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1.GEORGE GREY BARNARD SCULPTOR AND COLLECTOR
From The Barnard Papers Philadelphia Museum of Art and Archives of American Art
Described by Harold Dickson in his introduction to George Grey Barnard Centenary Exhibition, 1863-1963 as a ‘born’ sculptor, Barnard was among the greatest of American sculptors and a medallist at the Salon of the Champs de Mar in Paris. Also a Medieval Art collector, he amassed a wonderful collection, whose pieces eventually became ‘The Cloisters’, now New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The son of a preacher Barnard was born in 1863 in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, and received his first art training at the Chicago Art Institute and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was a student of Jules Cavelier. Still unknown in the art world, he instantly impressed the market at the 1894 Salon with his Rodinesque piece, ‘I Feel Two Natures Struggling Within Me’ (Metropolitan). In 1902 Barnard was for the first time commissioned to create a statuary group for the new Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg. He soon started producing pieces for private individuals, including his special patron John D. Rockefeller Jr, and Charles P. Taft, who asked him to create a statue of Abraham Lincoln, erected in 1917, for Cincinnati (this last becoming the focus of a well-known controversy when a copy was to be presented to Westminster Abbey).
At least as early as 1910 Barnard expanded his operations to include Italy, where he probably first went antique hunting when he visited the quarries at Carrara. Within a short time, he was familiar with dealers in Florence, Perugia, and other towns and was negotiating for the frescos in the conventual church of Sant’Antonio del Tau, Pistoia, then privately owned. Some of the Italian Renaissance terra-cotta sculptures and decorative items he bought in Italy eventually furnished his house next to his Cloisters and were never incorporated with his French material. It was thus also as an Italian art expert that Barnard travelled to Europe in the spring of 1913 accompanied by Robert Sterling and Stephen C. Clark, sons of his late patron. The Clarks had engaged him to act as their agent, and they wasted no time in spending 20,000 dollars at Demotte's. Barnard guided his traveling companions toward purchases in Florence, and also bought objects for resale and for his own collection; near