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Elias Ashmole
Born
Elias Ashmole acquired the cabinet of curiosities assembled by the gardeners John Tradescant the elder and younger, in circumstances the Tradescant family contested, and gave it with his own collection to the University of Oxford. The Ashmolean Museum opened in 1683, often called Britain's first public museum. Oxford's curators have since transformed it into a museum of art and archaeology that is free to visit.
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Hans Sloane
Born
Hans Sloane, a physician whose fortune partly came from Jamaican plantations worked by enslaved people, gathered about 71,000 books, specimens, coins and objects. At his death in 1753 he offered them to the nation for a fraction of their value, and Parliament created the British Museum to house them. The museum now openly discusses the colonial origins of that founding collection, which is part of the story.
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Thomas Jefferson
Born
After British troops burnt the Library of Congress in 1814, Thomas Jefferson sold Congress his personal library of 6,487 books in 1815, organised by his own subject system. It more than doubled the library's size and widened its scope beyond law and politics. A later fire destroyed much of it, and Library of Congress staff have spent years reconstructing the collection, which can be seen in Washington.
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Pavel Tretyakov
Born
Pavel Tretyakov, a Moscow textile merchant, spent decades buying Russian paintings directly from living artists, including Repin and Perov, specifically to create a national collection. In 1892 he gave his gallery and nearly 2,000 works to the city of Moscow. The State Tretyakov Gallery remains the main museum of Russian art, and its curators have kept his aim of collecting the national school.
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Augustus Pitt Rivers
Born
Augustus Pitt Rivers, an army officer interested in how weapons and tools developed, collected tens of thousands of objects from around the world and arranged them by type rather than by place. He gave the collection to the University of Oxford in 1884, founding the Pitt Rivers Museum, whose crowded cases still delight visitors. Its curators now address the colonial ways many objects were acquired, removing human remains from display in 2020.
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Henry Tate
Born
Henry Tate, a sugar refiner who made his fortune partly with sugar cubes, collected contemporary British paintings, including Millais's Ophelia. He offered them to the nation and paid for a gallery at Millbank, which opened in 1897 as the National Gallery of British Art, now Tate Britain. The four Tate galleries that grew from it remain free to enter for their permanent collections.
More about Henry Tate7
Isabella Stewart Gardner
Born
Isabella Stewart Gardner built a Venetian-style palazzo in Boston to display her paintings, including works by Titian, Rembrandt and Vermeer, advised by the young art historian Bernard Berenson. It opened to the public in 1903, and her will required the arrangement to remain unchanged. When thirteen works were stolen in 1990, the empty frames were left hanging, still a striking sight.
More about Isabella Stewart Gardner8
Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild
Walter Rothschild, heir to the banking family, was obsessed with zoology from childhood and opened his own natural history museum at Tring in Hertfordshire in 1892, employing curators who described thousands of new species. He bequeathed the museum to the British Museum on his death in 1937. It is now the Natural History Museum at Tring, free to visit, with its Victorian cases of mounted animals largely intact.
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Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, a Puerto Rican-born historian who worked as a bank clerk in New York, spent decades collecting books, manuscripts and art documenting the history of people of African descent, to refute claims that Black people had no history. In 1926 the New York Public Library bought his collection with Carnegie Corporation funds and later made him its curator. It is now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.
More about Arturo Alfonso Schomburg10
Henry Clay Frick
Born
Henry Clay Frick, the steel and coke magnate notorious for his role in the violent Homestead strike of 1892, assembled old master paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt and Holbein in his Fifth Avenue mansion. He left the house and collection to become a public museum, which opened in 1935 after his widow's death. The Frick Collection, reopened in 2025 after a renovation, remains one of New York's most intimate museums.
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Henry Clay Folger
Born
Henry Clay Folger, a Standard Oil executive, and his wife Emily Jordan Folger spent decades buying Shakespeare material, including 82 copies of the First Folio, the largest such collection in the world. They endowed the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, which opened in 1932 shortly after his death, with Amherst College as administrator. Emily's role as co-collector and cataloguer was essential.
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Henry E. Huntington
Born
Henry E. Huntington, a railway and property magnate in Los Angeles, bought whole libraries in bulk, gathering a Gutenberg Bible, the Ellesmere Chaucer and huge holdings of British and American history, plus art such as Gainsborough's The Blue Boy. In 1919 he and his wife Arabella placed the library, art collections and gardens in San Marino in a trust. Today the Huntington serves both scholars and the visiting public.
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Albert C. Barnes
Born
Albert C. Barnes made a fortune from the antiseptic Argyrol and bought Renoirs, Cézannes and Matisses in vast numbers, hanging them in idiosyncratic arrangements alongside African sculpture and ironwork. He set up the Barnes Foundation in 1922 as an educational institution with very restricted visiting. After long legal battles, the collection moved to central Philadelphia in 2012, keeping his hangs but opening far more widely.
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Calouste Gulbenkian
Born
Calouste Gulbenkian, an Armenian oil magnate nicknamed Mr Five Percent, collected Egyptian antiquities, Islamic ceramics, Lalique jewellery and paintings bought partly from the Soviet Hermitage sales. He spent his last years in Lisbon, and his will created the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, whose museum opened there in 1969. The foundation is now one of Portugal's major cultural and scientific funders.
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Alfred Chester Beatty
Born
Alfred Chester Beatty, an American mining engineer who made a fortune in copper, collected manuscripts, rare books and decorative arts from Asia, the Middle East and Europe, including some of the earliest biblical papyri. He moved to Dublin in 1950 and left his library to the Irish people on his death in 1968. The Chester Beatty in Dublin Castle is free to visit.
More about Alfred Chester Beatty16
Harry Everett Smith
Born
Harry Smith, an experimental filmmaker and compulsive collector, had amassed thousands of 78rpm records of 1920s and 1930s blues, country and Cajun music. In 1952 Folkways Records issued his selection as the Anthology of American Folk Music, with his eccentric notes, and it became a bible for the folk revival, studied by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez among others. The Smithsonian reissued it in 1997, and it remains widely available.
More about Harry Everett Smith17
Alan Lomax
Born
Alan Lomax spent some sixty years recording folk musicians, from Lead Belly and Muddy Waters in the American South to singers in Spain, Italy and the Caribbean, building one of the largest archives of traditional music. His early recordings went into the Library of Congress, and his later collection, acquired by the library in 2004, has been digitised and made freely available online through the Association for Cultural Equity he founded.
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