Word: argyrol
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...such as Hermann Goring, have been sincere and knowledgeable art lovers. Moreover, being an important collector doesn't even show that you have halfway decent manners, let alone morals. Witness the late Dr. Albert Barnes, who before World War I became a multimillionaire from selling a snake oil called Argyrol. He bought a huge collection--175 Renoirs, 66 Cezannes, 65 Matisses--and built a foundation around them, but Philadelphia still remembers him mainly as a geek and a bully, and his theories about art as the honkings of a crank...
Barnes was the classic American self-made man. The son of a black-Irish Philadelphia butcher, he went through medical school and made his fortune in the early 1900s on an antiseptic, which he developed in partnership with a German chemist and registered under the trade name Argyrol. Even before World War I, Barnes was a millionaire -- a word with meaning then. And he was developing a curiosity about modern...
...became known as "the Eight," and made its impact on the U.S. scene with such glum paintings of the cluttered urban scene that they were dubbed "the Ashcan School." But, traveling abroad in 1912 as the agent for Philadelphia Millionaire Dr. Albert C. Barnes, inventor of the bland antiseptic Argyrol, Glackens became more impressed by the vigor of contemporary French painting, helped Barnes acquire at bargain prices high-toned paintings by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Degas, Gauguin, Matisse and Renoir...
...years before his death, the painter Thomas Eakins made a sale that overnight made headlines. It was an oil sketch; the buyer was Albert C. Barnes, just then beginning to use his great Argyrol fortune to build up his great art collection. The press spread the rumor that Barnes had paid $50,000 for the sketch (a better guess would have been $5,000), and suddenly Eakins found himself being hailed as "the dean of American painters." His place in U.S. art has remained secure ever since, but true recognition came late for Eakins himself...
Soutines at $50. Barnes was a strange and brilliant man who rose out of a South Philadelphia slum to become a chemist and make a fortune out of an antiseptic called Argyrol. But his chief passion in life was art. He read everything he could find on the subject. He bought Modiglianis when the artist was still an unknown, once scooped up 60 Soutines at an average of $50 apiece, acquired some of the world s finest Matisses and assembled the most impressive group of Cézannes outside the Louvre. His collection was to include everyone from Tintoretto...