Inside this building hangs what many art historians consider the greatest single collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in the world: the Barnes Foundation. Albert C. Barnes was a Philadelphia physician who made a fortune from the antiseptic Argyrol and spent it buying art in Paris in the 1910s and 20s when Cézanne, Matisse, and Renoir were still undervalued. He ended up with 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 59 Matisses, 46 Picassos, and works by Seurat, Modigliani, van Gogh, and El Greco, among thousands of other pieces.
Barnes was a radical educator who hung the paintings in deliberately unconventional arrangements — mixing paintings with ironwork, hinges, and decorative objects to teach visual relationships rather than art history — and he spent decades fighting the Philadelphia establishment, which he despised, over access to his collection. He died in a car accident in 1951. His will specified that the collection remain in his house in Merion, Pennsylvania forever.
After a long and bitter legal battle, his foundation moved the collection to this building in 2012, recreating the exact wall arrangements of the Merion galleries in a new space. The result is extraordinary and deeply strange in equal measure.