20 Art Collections That Grew Into Unimaginable Fortunes

American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, an art critic, didn’t have a great deal of money. They subsisted on a small family stipend. But in their apartment in Paris, they held court for up-and-coming painters who sold paintings for mere pocket change. Leo purchased Pablo Picasso’s “Young Girl with a Flower Basket” for roughly $30, and decades later it sold at auction for $115 million.

A homeopathic doctor and amateur painter in the small French town of Auvers-sur-Oise, Dr. Paul Gachet cared for the mentally ill Van Gogh in the final months of his life in 1890 and, in return, received a number of paintings and etchings, including a portrait of Gachet. A private version of the portrait was later sold at auction for a record-breaking $82.5 million, and a second one hung in a Paris museum, donated by Gachet’s son.

Robert Scull owned a taxicab company in New York, and his wife, Ethel, was an equal partner in choosing which emerging artists were worth collecting. The Sculls had their own collection of contemporary art. In 1958, they bought a Robert Rauschenberg artwork called “Thaw” for $900. When he sold the collection at auction in 1973, “Thaw” went for $85,000. Rauschenberg confronted Scull right then and there to argue about who deserved the profit.

Dr. Albert Barnes made a fortune selling Argyrol, a silver compound he and another chemist developed to stop eye infections in babies. For roughly 16 years, he used the income from sales of the drug to buy Post-Impressionist paintings around Europe. Only after all that buying was done did he sell his company. His foundation’s collection is now valued at $20-25 billion.

Peggy Guggenheim’s father died on the Titanic. The $450,000 trust left to her was small compared with her relatives’ mining fortunes, and she couldn’t spend a dime from it until she turned 21. Years later, she opened a London gallery and began “collecting a picture a day” as she traversed Europe in the grip of war, buying up cheap Picassos, Mirós and Jackson Pollocks. Peggy Guggenheim’s collection in a Venetian palace is now worth over $1 billion.

Victor Ganz had a small costume jewelry business in New York, and his wife, Sally Ganz, was an equal partner in their collecting. They purchased Picasso’s “Le Rêve” for $7,000 early on. Later, they bought all 15 paintings in Picasso’s “Women of Algiers” series and sold some to help pay for them. When Sally died, the rest went to auction for $206.5 million, setting a record for a single owner at the time.

Sergei Shchukin was a wealthy Moscow textile merchant who began collecting radical new French paintings in the late 1890s, eventually becoming the most significant patron of Henri Matisse, for whom he commissioned murals that decorate his former mansion in Moscow. He opened the doors of his house to the public each Sunday, where he displayed his collection of 258 modern works, including scores of Picassos and Matisses. But after the 1917 Russian Revolution, the new Soviet government confiscated his entire collection by law. It is now housed in two prominent Russian museums and worth billions of dollars.

Julien François “Père” Tanguy ran a small Paris art supply shop and was known for being extremely generous. He didn’t demand that obscure painters like Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin pay him in cash for tubes of paint and lengths of canvas, but accepted their own paintings as payment. When Tanguy died in relative poverty, his friends sold off his stock at an auction, with the proceeds to be used to support his widow. The paintings once traded at a cost of a few dollars are now worth tens of millions each.

Ivan Morozov, a wealthy Moscow textile industrialist, built his massive collection of more than 600 Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Monet, and Renoir with proceeds from his business and recommendations from dealers in Paris. When the new Bolshevik government came to power, it confiscated Morozov’s collection, along with that of fellow collector Sergei Shchukin, by decree. Today, the art is dispersed among the state-owned museums established by the Soviet Union and is worth more than $5 billion.

Sisters Claribel Cone and Etta Cone grew up in a Baltimore grocery-and-textile family and, after being introduced to Matisse and Picasso by their friend Gertrude Stein, bought avant-garde work that was derided by the press. They spent their small living allowances buying what critics called “bad” art, and Claribel died first. She left her share of the collection to Etta on the condition that it go to a Baltimore museum someday. Etta continued to collect on her own until she died as well, at which point the entire collection, which includes 500 Matisse works, went to Baltimore. The collection is now worth close to $1 billion.

Ambroise Vollard opened a tiny gallery in Paris and bought entire rooms full of art by obscure painters. He organized Cézanne’s first solo exhibition, then, a few years later, presented Picasso’s first Parisian show. He bought dozens of canvases very cheaply, but rather than reselling them, he hoarded thousands of works in private. He died in a car crash, and decades later, a bank vault discovered in Paris was found filled with forgotten paintings that sold for tens of millions at auction.

Helene Kröller-Müller, married to Dutch shipping magnate Anton Kröller, began collecting modern art in the early 1900s with help from a consultant, H.P. Bremmer. The couple amassed nearly 90 Van Gogh oil paintings, as well as works by Mondrian and Cézanne. When her husband’s shipping company was in danger of going under during an economic downturn, the Dutch government agreed to underwrite a foundation that would buy and safeguard the collection rather than allow it to be broken up. The museum constructed to display the collection is still open in the Netherlands and is now worth billions.

Japanese dockyard magnate Kojiro Matsukata, touring Europe with advice from Claude Monet, purchased more than 10,000 works of Western art, including Monet’s “Water Lilies” and pieces by Rodin. His dockyard was stricken by a financial panic, and he had to sell some items. France seized a core group during the Second World War. Eventually, the remaining works returned to Japan, establishing the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. They’re worth billions.

Although Chester Dale amassed his fortune on Wall Street as a financier for public utilities, it was his wife, Maud Dale, a trained artist, who was largely responsible for almost all their acquisitions once they began buying French art in 1923. Over the course of the next 20 years, they amassed paintings and drawings by El Greco, Monet, Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso. Upon Chester’s death in 1962, he left more than 240 masterworks to the National Gallery of Art in Washington with the proviso that none could be loaned out.

John Quinn was a practicing corporate attorney in New York who amassed a personal fortune rather than inheriting one. He helped organize the historic 1913 Armory Show that brought European modernism to American audiences and lobbied Congress to eliminate import tariffs on modern art. Over the next several years, Quinn used his legal income to amass more than 2,000 works by Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, and others. When he died, his collection was auctioned off in New York and Paris, demonstrating that modern art could be sold and paving the way for New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Wilhelm Uhde, a German art historian who emigrated to Paris at the start of the twentieth century, was one of the first collectors of Cubist paintings, buying up inexpensive early canvases by Picasso and Braque. He also championed the self-taught painter Henri Rousseau, all on a pittance from writing criticism and small-scale dealing. When the First World War started, he was a German subject residing in France, and the whole of his collection was confiscated as enemy property and sold by the French government. Many of the works which he acquired for almost nothing are now in museums, worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Walter Arensberg, a poet of modest independent means, and his wife Louise, heir to a small family trust, began to collect only after seeing the Armory Show in 1913, the landmark exhibition that introduced European modern art to American audiences. At their apartment in New York, which was the unofficial headquarters of the Dada movement, they bought Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” and other works by Duchamp, Brancusi and Klee. They later relocated to Hollywood and, over several decades, amassed a significant number of modernist paintings and sculptures. They eventually donated their entire collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which today houses the most complete Duchamp holding in the world.

In 1913, the Armory Show, an exhibition of European modern art, was held in New York City. Lillie Bliss, the daughter of a New York textile merchant, began her love affair with modern art there, and soon began buying Cézannes, Seurats, Degas, and Picassos with the help of her friend, the artist Arthur Davies. In 1929, Bliss, the philanthropist Abby Rockefeller, and the art dealer Mary Quinn Sullivan created the Museum of Modern Art. In 1931, when Bliss passed away, she bequeathed 150 pieces of modern art to the museum, forming its permanent collection, which has since grown into a museum worth billions.

The term “Neo-Impressionism” was invented by the French critic Félix Fénéon, who, between 1906 and 1924, was the artistic director of a leading Parisian gallery where he signed Matisse to a contract and mounted numerous large-scale exhibitions. Such connections, combined with his friendship with many painters, enabled him to buy works directly from the likes of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. Following his death in 1944, his collection was sold off at auction, with some of the works ending up in prestigious museums.

Giuseppe Panza di Biumo began collecting post-war American art in the 1950s. He bought it with proceeds from his family’s fairly humble real estate and wine business back in Italy, purchasing thousands of paintings, sculptures, and light installations from living painters and sculptors such as Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, and Dan Flavin, most for just a few thousand dollars apiece. Eventually, he sold 80 of these pieces to Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art for $11 million, establishing the foundation of its collection, while gifting hundreds of additional works by Minimalist artists to the Guggenheim.

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