finally, the Kress Collection could aid Americans by providing an example to the
international community of American commitment to the arts. In a memorandum to their trustees,
Kress and Emerson explained that though the international community recognized the United
States’ unique capacities “in the aspect of material achievement” (the industrial and commercial
sphere), they hoped the Kress Collection would demonstrate the “deep yearning on the part of
our people” for “achievement in the non-material field.”
74
This was a long-held American goal,
one that motivated Gilded Age collectors to amass their holdings. Yet, the Kress Regional
Galleries Program went beyond a demonstration of taste and economic power. In creating Old
Master collections for dozens of cities across the country, the Kress Foundation demonstrated the
ambition and sophistication of American philanthropy.
Kress and Emerson circulated the memorandum articulating the Foundation’s goals in
1951. This document served as a mission statement, one that reflected long-held views about
how the Kress Collection could benefit the public. At the same time, the language within the
memorandum reflected contemporary concerns about the future of American public life. In
1952—only a year after this document circulated—the United States Congress appointed a
special committee to investigate whether American foundations had used their tax-exempt status
to propagate “un-American” ideas and activities.
75
The Kress Foundation did not come under

73
For more on postwar debates about American creativity, see Ogata, Designing the Creative Child.
74
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Memorandum, March 13, 1951. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive
[Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 123, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art: Correspondence:
General (2/5)], New York, New York.
75
The select committees—known as the Cox and Reece Committees after their committee chairs—ran
from 1952–4. They investigated many of the largest and most powerful foundations in the United States,
including the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations as well as the American Council of Learned
Societies. Norm Birnbaum, “Grants to Scholars: Resistance to Interference with Educational Foundations

272
investigation, undoubtedly in part due to its clearly articulated support for traditional values and
capitalism. Amidst this backdrop of suspicion, it is perhaps unsurprising that Kress and
Emerson’s memorandum to the Kress Foundation in 1951 framed their broad goals for the Kress
Collection with language that claimed they would also reinforce the “American way of life.” Oft-
repeated phrases like this appear so frequently in promotional materials in the 1940s and 50s that
they become banal, but their very ubiquity indicates the importance of this concept.

From Washington, D.C. to the Hawaiian Islands: Planning the Kress Regional Galleries
In 1947, over one hundred and thirty Kress Collection pieces sat in storage. To return this
body of work to public view, Kress wrote Berenson that the Kress Foundation would open
fifteen galleries in locations “from Washington, D.C. and New York” to “the Hawaiian
islands.”
76
This desire to place Kress Galleries on the outermost points of the United States
celebrated both the scale of the nation and of Kress’s legacy. The S.H. Kress & Co. store
advertisements boasted for decades that the Kress chain operated “stores from coast to coast.”
(Fig. 4.5). The Kress Regional Galleries would allow the claim to apply to the Kress
philanthropic efforts as well. Though it began as a program to redistribute overlooked Kress
Collection artwork, ambitions for the Kress Regional Galleries ran high. The Regional Galleries
Program expanded the Kress legacy by creating a national Kress Collection, one strengthened in
this respect by its dissemination.

Urged,” New York Times (November 30, 1952), 188; “Foundations Investigation.” CQ Almanac 1954,
10
th
ed., Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1955. http://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/cqal54-
1358084.
76
“Samuel H. Kress Collection Art Gallery Work,” January 28, 1948. Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 125, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art:
Correspondence: General (1/5)], New York, New York.

273
As serious discussions began, it became clear that the Regional Galleries Program would
represent a major undertaking for the Kress Foundation. To ensure the program’s success, the
foundation established offices in midtown Manhattan. The Kress Foundation also expanded its
staff; in October 1947, Emerson, a former banker and Kress Foundation trustee, signed on as art
director, while the German art historian William Suida joined as the librarian and research
curator for the collection.
77
At the Kress Foundation, Rush Kress, William Suida, Mario
Modestini (from 1949 onward), Guy Emerson, and Emerson’s assistant (and future Kress
Foundation president) Mary Davis, worked with their staff to organize this program.
78
In
addition to engaging in discussions with the Kress Foundation trustees, they also consulted
David Finley, John Walker, and the trustees of the National Gallery throughout this period.
By the end of 1947, Kress and his new team settled into the task of selecting cities to
receive Kress gifts. They planned to echo Samuel Kress’s earlier patterns of giving, which
focused on cities that supported the S.H. Kress & Co. in the American South and West. Working
with a list of cities that suited these aims, Rush Kress narrowed his selections down to sixteen
definite sites: Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Birmingham, New Orleans, Houston, Tucson,
Denver, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Honolulu, Allentown, and
Philadelphia. The cities of Dallas, San Antonio, and Salt Lake City were marked as possibly
desirable as well.
79
This list honors Samuel Kress’s legacy as a philanthropist, while also

77
Perry, “The Kress Collection,” 34; Edgar Peters Bowron, “The Kress Brothers and their ‘Bucolic
Pictures’: The Creation of an Italian Baroque Collection,” in A Gift to America: Masterpieces of
European Painting from the Samuel H. Kress Collection, Chiyo Ishikawa, Lynn Federele Orr, George
T.M Shackelford, and David Steel, eds. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 46.
78
Guy Emerson to Rush Kress, March 21, 1950. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 4: Kress Foundation,
Box 162, Kress Foundation Archives: Administration: Correspondence: General (2/6)], New York, New
York.
79
Guy Emerson, “Memo to Mr. R.H. Kress,” November 17 1948. Samuel H. Kress Foundation [Series 2:
Kress Institutions, Box 125, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art: Correspondence: General (1 of
5)], New York, New York.

274
reflecting Rush Kress’s personal commitments. With two exceptions, the cities chosen had
already engaged with the Kress Collection in a significant manner. Many held earlier gifts from
Kress and/or hosted the Kress traveling exhibition in the 1930s. Rush Kress broke from this
tradition in only two cases: Tucson and Philadelphia. In both instances, personal ties instead
motivated him to include them on the list. Kress spent the winters in Tucson, close to his wife’s
alma mater, the University of Arizona. His decision to include Philadelphia arose from his
friendly correspondence with Fiske Kimball, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
80

This list does not reflect the final dispersal of the Kress Collection, but it establishes the
rules by which the Kress Foundation evaluated potential sites for Kress galleries. With the
exception of Allentown, the cities listed all supported S.H. Kress & Co. stores. Allentown
represented a special case as it is close to the Kress family home in Cherryville, Pennsylvania.
Samuel Kress had promised Allentown twenty-six paintings from his collection in 1946, but he
had stipulated that the town could not take possession of the artwork until it obtained a suitable
museum facility.
81
As Rush Kress assumed control of the Kress Foundation from 1947 onward,
he hoped to replicate the scale and ambition of his brother’s gift to Allentown. However, he
planned to do so in cities more in keeping with Samuel’s giving in the 1930s. Thus, as they had
in the past, the Kress Foundation focused on museums within large and growing cities in the
American South and West that possessed promising museums.
In order to be considered, the Kress Foundation stipulated participating museums must
possess suitable gallery space. They had to have, or had to be willing to install, climate control
systems, adequate lighting, fireproofing measures, and security features. A number of museums

80
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 145, Philadelphia, PA:
Philadelphia Museum of Art: Correspondence: General (1 of 4)], New York, New York.
81
Diane P. Fischer, Introduction to The Samuel H. Kress Collection at the Allentown Art Museum of the
Lehigh Valley, ed. Diane Cole Ahl (Allentown: Allentown Art Museum, 2012), 10–14.

275
added air conditioning to their galleries in order to comply with these stipulations. Air
conditioning helps regulate humidity levels within galleries. As a relatively new innovation, it
also made the museum feel like a controlled, modern, and professional environment.
82
The Kress
Foundation also favored institutions that planned to dedicate spaces for the Kress Collection.
83

Beyond these material considerations, the Kress Foundation wanted to place Kress Galleries in
communities that would appreciate and make use of them. The Kress team looked for museums
with strong and growing attendance figures and other evidence of local support.
84

These considerations were commensurate with the size and age of the city. For example,
the Kress Foundation ultimately withdrew their offer to include the Los Angeles County
Museum in the Regional Galleries Program because they felt a city as large and prosperous as
Los Angeles should support an independent art museum.
85
Kress Foundation officers and
trustees met with museum directors and their trustees from all over the country to assess their
institutions as possible locations for Kress galleries.
As the gallery selection process went on in New York, the Kress Foundation prepared a
survey of all Kress artwork at the National Gallery. The art dealer Felix Wildenstein, Kress
conservator and curator Stephen Pichetto, art historian William Suida, and art critic Alfred

82
Americans first experienced air conditioning at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. However, air
conditioning units were too large and expensive for most facilities until the postwar period (Paul Lester,
“History of Air Conditioning,” U.S. Department of Energy, accessed November 14, 2018,
https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-air-conditioning).
83
These ideas emerge repeatedly in the letters and notes within the administrative records of the Kress
Foundation. See Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 133, Kress
Institutions: Regional Collections: Administrative Documents], New York, New York.
84
See Rush Kress’s letter to directors of each museum holding Kress Collection art, July 14, 1955.
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 133, Kress Institutions: Regional
Galleries: Administrative Documents], New York, New York.
85
Guy Emerson to Marvin C. Rose, Chief Curator of the Los Angeles County Museum, April 23, 1954.
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 149, Los Angeles, CA: Los
Angeles County Museum of Art: Correspondence: General], New York, New York. Until 1961, the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art was part of the larger Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science
and Art in Exposition Park.

276
Frankfurter graded the Kress Collection within the National Gallery of Art on a scale of A to C,
in which A represented a great masterpiece and C, works that could be replaced if superior
examples came to market. Unsurprisingly, the Kress Collection pieces placed in study galleries
or in storage received lower marks than those in the museum’s main galleries. Nonetheless,
Pichetto and Suida deemed many of the paintings off view to be “masterpieces of that artist
and/or period.”
86

Armed with this survey and their own insights, Suida and Walker spent three days over
the course of March 1950 determining which paintings should stay at the National Gallery, and
which would be better elsewhere.
87
By the summer of 1951, Walker agreed to return over three
hundred Kress Collection paintings held by the National Gallery.
88
The museum’s trustees
signed off on this exchange because the Kress Foundation promised to replace the returned
works with fewer, finer examples in the years to come.
89

With the transfer approved, Walker prepared to ship the Kress Collection art to
Huckleberry Hill. The Kress Foundation planned to use their newly established restoration center
and storage facility to collect, clean, and organize the artwork included in the Regional Galleries
Program. Walker also sent paintings and sculpture that he was undecided about keeping for the
National Gallery. In some cases, Walker explained, cleaning and restoring the piece would

86
“Ratings of Items in the Kress Collection at the National Gallery,” and “Recapitulation of Samuel H.
Kress Collection in the National Gallery of Art.” Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress
Institutions, Box 123, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art: Collections: General (1 of 5)], New
York, New York.
87
John Walker to Guy Emerson, March 31, 1950. National Gallery of Art Archives [Series 7A2, Box 5,
7A2 Central Files, Central Files Subject Files, 1939–1970, C-10 Artistic Matters General, Kress
Correspondence and Equipment 1950], Washington D.C.
88
“Kress Collection Paintings at the National Gallery of Art,” June 5, 1951. Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 123, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art: Collections:
General (2 of 5)], New York, New York.
89
Samuel H. Kress Foundation to Lammot Belin, Vice President of the National Gallery of Art’s Board
of Trustees, July 17, 1951. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archives [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 123,
Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art: Collections: General (2 of 5)], New York, New York.

277
clarify his decision. He also wrote Emerson that when in doubt, he believed “we should lean over
backwards to let it go to a regional gallery if it fits in well with the proposed collection there.”
90

At Huckleberry Hill, the paintings returned—or in consideration for return—could be placed
alongside other Kress Collection art held in the Kress residences and New York warehouses.
91
In
partnership with Walker and the representatives of the regional galleries, the Kress team could
then determine how to create the regional collections.

Forming the Kress Regional Collections
The Kress Foundation did not want the Regional Gallery collections viewed as mere
subsidiaries of the primary Kress Collection at the National Gallery of Art, but rather as
extensions. The Kress team envisioned creating twenty Kress Galleries across the United States,
each of which would contain twenty to thirty works of art.
92
Each regional collection needed to
reflect the larger Kress Collection in a meaningful way.
Initially, they planned to create thematically linked groupings for each site. In late 1949,
a memo discussing the program proposed creating collections reflecting the ethnic origins of
their communities. For example, the Kress Foundation could send French art to New Orleans,
Spanish to San Diego, and Dutch and Flemish work to Allentown, Pennsylvania. The memo

90
John Walker to Guy Emerson, June 11, 1951. National Gallery of Art Archives [Series 7A2, Box 5,
7A2 Central Files, Central Files Subject Files, 1939–70, C-10 Artistic Matters General, Kress
Correspondence and Equipment-Huckleberry Hill], Washington, D.C.
91
In addition to the many works of art held at the Kress’s 1020 Fifth Avenue penthouse, Kress placed
parts of the collection in storage in the Atlas and Manhattan Storage facilities in New York (Samuel H.
Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 125, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of
Art: Correspondence: General (1 of 5)], New York).
92
“The Kress Collection will be unique in history, and must be regarded as a national collection, and not a
Washington collection with eighteen or twenty subsidiary collections of inferior quality” (Rush Kress
from Guy Emerson, March 21, 1950. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 4: Kress Foundation,
Box 162, Kress Foundation Archives: Administration: Correspondence: General (2/6)], New York, New
York).

278
suggested other sites might receive collections that highlighted a particular school or category of
painting, such “Venetian Painting” (perhaps for Honolulu), religious art in San Francisco, and
fourteenth- to eighteenth-century portraits in Houston.
93
Elements of this approach appear in the
dissemination of the Kress Collection. Allentown did receive a higher concentration of Northern
Renaissance art, and in Tucson, Spanish paintings represented half of their regional collection.
However, on a larger scale this thematic approach to organizing the regional collections proved
impractical, as the vast majority of the artworks available for the Regional Galleries Program
were early modern Italian paintings. Furthermore, “primitives” and eighteenth-century paintings
dominated the group.
Kress and his team had always intended to enhance this grouping through further
acquisitions. They might have, as the historian Lewis Einstein recommended, acquired artwork
from other European schools in order to create more balanced collections for the Regional
Galleries.
94
But in the end, they instead kept close to Kress’s legacy; as integral units of the
larger Kress Collection, the regional collections would present condensed surveys of Italian
Renaissance art. There were pragmatic and identic reasons for this decision: as Emerson advised
Kress, they would have to buy under pressure should they chose to develop a broader European
collection, and furthermore “Italian… is our field.”
95

93
“Provisional List of Groups, December 29, 1949.” Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2:
Kress Institutions, Box 133, Kress Institutions: Regional Galleries: Administrative Documents], New
York, New York.
94
On reviewing their holdings, Lewis Einstein, an American diplomat and early modern historian,
suggested that the Kress Foundation could create more balanced overviews of European art by donating
its minor Italian paintings to religious institutions and replacing them with non-Italian examples (Lewis
Einstein to Rush Kress, November 21, 1950. Samuel H. Kress Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box
125, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art: Correspondence: General (1 of 5)], New York, New
York).
95
Guy Emerson to Rush Kress, March 21, 1950. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 4: Kress
Foundation, Box 162, Kress Foundation Archives: Administration: Correspondence: General (2/6)], New
York, New York.

279
Rush Kress must have reflected on his professional experience managing chain stores
when he reminded the Kress team that in forming each regional collection it would be important
to “…keep before us the fact that the Kress Collection is a unit, and that its name and ideals can
be maintained only if all its various units are kept up a high standard of quality.”
96
As they
examined the available Kress Collection artwork, Walker, Suida, Modestini, and Emerson
concluded that while there were likely enough pieces to supply the Regional Galleries, they
would need more “leaders”—masterpieces Walker described as “pilgrimage pieces”—in order to
ensure the Regional Galleries maintained the level of quality they desired.
97
The team planning
the Regional Galleries Program understood that the masterpieces they sought to enhance the
regional collections could be acquired on the market. The group worked to organize their
existing holdings at Huckleberry Hill into prospective regional collections, allowing the
Foundation to collect in a more targeted manner to strengthen each grouping.
Though the Kress Foundation never ceased collecting, the rate of acquisitions slowed
during the early 1940s. Rush Kress’s leadership changed this pattern. From 1947 until 1957, the
Kress Foundation purchased hundreds of works of art.
98
The acquisition of these works served
two distinct, though related, purposes: first, to enhance the Kress Collection at the National
Gallery of Art with masterpieces, and second, to improve the holdings for regional collections
both in terms of quantity and quality.

96
Kress Foundation Memorandum, March 13, 1951. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2:
Kress Institutions, Box 123, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art: Collection: General (2 of 5)],
New York, New York.
97
Memorandum to Suida, Modestini, Emerson, November 28, 1951. Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 133, Kress Institutions: Regional Galleries: Administrative
Documents], New York, New York. John Walker writes of his desire to acquire more “pilgrimage
pictures” in a letter to Guy Emerson, October 1, 1952 (National Gallery of Art Archives [Series 7A2
Central Files, Box 5, Central Files Subject Files, 1939–1970, C-10 Artistic Matters General, Kress
Correspondence and Equipment 1952], Washington, D.C.).
98
Appendices I, II, III.

280
In his memoir, Walker praised Rush Kress for collecting more boldly than Samuel had in
the past.
99
Rush worked with the most prominent dealers, and he was willing to pay higher prices
than his brother. The stature of the Kress Collection certainly changed through its association
with the National Gallery of Art. Samuel Kress collected quietly for over a decade, but in the
1940s and 1950s, dealers presented their finest offerings to Rush Kress. Under his watch, the
Kress Foundation acquired prized works of art including The Adoration of the Magi, attributed to
Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, Titian’s Ranuccio Farnese, and the El Greco Laocoön. Rush
worked closely with Walker, his advisors at the Kress Foundation (especially Mario Modestini),
and the art dealers themselves to ensure that the National Gallery’s Kress Collection would stand
as a testament to his family.
Rush was also willing to help Walker address lacunae in the National Gallery’s collection.
Under Samuel’s leadership, the Kress Foundation acquired eighteenth-century French art on
behalf of the museum. Rush continued this tradition, purchasing fifteenth- to eighteenth-century
French, German, Netherlandish, Flemish, and Spanish art to enhance the National Gallery’s
holdings. As a result, the National Gallery holds close to forty percent of the non-Italian
paintings purchased by the Kress Foundation after 1947. These acquisitions include prized works
by Matthias Grünewald, Francisco de Zurbarán, Chardin, Rubens, and Goya.
100

Concurrent with this hunt for masterpieces, the Kress Foundation actively collected art to
strengthen the Regional Galleries Program. Against Walker’s advice, Kress renewed his
relationship with Alessandro Contini Bonacossi. The Kress Foundation purchased several large
sets of Italian art from the dealer in the late 1940s and early 1950s primarily to fill out the Kress

99
Walker, Self-Portrait with Donors, 143–154.
100
Appendix II.

281
regional collections.
101
Beyond issues of quantity, the Kress team used their Italian acquisitions
from Contini, as well as many other dealers including Wildenstein, Duveen, Frederick Mont, and
Julius Weitzner, to transform their available works into more complete surveys of early modern
Italian art.
102

Between 1947 and 1961, the Kress Foundation acquired around four hundred works of
early modern Italian art; this represented two-thirds of their total purchases during this period.
103

Of the Italian acquisitions, nearly two-thirds dated to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings accounted for another third.
104
In addition to these
works, the Kress Foundation added a few dozen thirteenth- and fourteenth-century paintings.
105

Through these purchases, the Kress Foundation sought to redress the lack of high Renaissance
art available for the Regional Galleries Program. Rush Kress also acquired a rich collection of
Italian Baroque art during this period of collecting. After World War II, Baroque paintings
flooded the art market, but seventeenth-century Italian art remained unpopular. This situation—
heightened by the strength of the American dollar—meant Baroque paintings could be purchased
inexpensively in the early 1950s. Mario Modestini, Robert Manning, and Bertina Suida Manning
wisely encouraged Rush Kress to take advantage of the opportunity to enrich this aspect of his
brother’s collection. Like Berenson, Walker disliked Italian Baroque art, and so was not inclined

101
Walker, Self-Portrait with Donors, 150–3.
102
For this list of dealers, see “Paintings Acquired in 1947 and 1948 (other than Wildenstein & Duveen),”
June 10, 1948. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 1: Kress Collection, Box 111, Contini-
Bonacossi, Alessandro: Bills of Sale (3 of 3)], New York, New York.
103
See Appendices I, II, III.
104
Edgar Peters Bowron, “The Critical Fortunes of Italian Baroque Painting in America,” in Buying
Baroque: Italian Seventeenth-Century Paintings Come to America, ed. Edgar Peters Bowron, 1–15
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press for the Frick Collection, 2017).
105
Appendices I and III.

282
to give it a home in the National Gallery. As a result of his distaste for it, several Kress Regional
Galleries possess Baroque paintings now regarded as masterpieces.
106

The regional Kress Collections took shape through a series of meetings in which Kress,
the Kress Foundation officers and staff (primarily Emerson, Modestini, Suida, Davis), Walker,
and Finley worked with the directors and trustees of the selected regional galleries to determine
the best group of paintings for each site. Beginning in the autumn of 1951, the Kress Foundation
invited the regional gallery directors to come to New York, Washington, D.C., and Huckleberry
Hill to view the available art.
107
The regional gallery representatives visited the Kress facilities
individually or in small sets, which muted the sense of competition. Nonetheless, they were
aware their desiderata existed alongside those of the other institutions. The Kress team displayed
both available paintings and those temporarily assigned to another institution. At Huckleberry
Hill, one or more members of the Kress team would accompany the regional gallery’s
representative into the facility’s storeroom. The storeroom at Huckleberry Hill served a practical
purpose, but its careful organization also communicated the Kress Foundation’s professionalism
to visitors (Fig. 4.6). They showed their visitors the paintings, which were organized on sliding
racks according to school and period. Together, they would discuss possible arrangements for
each particular institution.
108
Following the visit, the directors submitted lists of their top

106
Bowron, “The Critical Fortunes of Italian Baroque Painting in America,” in Buying Baroque, 1–15.
Robert Manning and Bertina Suida Manning also served on the team managing the Kress Regional
Galleries Program.
107
Memorandum to National Gallery of Art and Kress Foundation officers, August 4, 1951. Samuel H.
Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 123, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of
Art: Collection: General (2 of 5)], New York, New York. Also see Walter Heil’s Memorandum to Herbert
Fleishhacker, President of the Board of Trustees for the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, November
24, 1951. San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, Registrar’s Office [Kress Foundation: 1948–1951], San
Francisco, California.
108
Dianne Dwyer Modestini, Masterpieces: Based on a Manuscript by Mario Modestini (Florence:
Cadmo, 2018), 240.

283
choices.
109
The Kress team carefully organized their available artwork to include variety within
each regional collection. On average, the Kress Regional Galleries received around three-dozen
works of art, though their collections vary in size.
As part of the process of organizing regional collections, the Kress team reviewed the
existing holdings of each regional gallery. For example, in planning their initial gift to the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Emerson and Suida studied its collection. They found the Johnson
Collection “outstanding in primitives” but noted that the museum’s holdings were thinner from
the mid-sixteenth century onward. They worked with Kimball to develop a Kress Gallery that
would strengthen their display of high Renaissance art.
110
Likewise, during his visit to Houston
in late 1952, Modestini reviewed the Museum of Fine Arts’ newly installed Straus Collection,
which consisted of dozens of works of early modern art.
111
The Straus Collection included a rich
array of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian paintings, including works attributed to
Allegretto Nuzi, Lorenzo Monaco, and Fra Angelico.
112
Following his visit, Modestini advised
his collaborators to rethink the structure of the Kress Gallery for Houston.
113
The Houston Kress
Collection includes fewer fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian paintings as a result, and those

109
For example, the Atlanta Art Association submitted a series of lists (Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 133, Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art: Collection: General],
New York, New York).
110
Guy Emerson to Rush Kress, March 21, 1950. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 4: Kress
Foundation, Box 162, Kress Foundation: Administration: Correspondence: General (2/6)], New York,
New York.
111
“Passion for Perfection: The Straus Collection of Renaissance Art, October 21, 2017-June 17, 2018,”
accessed September 5, 2018, https://www.mfah.org/exhibitions/passion-for-perfection-straus-collection-
of-renaissance-art.
112
Catalogue of the Edith A. and Percy S. Straus Collection April, 1945 (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts,
1945).
113
Memorandum, December 31, 1952. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions,
Box 133, Kress Institutions: Regional Galleries: Administrative Documents], New York, New York.

284
donated are notably all the work of Venetian or Lombard artists. Instead, the Kress Collection in
Houston highlights Italian Baroque painting, as well as that of the later eighteenth century.
114

In a memorandum to the art committee of the Kress Foundation written in April 1959,
Emerson identified several keys factors that had emerged repeatedly in sorting out the regional
collections. For example, the size of paintings represented a significant factor. The Kress team
had of course considered the gallery space apportioned for Kress Collection artwork at each site.
Emerson noted that many of the paintings available for the program were small; therefore larger
works had to be allocated thoughtfully to create a pleasing sense of variety for each regional
collection. Subject matter also figured in assigning artwork. The regional gallery representatives
expressed distaste for nudes, of which there are only a handful in the Kress Collection, and all of
classical figures like Venus and Andromeda.
115
They also wished to limit paintings with
“unpleasant subjects, for example, Cleopatra putting an asp to her breast.”
116
Multiple versions of
this scene failed to find homes in Kress Regional Galleries; they ultimately went into university
collections instead.
117
Furthermore, directors from Southern and/or primarily Protestant
communities “repeatedly expressed the hope” that their collections “not contain a high

114
“Search the Collection,” Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, accessed August 24, 2018,
https://www.mfah.org/art/search?q=%22Kress+Collection%22&show=30.
115
Samuel Kress may have owned more nudes than the current composition of the Kress Collection
suggests. For example, he purchased Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Reclining Nude in 1939. Either Rush Kress
or the Kress Foundation sold the painting in 1959. Today it belongs to Norton Simon Museum.
“Reclining Nude,” Norton Simon Museum, accessed September 12, 2018,
https://www.nortonsimon.org/art/detail/F.1972.12.P.
116
Memorandum for the Art Committee, Guy Emerson, April 6, 1959. Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Archive [Series 4: Kress Foundation, Box 162, Kress Foundation: Administration: Correspondence:
General (5/6)], New York, New York. For example, the Allentown Art Museum’s director, Richard
Hirsch, expressed surprise that The Larder with Figures, a painting attributed to Frans Snyders, received
favorable comments from the public while on loan from the Kress Foundation. At the center of this large
painting, a gutted boar confronts the viewer, surrounded by piles of recently killed game (Richard Hirsch
to the Kress Foundation, September 29, 1959. Allentown Art Museum Archive [Curatorial Records,
Snyders 61.43 EPS], Allentown, Pennsylvania).
117
Fern Rusk Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XV–XVI Century
(London: Phaidon Press for the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1973), 136–7.

285
percentage of Madonnas” and other especially Catholic religious subjects.
118
This latter request
would prove difficult to accommodate from a collection composed primarily of fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century Italian art. However, Madonnas rarely compose more than a quarter of the
paintings within an individual regional collection. Finally, while the regional galleries welcomed
the opportunity to obtain collections of Italian Renaissance art, many also requested non-Italian
paintings in order to round out their own collections.
119
The Kress Foundation sought to satisfy
each site’s wishes to the best of their abilities.
120

With these considerations in mind, the regional collections usually included paintings
ranging from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries. Several sites also received examples of
thirteenth and early-fourteenth century paintings as well. For example, the North Carolina
Museum of Art received a rich collection of Italian primitives, including the Peruzzi Altarpiece
attributed to Giotto.
121
Each regional collection also included examples from a diverse range of
Italian schools, though Tuscan artists predominate for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings,
while Venetian artists represent the majority of eighteenth-century paintings. Finally, the
regional collections displayed thoughtful variation in terms of subject matter. As would be
expected, many works convey religious scenes, but most collections also include examples of
portraiture, classical subjects, and vedute. Through these surveys, the Kress collections made

118
Memorandum for the Art Committee, Guy Emerson, April 6, 1959. Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Archive [Series 4: Kress Foundation, Box 162, Kress Foundation: Administration: Correspondence:
General (5/6)], New York, New York.
119
For example, Richard Hirsch of the Allentown Art Museum noted examples of eighteenth-century
French art or Spanish works of any period would expand the range of their collection (Richard Hirsch to
the Kress Foundation, September 29,1959. Allentown Art Museum Archive [Curatorial Records, Snyders
6.43 EPS], Allentown, Pennsylvania).
120
List of “First Choice” by Gallery. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions,
Box 128, Washington, DC.: National Gallery of Art: Exhibition: Art Treasures for America], New York,
New York.
121
Browse the Collection: North Carolina Museum of Art, accessed October 30, 2018,
http://www.kressfoundation.org/collection/ViewCollection.aspx?id=72&repoID=18468.

286
visible the traditional narrative of early modern Italian art. Through their acquisitions, the Kress
team developed a body of work that could provide a survey of early modern Italian art while also
punctuating regional collections with masterpieces that would elevate the Regional Galleries
Program.

Installing the Kress Regional Galleries
While the Kress Regional Galleries Program enriched museums materially, it also served
to strengthen the practices of art institutions across the country. The Kress Foundation worked
closely with the directors, staff, and trustees of the regional galleries to plan their Kress galleries.
Beyond discussing the content of their individual Kress Collections, the Kress Foundation
advised institutions on how to display and care for their new collections. The Kress Foundation
required regional galleries to employ qualified staff to care for and communicate about the
artwork they donated, and encouraged regional gallery directors and curators to lead plans for the
installation of their institution’s new Kress galleries. Nonetheless, most institutions planned the
hanging scheme and design of their Kress rooms with the Kress team. Modestini often offered
advice on how to arrange the paintings. They were usually hung according to region and
chronological order, though curators made exceptions occasionally for aesthetic reasons.
122

Modestini frequently also conferred with regional gallery leaders on wall color and
lighting. He and others on the Kress team hesitated to suggest an individual shade, as the best
colors for a gallery varied according to the lighting, flooring, and other elements of individual
rooms. However, Emerson informed Sally Hansell of the Atlanta Art Association that they

122
John Richard Craft to Mario Modestini, December 16, 1953. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive
[Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 136, Columbia, S.C.: Columbia Museum of Art: Correspondence: Early
Communication Regarding the Gift], New York, New York.

287
usually found pale grays to be the most successful choice.
123
At the urging of the Kress team,
many gallery directors also invited Modestini’s preferred lighting expert, Abe Feder, to review
and update their lighting systems before the opening.
124
Lighting mattered not only for the
paintings’ safety, but also for their visibility. The varnished surfaces of the Kress Collection
paintings would present unpleasant glare to the viewer if they were not hung and lit carefully.
Rush Kress felt strongly that the Kress Galleries should present the collection in the best
possible light. He wrote that like merchandise, paintings and sculpture needed to appear clearly
in order to be appreciated by the public.
125
Kress preferred the spacious approach to hanging
artwork chosen by the National Gallery of Art, where paintings hung at eye-level with generous
passages of empty space between them. He also preferred to see the paintings mounted on the
wall, so hanging wires would not distract the viewer.
126
Kress praised the majority of regional
galleries that installed their collections in this manner.
The regional galleries varied in many subtle ways. Both Tulsa and Honolulu installed
their Kress Collection in clean, simple spaces, but chose to enhance their collections in differing
ways. In Tulsa, for example, the molding along the gallery wall subtly framed the paintings and
created a sense of balance and order within the room (Fig. 4.7). The Honolulu Academy of Arts
included decorative arts in their Kress Gallery; twin candlesticks framed the sixteenth-century

123
Guy Emerson to Mrs. Granger Hansell, March 26, 1957. High Museum of Art [Curatorial Records],
Atlanta, Georgia.
124
Guy Emerson to Richard Harvill, June 16, 1959. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress
Institutions, Box 144, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Museum of Art: Correspondence: General
(1/3)], New York, New York.
125
Memorandum from Rush Kress to D. Finley, J. Walker, H.A. McBride, G. Emerson, H.L. Spencer,
and C.G. Trammell, June 7, 1954. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box
133, Kress Institutions: Regional Galleries: Administrative Documents], New York, New York.
126
Rush Kress hated the visible wires in the Honolulu Academy of Art’s Kress Gallery. He requested they
mount the paintings directly on the wall, but they refused in order to protect the artwork from earthquakes.
The museum’s director, Robert P. Griffing, Jr. recounted this disagreement in an oral history (Robert P.
Griffing, Jr., interviewed by Anne Seaman, March 19, 1979. [Honolulu Museum of Art Archives],
Honolulu, Hawaii).

288
Sacra Conversazione, while the table and majolica provided a sense of human scale to the large
work (Fig. 4.8).
127
The Kress Foundation welcomed installations that included furniture, textured
wall coverings, and even rugs to create settings for their artwork. Complete uniformity between
the galleries would detract from their appeal. However, in all Kress Gallery arrangements, the
paintings stand out in clear focus.
Among the dozens of regional gallery openings Rush Kress attended, he only expressed
strong dislike for the one arrangement that departed from this model. In 1952, the Seattle Art
Museum opened their new Kress Gallery. In addition to a painted ceiling by Tiepolo and several
sculptures, the room displayed two-dozen Kress Collection paintings. Sherman Lee, the associate
director, hung the paintings in the older salon-style in order to fit them all in the limited space.
The final result upset Kress, who found the room—which had also been painted a deep blue-gray
to complement the Tiepolo—dark and crowded.
128
After Kress threatened to withdraw their
collection, the Seattle Art Museum reinstalled their Kress Galleries to address his complaints.
129

Experiences like this led the Kress team to refine their views of the best practices for installing
regional galleries.

127
In 1959, Robert Griffing returned this painting, attributed to Bonifazio de’ Pitati Verona, along with
more than a dozen others to the Kress Foundation (Robert Griffing, “Memorandum on the Kress
Collection,” June 1, 1959. Honolulu Museum of Art Archive [Kress Correspondence], Honolulu, Hawaii).
Today it is in the Kress Collection of the Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina.
128
Among his many colorful complaints about this gallery installation, Rush Kress described the hanging
arrangement as resembling “an accumulation of three or four months’ work on top of your desk… …so it
affected me accordingly” (Rush Kress to Joshua Green, June 25, 1952. Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 143, Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum: Correspondence: Early
Communication Regarding the Gift], New York, New York).
129
After Kress complained, a local donor offered to pay to create more suitable gallery space. The Seattle
Art Museum successfully reinstalled their Kress Galleries in late 1954 (Rush Kress to Richard Fuller,
January 20, 1954. Seattle Art Museum Archive [Kress Collection: Correspondence], Seattle, Washington).

289
From Coast to Coast: Selecting the Kress Regional Gallery Sites
Though the Kress Foundation would not finalize any gifts until they had determined the
distribution for the entire Regional Galleries Program, they began creating and placing regional
collections fairly quickly. At the same time that the Kress team began planning the Regional
Galleries Program in the late 1940s, however they were also in the midst of preparing an
exhibition for the National Gallery of Art’s tenth anniversary. The Kress Foundation had
purchased hundreds of works of art over the past decade. For its decennial celebration, the
National Gallery of Art unveiled a portion of the newly acquired artwork from the Kress
Foundation, the majority of which would be given to the museum in the future.
130

This exhibition included more than one hundred paintings from the Kress Foundation,
well over half of which were Italian Renaissance examples. The newly displayed paintings
included work attributed to masters including Giotto, Filippo Lippi, Domenico Ghirlandaio,
Giovanni Bellini, Titian, Annibale Carracci, Tiepolo, and Canaletto. The new Kress gifts also
enriched the National Gallery’s holdings with thirty-three European paintings created outside of
Italy. These works varied in date and region from the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century, with
paintings by Petrus Christus and Albrecht Dürer, all the way to the nineteenth century with a
portrait by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The Kress Foundation also presented the National
Gallery with dozens of sculptures, the majority of which were eighteenth-century French pieces
in marble.
131
Finally, the Kress Foundation gave the National Gallery the famed Gustave Dreyfus
collection, consisting of more than a thousand Renaissance medals and small bronze works.
132

130
William E. Suida, Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection: Acquired by the Samuel H.
Kress Foundation, 1945–1951 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1951).
131
Suida, Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection (1951).
132
Perry Cott, Renaissance bronzes, statuettes, reliefs and plaquettes, medals and coins from the Kress
Collection: Acquired by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation 1945–1951 (Washington, D.C.: National
Gallery of Art, 1951).

290
The press celebrated this exhibition as evidence of the National Gallery of Art’s
maturation over the past ten years. The Kress Foundation’s decision to permit the National
Gallery to determine the final composition of their Kress Collection also drew praise. ArtNews
editor Alfred Frankfurter wrote that Samuel Kress’s “generosity of attitude” as a donor was
“unparalleled in the history of art.”
133
The staff and officers of the Kress Foundation and
National Gallery of Art must have been pleased with the predominately positive coverage of the
exhibition, as the Kress loan exhibitions—held every five years between 1941 and 1961—
absorbed an enormous amount of their time and energy. This was especially true for Modestini
and his team; they worked under constant pressure to clean, restore, varnish, and frame the Kress
paintings in time for the exhibition’s opening. For this reason, the Regional Galleries Program
did not truly get underway until late in 1951, with one exception.
The earliest Kress Regional Gallery opened with haste on November 3, 1950, at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art.
134
Despite their other commitments, the Kress Foundation worked
rapidly with Fiske Kimball, the director, to select just over two-dozen early modern paintings in
time for the museum’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebrations.
135
The Kress Foundation,
Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the public understood that this arrangement represented an
initial offering that could be altered and improved over the years to come.
136
The newspapers

133
Alfred M. Frankfurter, “Washington: celebration, evaluation,” ArtNews 50, no. 2 (April 1951): 26–35.
134
Annual Report for the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Trustees, October 11, 1954. Samuel H. Kress
Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 133, Kress Institutions: Regional Galleries:
Administrative Documents], New York, New York.
135
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 146, Philadelphia, PA:
Philadelphia Museum of Art: Correspondence: General (1 of 4)], New York, New York.
136
This is stated explicitly in Frankfurter, “Washington: celebration, evaluation,” and is also discussed in
correspondence with the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2:
Kress Institutions, Box 146, Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art: Correspondence: General (1
of 4)], New York, New York.

291
celebrated the Kress Foundation’s efforts to extend its collection beyond Washington, D.C.
137

Yet at the same time, art critics derided the hastily prepared selection of paintings. Suida’s
ambitious attributions offended the press, which particularly criticized his support for an old
attribution of St. Sebastian to Raphael.
138
Following this experience, the Kress team resisted
requests to rush through the gallery selection and installation process.
Once the National Gallery of Art’s 1951 exhibition was underway, the Kress team turned
its focus to the Kress Regional Galleries Program. In November 1951, the University of Arizona
became the second place to celebrate the opening of new Kress Galleries. Rush Kress offered to
include his wife’s alma mater in the program in early 1949, provided they build suitable
facilities.
139
They agreed, and the Kress team—as in Philadelphia—selected a set of just over
two-dozen works of art, predominately examples of thirteenth- to eighteenth-century Italian
painting. As in Philadelphia, this exhibition opened as a set of long-term loans, with the
understanding that most, if not all, the art on display would ultimately belong to the university.
The Regional Galleries Program represented Rush Kress’s opportunity to leave his own
imprint on the Kress Collection. It is thus unsurprising that he chose two galleries to which he
had close personal connections, to open the first Kress Galleries. However, Rush never ceased to
view the Kress Collection as first and foremost his brother’s legacy. After opening the galleries
in Philadelphia and Tucson, Rush Kress and his team turned to museums with a long-standing

137
Alfred Frankfurter, “Independence at Philadelphia?,” ArtNews, (December 1950), 15; Aline B.
Louchheim also commented favorably on the Kress Foundation’s plans to edit and enrich the collection in
the future. Aline B. Louchheim, “New Kress Pictures in Washington,” New York Times (March 18, 1951),
225.
138
Alfred Frankfurter, editorial in ArtNews, November 28, 1950. The Kress Foundation later reassigned
this work to a follower of Pietro Perugino and donated it to the New Jersey State Museum. Shapley,
Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XV–XVI, 100.
139
Rush Kress to Byron McCormick (President of the University of Arizona), February 15, 1949.
University of Arizona Museum of Art Archive [Kress Correspondence, Pre-July 1952], Tucson, Arizona.

292
relationship with Samuel Kress, S.H. Kress & Co., and the Kress Foundation. Between 1952 and
1955, they opened galleries in eight museums fitting this description: the Birmingham Museum
of Art (April 25, 1952), the Honolulu Academy of Art (June 6, 1952), the Portland Art Museum
(June 20, 1952), the Seattle Art Museum (June 24, 1952), the New Orleans Museum of Art
(April 24, 1953), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (October 13, 1953), the Denver Art
Museum (October 1, 1954), and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco (February 17, 1955).
140

These cities and their museums represented natural locations for Kress Regional Galleries.
As de facto president of the Kress Foundation, all final decisions regarding the placement
of Kress Galleries had to be approved by Rush Kress. However, planning this program was a
collaborative exercise involving many parties at the Kress Foundation and National Gallery of
Art. For example, David Finley (a South Carolinian by birth) successfully advocated for the state
capital of Columbia to be included in the Regional Galleries Program. The city had recently
opened its own museum, and Finley’s sister Elisabeth and her husband, W. Bedford Moore,
served on the Columbia Museum of Art Commission.
141
After a poorly planned visit in the
summer of 1953, Rush Kress expressed misgivings about the Foundation’s commitment to the
Columbia Museum of Art.
142
Finley continued to advocate for Columbia, and by the time the city

140
Guy Emerson to John Walker, April 8, 1953. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress
Institutions, Box 126, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art: Correspondence: General (3 of 5)],
New York, New York.
141
See correspondence in the Library of Congress [Finley, Box 4, David E. Finley Subject File: Columbia
(S.C.) Museum of Art, 1949–52], Washington, D.C. On this, and his sister’s role, see Charles R. Mack,
European Art in the Columbia Museum of Art (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 14.
142
Rush Kress stated that the Kress Foundation “certainly used extremely poor judgment, without
knowing the facts, in establishing a Regional Gallery Collection in Columbia.” He concluded this letter
by stating that “Messrs. Finley and Emerson are personally responsible for making this opening a success”
if he decided to move forward with it (Rush Kress to David Finley, August 25, 1953). S. Beverley
Herbert’s letter to Finley two weeks later explained that Kress surprised the museum while in Columbia
on business (Herbert to Finley, September 10, 1953). Misgivings abounded on both sides, but in the end
the Kress Foundation moved forward with their commitment to Columbia. Both letters can be found in
the Library of Congress [Finley, Box 4, David E. Finley Subject File: Columbia (S.C.) Museum of Art,
1953–66)], Washington, D.C.

293
received its gifts, the Columbia Museum of Art held one of the largest regional Kress Collections
in the country.
143
This incident underlines how significantly each member of the team organizing
this program could shape its outcome.
The directors and trustees of the regional galleries could also serve as strong advocates
for their institutions. This was certainly the case for San Francisco’s M.H. de Young Memorial
Museum. The director of the de Young, Walter Heil, campaigned for his museum actively and
his efforts paid off. As they would occasionally agree to do, the Kress Foundation purchased
requested artwork for the de Young Kress Collection. In 1953 the trustees agreed to purchase El
Greco’s Saint Francis Venerating the Crucifix for the de Young Museum in honor of San
Francisco’s patron saint.
144
Only a year later, Heil wrote that he “was ready to kiss him and
everybody else present” when Rush Kress agreed to buy a Pieter de Hooch painting that Heil
admired.
145
The Kress Gallery at the de Young Museum opened on February 18, 1955. Though it
is not among the largest of the regional collections, only the North Carolina Museum of Art’s
Kress Collection—nearly double the size of the de Young’s—surpasses it in value.
146

1955–58: Delays and Drama
The Kress Gallery opening at the de Young Museum marked the last event of its kind for
the next three years. The Kress Foundation expressed hope earlier that they would conclude the

143
In addition to the decorative arts and sculpture donated by Kress, the Columbia Museum of Art holds
more Kress Collection paintings than all institutions except the National Gallery of Art, North Carolina
Museum of Art, University of Arizona Museum of Art, El Paso Museum of Art, and Allentown Art
Museum. Mack, European Art (2009), 14.
144
Perry, “The Kress Collection,” 28–9.
145
Walter Heil to Guy Emerson, December 21, 1954. San Francisco Fine Arts Museums [Registrar’s
Office, Kress Foundation: 1954 and 1955], San Francisco, California.
146
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 133, Kress Institutions:
Regional Galleries: Inventories and Valuations], New York, New York.

294
Regional Galleries Program by 1955 or 1956.
147
However, a number of issues arose that delayed
its completion.
As they had five years earlier, the Kress team busily engaged in planning for another
anniversary exhibition at the National Gallery of Art. 1956 would mark the museum’s fifteenth
year, and they again planned to honor the occasion by unveiling updated galleries filled with new
pieces from the Kress Collection. Already in late 1953, a Kress memorandum regarding the
exhibition anticipated it would slow progress on the regional collections. Kress presented all new
purchases to Finley and Walker, and permitted them to reserve any artwork of interest for the
National Gallery. Their choices would not be finalized, however, until the exhibition’s
installation in 1956. After completing the galleries in Washington, a number of these strong
paintings would be available to serve as “leaders” in the remaining regional collections.
148

In the midst of these now nearly routine preparations, new complications emerged. In
1955, Finley turned sixty-five, the mandatory retirement age for executive officers according to a
rule established by the Gallery’s trustees. He was not ready to retire. He planned to stay through
the fifteenth anniversary exhibition opening in March 1956. Over the summer, Chester Dale
convinced his fellow trustees, Paul Mellon and F. Lammot Belin, to vote in Huntington Cairns,
general counsel and treasurer to the Gallery, as Finley’s replacement. This decision occurred
without consulting Duncan Philips or Samuel Kress, the remaining general trustees on the board
for the National Gallery. They supported Finley; the director also found support amongst the ex-
officio members of the board. In the midst of this tension, Samuel Kress—who was still
president of the board of trustees—died in September 1955. Rush Kress was elected to replace

147
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 133, Kress Institutions:
Regional Galleries: Administrative Documents], New York, New York.
148
Memorandum to Rush Kress and Guy Emerson, December 3, 1953. Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Archive [Series 4: Kress Foundation, Box 162, Kress Foundation: Administration: Correspondence (3/6)],
New York, New York.

295
him on the board, but the presidency passed to Dale. In December 1955, Kress sent a letter—
composed by Finley—in which he stated the Kress Foundation would not send any additional
artwork to the National Gallery until their confidence in the board of trustees was restored.
149

This conflict posed a threat to the National Gallery in three distinct ways. First, both
Chester Dale and Rush Kress hinted that if they were not satisfied, they might not donate their
collections to the museum. Second, an unresolved conflict between the five citizen trustees could
lead to more active involvement on the part of the board’s four ex-officio members: the Chief
Justice of the United States, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the
Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. If this disagreement pulled them into the management
of the museum, it could set a precedent that would limit future citizen trustees. Third, they could
lose Walker. He stated that if not elected as director, he would resign and return to Villa i
Tatti.
150
The trustees met during the winter of 1956 and resolved their dispute. Finley remained
at the National Gallery until the summer of 1956, at which time John Walker assumed his
position as director.
151

Following this conflict, the Kress Foundation faced additional financial and legal
challenges. Samuel Kress’s annual gifts to the Foundation ceased upon his death.
152
Worse yet,
the S.H. Kress & Co. business slowed. By the mid–1950s, Kress’s customer base began
relocating to new suburban neighborhoods and stopped coming into the city to shop. S.H. Kress

149
They stopped shipments in November 1955 (Guy Emerson to Rush Kress, November 4, 1955. Samuel
H. Kress Foundation [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 126, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art:
Correspondence: General (3 of 5)], New York, New York).
150
Philip Kopper, America’s National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2016),
102–3.
151
Kopper, America’s National Gallery of Art (2016) 102–3. Fern Rusk Shapley, William Suida, and
John Pancoast. Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection Acquired by the Samuel H. Kress
Foundation, 1951–1956 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1956).
152
Memorandum, December 21, 1955. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 4: Kress Foundation,
Kress Foundation: Administration: Correspondence: General (4/6)], New York, New York.

296
& Co. earnings fell, and in 1956 the company reduced dividends from three to two dollars per
share. The Kress Foundation owned over forty percent of the S.H. Kress & Co. stock, so it lost
over a million dollars a year due to these reductions.
153
S.H. Kress & Co.’s competitors did not
suffer the same losses during these years, leading shareholders to question the company’s
leadership. In particular, many criticized Rush Kress, who at eighty years of age, still held
control of both the Kress Company and Foundation, for failing to innovate competitively.
In 1957, the Kress Foundation trustees turned to Sidney Weinberg, a prominent
investment advisor, for advice about how to protect their endowment. Rush Kress viewed this
move as an affront, and publicly asked the trustees involved to resign in February 1958. They in
turn threatened a proxy fight to take control of the S.H. Kress & Co. board. The press paid close
attention to this conflict, as it could represent the first instance of a foundation or trust taking
control over its founding corporation. The Kress Foundation board of trustees met for a week in
March to solve the crisis. In the end, Rush Kress reversed his position. Referring to the trustees
as “my closest and most loyal friends,” Kress gave them control of the S.H. Kress & Co. The
trustees assumed more direct control of the S.H. Kress & Co. and restructured its board of
directors.
154
Losing control of the company distressed Rush Kress deeply, and unfortunately it
did not ultimately save the S.H. Kress & Co. from further decline. Following Rush Kress’s death
in 1963, the Kress Foundation trustees sold their S.H. Kress & Co. stock in 1964 to protect the
endowment.
155

153
Vartanig G. Vartan, “Kress Spotlighted by Unique Switch,” Christian Science Monitor (March 19,
1958).
154
Margaret Leslie Davis, The Culture Broker: Franklin D. Murphy and the Transformation of Los
Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 265–7.
155
Leonard Sloane, “Kress Arranges Leaseback Deal,” New York Times, April 4, 1964, 31, 39; Susan
Wilkerson and Hank Griffith, A Guide to the Building Records of the S.H. Kress & Co. 5–10–25 Cent
Stores at the National Building Museum (Washington, D.C.: National Building Museum, 1993), xiii.

297
The decline in S.H. Kress & Co. stock prices in 1956 led to an end of active collecting for
the Kress Foundation the following year.
156
The timing proved especially difficult as the
Foundation had obtained loans to acquire the artwork added to the Kress Collection in honor of
the National Gallery of Art’s fifteenth anniversary.
157
However, the Kress Collection already had
achieved a sufficient size and depth by that date to fulfill the Foundation’s commitments to the
National Gallery and their Regional Galleries Program. Rush Kress turned eighty in 1957, and
repeated his desire to see his brother’s collection dispersed in his lifetime.
158
Following the
National Gallery’s fifteenth anniversary celebration, the Kress team focused on completing the
Regional Galleries Program by 1960. This would be just in time to coincide with the National
Gallery’s twentieth anniversary the following spring.
159

Last but not Least: The Final Kress Regional Galleries
Following the trials of 1955–8, the Kress Regional Galleries Program opened six
additional regional galleries. As the program concluded, it did not diminish in ambition. The
final six galleries hold some of the largest and finest Kress regional collections. In many respects,
the last Kress galleries best suited the intention of the Regional Galleries Program. At each of
these institutions, local community leaders recognized the Kress Program as an opportunity to

156
Appendices I, II, III.
157
Memorandum, December 21, 1955. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 4: Kress Foundation,
Box 162, Kress Foundation: Administration: Correspondence: General (4/6)], New York, New York.
158
Memorandum written by Rush Kress, June 7, 1954. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 4:
Kress Foundation, Box 162, Kress Foundation: Administration: Correspondence: General (4/6)], New
York, New York. Also see Memorandum, November 7, 1956. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive
[Series 4: Kress Foundation, Box 162, Kress Foundation: Administration: Correspondence: General (4/6)],
New York, New York. Rush suffered a minor stroke while in Rome in 1952, which must have added to
the pressure to complete the project (Guy Emerson, August 29, 1952. Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Archive [Series 4: Kress Foundation, Box 162, Kress Foundation: Administration: Correspondence:
General (3/6)], New York, New York).
159
Memorandum, January 22, 1957. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 4: Kress Foundation,
Box 162, Kress Foundation: Administration: Correspondence: General (4/6)], New York, New York.

298
inspire further philanthropy. They established new museums, built new galleries and wings, and
energized their communities to engage with the collections.
In April 1958, the Kress Foundation celebrated in close succession the opening of Kress
galleries at the Brooks Memorial Gallery in Memphis and at the High Museum in Atlanta.
Samuel Kress donated artwork to each of these institutions in the 1920s and 30s.
160
Rush Kress
included both sites on his early list of desirable sites for Kress galleries. In each case, however,
the Kress Foundation found the existing gallery spaces did not meet the Foundation’s
requirements in terms of sufficient space and safety measures. The Brooks Memorial Gallery
created a new wing to house the Kress Collection, while the High Museum moved into a new
structure entirely in 1955.
161

The Allentown Art Museum faced similar challenges. In the mid-1940s, Samuel Kress
agreed to donate twenty-six Italian Renaissance paintings from his personal collection in
memory of his brother Palmer Kress. However, he would not physically deliver the paintings
until Allentown built a suitable new facility, one equipped with air conditioning, protected
natural light, and fireproofing measures. The indenture required Allentown to prepare the new
structure by 1946.
162
In reality, it took much longer to do so, and in the meantime, paintings
allocated for Allentown went into other Regional Kress Collections. The Kress Foundation
redressed this situation by offering the Allentown Art Museum a larger collection of artwork,

160
See Chapter 2.
161
See letters in the High Museum of Art Archive [Curatorial Records, Kress Collection-General
Correspondence with Kress Foundation, 1952–1959], Atlanta, Georgia; Letters in the Samuel H. Kress
Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions, Box 140, Memphis, TN: Memphis Brooks Museum of
Art: Correspondence: Early Communication Regarding the Gift], New York, New York.
162
Diane Cole Ahl, ed., The Samuel H. Kress Collection at the Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh
Valley (Allentown: Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh Valley, 2012).

299
one composed of works of greater value than the paintings originally offered.
163
After
complicated negotiations, the Allentown Art Museum opened their Kress Collection—one
unusually rich in Northern European art, per their request—in November 1960.
The three final Kress Regional Galleries were located in cities Rush Kress and his team
had not originally considered. The first of these opened in Raleigh, North Carolina, in November
1960. The North Carolina Museum of Art received more artwork from the Kress Collection than
any other institution save the National Gallery. Raleigh received this honor because in many
ways they created their museum in order to participate in the Kress Regional Galleries Program.
In 1943, attorney Richard Lee Humber visited Samuel Kress to discuss the museum he and
others wanted to establish in North Carolina. Kress agreed to provide one million dollars to
support Humber’s endeavor. Not long after, Kress suffered a stroke and stepped away from
actively managing the company and foundation. Rush Kress agreed to honor his brother’s
commitment, but proposed donating one million dollars’ worth of art in lieu of the money.
164
The
state of North Carolina accepted this offer and invested state resources into creating the
museum.
165
This institution perfectly suited the Kress Foundation’s goals by extending the reach
of the Kress Collection and using it to stimulate further giving.
The penultimate regional gallery, El Paso Museum of Art, hosted its opening in March
1961. Like Raleigh, El Paso received a large collection of Kress Collection artwork despite its
late entry into consideration. Edgar Peters Bowron suggested the sizeable gift served to
acknowledge El Paso’s importance to the Kress business. The S.H. Kress & Co. store there
produced more sales than any other in the nation, surpassing even the New York flagship.

163
Memorandum, November 7, 1956. Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive [Series 2: Kress Institutions,
Box 133, Allentown, PA: Allentown Art Museum: Building], New York, New York.
164
Rebecca Martin Nagy, ed. North Carolina Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (New York:
Hudson Press, 1998), 2–4.
165
North Carolina House Bill no. 1086, Session 1951.

300
Bowron also points out that in this instance, the Kress curator leading the selection process for El
Paso was himself a native Texan.
166
The fifty-nine Kress Collection pieces sent to El Paso
continue to form the core of the European collection for the El Paso Museum of Art. Early
modern Italian art dominates this, but the Kress Foundation also included a rich assembly of
Spanish painting in honor of El Paso’s Spanish speaking population.
167
As a result, their
collection includes works by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Francisco Zurbarán, and Jusepe de
Ribera.
168

The final regional gallery opening took place in Coral Gables, Florida, at the Lowe Art
Gallery. Founded in 19