THE SAMUEL H. KRESS FOUNDATION

THE KRESS COLLECTION

Guided by a dual purpose – a sense of the public responsibility of great wealth, and a belief that the moral force of great art can be cultivated – Samuel H. Kress and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation created between 1929 and 1961 a series of unprecedented programs to share the artistic legacy of Europe with the American people. In the depths of the Great Depression, a touring exhibition of 50 pictures from Samuel Kress’s private collection introduced Italian art to an eager if untutored public in 24 American cities, and throughout the 1930s his gifts of art placed the first Old Master paintings on the walls of local museums in many parts of the country. By 1941, his role as a Founding Benefactor of the National Gallery of Art reaffirmed both the value of his collection and the constancy of his purpose.

A new vision evolved as a staggering number of incomparable European masterpieces entered the Kress Collection during and after World War II. Rearrangement of the 34 Kress galleries at the National Gallery released a large quantity of museum-quality paintings for a novel, generous, logistically complex effort that offered well-balanced, representative surveys of Italian art to selected museums across the country – an unrepeatable national program in art philanthropy that donated more than 700 Old Masters to regional museums in 18 American cities during the 1950s. Another 200 paintings were divided into study collections for 23 colleges and universities. Major gifts of special collections were also bestowed on the Metropolitan Museum of Art (French porcelains and furniture, and a complete Robert Adam room with Gobelins tapestries), the Pierpont Morgan Library (drawings and illuminated manuscripts), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (13 tapestries on designs by Rubens and Pietro da Cortona).

Encompassing European art of the principal continental schools from the 13th to the early 19th centuries, the Kress Collection’s greatest distinction resides in the extraordinary abundance of its Italian pieces – more than 1,000 Italian paintings, 500 period frames, 1,300 small bronzes, medals, and plaquettes, and representative sculpture, drawings, and furniture. Many of the greatest Italian artists – Cimabue, Duccio, Giotto, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo, Correggio, Bellini, Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, Lotto, Tintoretto, Veronese, Carracci, Bernini, Strozzi, Tiepolo, Guardi, Canaletto, and Bellotto – appear in the Kress Collection, as do numerous fine works by less familiar masters. The French schools shine brightly from the early Renaissance to Poussin, Claude, Watteau, Chardin, Boucher, Fragonard, Houdon, David, and Ingres. Art of German-speaking lands comes from the hand of Durer, Grunewald, Altdorfer, Holbein, and Cranach. Flemish and Spanish tastes intermingle through Petrus Christus, Bosch, Memling, El Greco, Rubens, Van Dyck, Zurbaran, and Goya. All of these, and hundreds and hundreds more, constitute the Kress gift to the nation, shared with the public in more than 90 institutions in 33 states, as listed in the Kress Collection area of this site.

 

 

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