The Barnes Foundation Financial Records
1902-1972

A Guide

Administrative Information

Preferred Citation

[Description of item], [date]. Barnes Foundation Financial Records. The Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, Pennsylvania. Reprinted with permission.

Acquisition Information

These records were housed in the Barnes Foundation’s administration building storage area.

Processed By

Adrienne Pruitt. Finding aid written by Adrienne Pruitt, August 2008.

Access Restrictions

This collection is open for research to qualified researchers by appointment only. Please contact the Archives and Library Department for information on access and research.

Use Restrictions

The Barnes Foundation’s financial records are the physical property of the Barnes Foundation Archives. The Foundation holds literary rights only for material created by staff of the Foundation and material given to the Foundation with such rights specifically assigned. For all other material, literary rights, including copyright, belong to the authors or their legal heirs and assigns. Researchers are responsible for determining the identity of rights holders and obtaining their permission for publication and for other purposes where stated. Some items in this collection may be too fragile for use without the archivist’s supervision. Please consult the archivist for more information.

Related Material

Historical Note

An invoice for Calvados, one of Dr. Barnes's favorite spirits, 1938.

Albert C. (Coombs) Barnes (1872 – 1951) was a chemist, entrepreneur, and educator whose early financial success provided him with the means to form a world class art collection and to establish the Barnes Foundation, a non-profit institution dedicated to art education. Albert C. Barnes attended Philadelphia’s Central High School and received his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1892. He went on to study physiological chemistry at the University of Berlin and pharmacology at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat in Heidelberg. While in Heidelberg, he recruited German chemist Hermann Hille to work for H. K. Mulford and Company, for whom Barnes had worked as an advertising and sales manager since 1895. Barnes and Hille worked together on their own time to develop a silver-based antiseptic called Argyrol, and in May 1902 they both left H.K. Mulford and Company to form their own partnership.

Established as a pharmaceutical company located at 24 North 40th Street in Philadelphia, the partnership of Barnes and Hille was successful almost immediately, with net profits rising from $4,747.46 in 1903 to $152,772.76 in 1906. This was due in large part to Barnes’s strategy of advertising directly to doctors and soliciting their endorsements. “It is just such doctors who proved to be our most valuable advertising capital because they write a lot and they talk a lot, and what they say reaches not only other specialists but a great many general practitioners who accept their statements as authoritative,” Barnes wrote. The doctors proved receptive to Argyrol and to Barnes and Hille’s new product, an iron salt called Ovoferrin. In order to keep the formulas to Argyrol and Ovoferrin secret, Barnes trademarked the product names but did not patent the product’s formulas, and he would later zealously pursue and prosecute counterfeiters selling similar products under his trademarked names.

Despite their success, the partnership was troubled. In late 1903 Barnes expressed his wish to dissolve the partnership on suspicion that Hille was revealing firm secrets and selling its raw materials. Their differences were resolved on that occasion, but by early 1907 civility had become impossible and on May 31, 1907 Barnes filed a bill in equity requesting that the firm be dissolved. His petition granted, he bought Hille’s half of the company, including all the rights to the formulas, and in 1908 established the A.C. Barnes Company at the same address. This business was also quite successful. Barnes sold the A.C. Barnes Company to the Zonite Products Corporation on July 19, 1929. Showing his characteristic concern for the welfare of his employees, Barnes brought many of them to work with him at the Barnes Foundation. Barnes and bookkeeper Nelle E. Mullen continued to administer the pension fund for former employees of the A.C. Barnes Company as trustees.

In 1922 Barnes’s lifelong interest in aesthetics led him to endow the Barnes Foundation, a non-profit educational institution. The Foundation offers courses in art appreciation and horticulture, published a journal and a series of books, and offered scholarships for overseas study to worthy students, in addition to acquiring artworks. The Foundation, with a gallery and a home for Dr. and Mrs. Barnes, was built in a surrounding arboretum at 300 North Latch’s Lane in Merion. The Foundation also maintained offices at 4525 Spruce St. in Philadelphia, and later at 4103 Haywood Road in Merion. These offices, and indeed the tax-free status of the Foundation as a whole, were the subject of spirited disputes between Dr. Barnes, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Receiver of Taxes for the City of Philadelphia, reflected in the surviving tax records.

In 1940 Dr. Barnes purchased an eighteenth-century farmhouse in Chester County, Pennsylvania, which he christened Ker-Feal. The farmhouse housed Barnes’s collection of American decorative art and was intended to serve as part of the Foundation’s educational program. Ker-Feal boasted impressive plantings under the direction of Laura L. Barnes, Dr. Barnes’s wife, who also served as director of the Barnes Foundation Arboretum. During the Second World War, Barnes used the farm at Ker-Feal to grow crops that were donated to the war effort. Barnes also sent care packages abroad to Leo Stein and other friends devastated by the war in Europe, and purchased war bonds for his employees.

Although some viewed Barnes as cantankerous, he was exceptionally generous to his friends, employees, and family. He purchased cars and homes outright for his employees, covered their medical expenses, paid for their travel in Europe, and provided them with lifelong pensions. After his mother’s death in 1912, Barnes held her estate in trust for his father, John J. Barnes, and his brother, Charles W. Barnes. He undertook many of his family’s other expenses, as well. His personal financial records bear witness to these and a host of other small generosities, some of which strike a modern eye as incongruous and amusing. In 1943, Barnes not only paid his friend John Dewey’s hospital bills, he also ordered his favorite importer to send Dewey a bottle of Smith Glenlivet, deliverable to Dewey’s room in New York Hospital. Barnes cared not only for the physical health of his associates, but also for their mental well-being. The financial records document, in very specific form, Barnes’s extraordinary achievements in the worlds of business and education, and also capture his complex personality, revealed in the details of his getting and spending.

Scope and Content

The Barnes Foundation financial records include Albert C. Barnes’s personal financial records as well as the records of his two businesses, Barnes and Hille and the A.C. Barnes Company, and the financial records of non-profit educational institution the Barnes Foundation, which Barnes endowed in 1922. The records date from 1902 – 1972, with the bulk of the records pertaining to the Barnes Foundation and dated 1922 – 1951.

This collection includes account books; balance statements; bank records such as checkbooks, cancelled checks, bank statements, and deposit records; cash account books; petty cash slips; employee records; records of investments; invoices and receipts; and tax records. Dr. Barnes’s personal financial records include details of the estate of his mother, Lydia A. Barnes. Records for Barnes and Hille and the A.C. Barnes Company are sparse and incomplete. The Barnes and Hille financial records include legal records, including extensive documentation of the partnership’s dissolution, and marketing records. The A.C. Barnes Company records include a few pieces of correspondence, legal records, and pension fund records. The majority of the records of the A.C. Barnes Company were transferred to the Zonite Products Corporation in 1929, as part of the sale of the company, and are no longer extant.

These records document Barnes’s business dealings, his collecting, and aspects of his private life. The records of Barnes and Hille, the A.C. Barnes Company, and the Barnes Foundation include employment records listing staff members. The records of Barnes and Hille and the A.C. Barnes Company, although incomplete, provide evidence of Barnes’s often innovative business methods and the means by which he built his fortune and financed his interest in art and education. Cancelled checks, checkbooks, purchase records, and customs invoices provide provenance for many of the artworks Dr. Barnes acquired between 1912 and 1951. Information about the framing, conservation, repair, and maintenance of some paintings and antiques can be found in invoices, receipts, and checkbooks. Expenses related to the construction of and repairs to Barnes Foundation buildings are also found in these records. Various facets of Dr. Barnes’s personal life, including information about family, pets, food and drink, travel arrangements, and healthcare issues, are revealed in his personal financial papers.

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Inventory

The following section contains a detailed listing of the materials in the collection.