ABSTRACT
Albert Coombs Barnes was born in 1872, in Kensington, a respectable working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia, then inhabited mostly by American workingmen of English, Scotch-Irish, or Irish stock. The very corpus of Barnes's writings about painting is impressive. There is his The Art in Painting, which was published by the Barnes Foundation in 1925, and reissued by reputable New York publishers twice later. Many of Barnes's judgments are valid and will remain valid for a long time to come. The fact that The Art in Painting and the Renoir volume begins with a psychological proposition of perception does him honor. In the late 1940s, when Cezanne's reputation were higher than ever before, he made his last two acquisitions: he traded two of his Cezannes for two Chardins. Unlike many of the patrons of the avant-garde, his political judgments, too, were unusually intelligent.
