A collector who hung iron hinges beside his Renoirs, and fifty-seven pieces chosen the way he would have chosen them.
From Tallmadge Ave
Tallmadge Ave is a vintage art and furnishings house in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. We find old things along the back roads between the Main Line and Lancaster County, and we tell the stories behind them: who made them, who kept them, and why they still belong in a house. Every so often we publish one of those stories with the pieces that go with it. This one begins a few miles from our door, in Merion.
In 1922 a chemist named Albert Barnes chartered a foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, to hold his paintings. He would end up with 181 Renoirs, the largest group anywhere, along with Cézannes, Matisses and Picassos. Visitors expected a museum. What they found looked more like a house with very strong opinions.
Barnes hung everything together. A curving iron hinge sat above a Renoir. A triangular plate from a Conestoga wagon hung over a Matisse still life. Shoe buckles, door latches and ladles went up between old masters. None of it was labeled. He wanted you to see that the curve in the hinge was the same curve in the painted arm below it, and he didn’t care that one cost a fortune and the other came off a door.
He called the walls ensembles. He kept rearranging them as long as he lived.
When the collection moved to the Parkway in 2012, the rooms were rebuilt to the same dimensions so the walls could hang exactly as he’d left them.
Chester County, late November
Part of it came from his family. His grandmother was Pennsylvania German, and he said that once he “got on Easy Street, I started to collect Pennsylvania Dutch articles.” Painted chests, pottery and hand-wrought iron came home from the same counties that line the ’Pike.
Barnes has had a lasting influence on the way we look at a room. Everything below comes from our own shelves, found along the ’Pike and arranged in his spirit: each group chosen for the line, color or light the pieces share, not for what they are.
Seven ensembles
The Walls
Fine art, something decorative and something made for use, in every group. Each piece is one of a kind.
I
The Wagon Wall
Hung for line · 9 pieces
The wagons in the painting, the horse in iron, the box a farmer carried his tools in. Barnes hung a wagon plate over a Matisse. This is the same idea at country-fair scale.
The blue of the dress carried into Staffordshire, the turn of the brass matched in the mirror's corners. Barnes's metalwork did this job above his portraits.
One eagle is carved in wood, the other cast in metal, a room apart until you hang them together. The hunt print and the ashtray rhyme the same way: one hunt printed on paper, the other fired onto a dish.
Barnes grouped by color as readily as by shape. Coral porcelain, black glass and gilt bronze share a wall here because they share a palette, whatever century each came from.
In 1940 Barnes and his wife Laura bought a fieldstone farmhouse in Chester Springs, built in 1775. They kept its old rooms for Pennsylvania German furniture, wrought iron and pottery. They named it Ker-Feal, Breton for “Fidèle’s House,” after the dog he’d brought home from France.
A man who could hang a hinge next to a Renoir named his house for his dog. The two choices seem to come from the same instinct.
