Editing Albert Barnes (section)

== From Argyrol to Art ==

Albert Coombs Barnes was born on January 2, 1872, in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, his working-class origins providing the outsider perspective that both drove his success and fueled his resentments. His education at Central High School and later at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School demonstrated abilities that his circumstances might have constrained. His partnership with Hermann Hille to develop Argyrol, a silver nitrate compound used to prevent infant blindness, created the fortune that his collecting would absorb.<ref name="anderson">{{cite book |last=Anderson |first=John |title=Art Held Hostage: The Story of the Barnes Collection |year=2003 |publisher=W.W. Norton |location=New York}}</ref>

His sale of Argyrol to Zonite Products in 1929, just before the stock market crash, secured the fortune that subsequent collecting would require. His early interest in art, developed through friendships including that with William Glackens who advised his initial purchases, evolved into systematic collecting that assembled masterpieces whose value has multiplied exponentially. His purchases during the 1920s, when impressionist and post-impressionist works were still affordable for the wealthy if not the ordinary, created a collection that later collectors could not replicate.<ref name="greenfeld"/>

His Philadelphia location, which he maintained despite the art world's concentration in New York, reflected both loyalty and antagonism toward a city whose establishment he felt had rejected him. The Main Line mansion where he housed his collection, and the foundation he established to provide art education, demonstrated ambitions that extended beyond personal enjoyment to educational mission. His Merion galleries, designed to display art alongside metalwork and furniture in "ensembles" that reflected his aesthetic theories, created viewing experience unlike any conventional museum.<ref name="anderson"/>