Items16The creator’s order
  1. 1John SoaneJohn SoaneBorn 10 Sept 1753The architect of the Bank of England crammed his house at Lincoln's Inn Fields with antiquities, casts, drawings and paintings, including Hogarth's Rake's Progress, then secured a private Act of Parliament in 1833 that left it to the nation on condition it be kept exactly as he left it. Sir John…0i
  2. 2Sir Richard Wallace, 1st BaronetSir Richard Wallace, 1st BaronetBorn 21 Jun 1818Wallace inherited the Hertford family's great collection of French eighteenth-century paintings, furniture and armour and added to it. After his death, his widow, Lady Wallace, bequeathed the collection at Hertford House to the nation in 1897, on condition that nothing be added to it or taken away.…0i
  3. 3Henry WaltersHenry WaltersHenry Walters, heir to a railway fortune, extended his father William's collecting into some 22,000 works spanning ancient Egypt to Art Nouveau, and on his death in 1931 left the whole collection and its gallery building to the city of Baltimore. The Walters Art Museum is run with public funding…0i
  4. 4Andrew MellonAndrew MellonBorn 24 Mar 1855Mellon, the banker and Treasury Secretary, bought old master paintings including works sold by the Soviet government from the Hermitage, then offered his collection and the money for a building to the United States. Congress accepted in 1937, the year he died, and the National Gallery of Art opened…0i
  5. 5Solomon R. GuggenheimSolomon R. GuggenheimSolomon Guggenheim, of the mining family, began collecting abstract art in the late 1920s under the guidance of the artist Hilla Rebay, and set up a foundation in 1937 to show it publicly, first in a rented space. The spiral Frank Lloyd Wright building on Fifth Avenue opened in 1959, after his…0i
  6. 6Samuel Courtauld (art collector)Samuel Courtauld (art collector)Born 7 May 1876Courtauld, head of the family textile firm, bought French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in the 1920s, including Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, when British museums largely ignored them. He also set up a fund to buy such works for the national collections and in 1932 founded…0i
  7. 7Duncan Phillips (art collector)Duncan Phillips (art collector)Born 26 Jun 1886Phillips, heir to a steel and glass fortune, opened two rooms of his family home in Washington to the public in 1921 as a memorial to his father and brother, making it one of the first museums of modern art in America. He bought Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party and built a Rothko Room with…0i
  8. 8Peggy GuggenheimPeggy GuggenheimBorn 26 Aug 1898Solomon's niece Peggy bought modern art at speed in Paris on the eve of war, at one point aiming for a picture a day, then showed it at her Art of This Century gallery in New York, which helped launch Jackson Pollock. From 1951 she opened her Venice palazzo on the Grand Canal to visitors, and…0i
  9. 9J. Paul GettyJ. Paul GettyBorn 15 Dec 1892Getty, the oil billionaire famous for his meanness, opened his ranch house at Malibu as a museum in 1954 and built the Getty Villa there in 1974, though he never visited it. On his death in 1976 he left most of his fortune to the museum trust, making it one of the richest arts institutions in the…0i
  10. 10Dominique de MenilDominique de MenilBorn 23 Mar 1908Dominique de Menil, heir to the Schlumberger oilfield services fortune, collected with her husband John everything from Surrealism to Byzantine icons and African art, and in Houston commissioned the Rothko Chapel. The Menil Collection, in a Renzo Piano building that opened in 1987, has always been…0i