By 1911, just two years before Soutine’s arrival in Paris, Barnes had accumulated enough capital to instruct his aesthetic coconspirator William Glackens to go to France with $20,000 and return with as many masterpieces as that money would buy. It bought twenty paintings. (Today’s equivalent, roughly $6.5 million, would be barely enough to buy one of the paintings that now grace the walls of the Barnes Foundation.)
Initially, they hung on the walls of Barnes’s factory and were used in the lectures he held about art history for his employees. Those twenty paintings formed the beginnings of a historic collection, of which Barnes was, in his lifetime, notoriously possessive. He set up his collection in Lower Merion, a suburb of Philadelphia, and kept his treasures under lock and key. Only Albert Einstein, John Dewey, and the actress Katharine Cornell were allowed to visit whenever they liked. Everyone else had to apply for permission, and many were rejected. (Among them was the great art historian and critic Meyer Schapiro, who was turned away repeatedly.)
The exact circumstances under which Barnes first saw Soutine’s paintings are obscured by the many, contradictory accounts left by those involved. Barnes himself recounted contradictory versions of the story. Paul Guillaume, Léopold Zborowski, and Jacques Lipschitz all claimed credit for introducing Barnes to Soutine’s work. (Of course the fact that they clamored for credit is a testament to the importance of Barnes’ acquisition.)
In one account Barnes said that Zborowski showed him Soutine’s paintings in 1921. In another he said, “The first time I ever saw a Soutine was in 1922 in a small bistro in Montparnasse and I bought it. Paul Guillaume [who by then was serving as Barnes’s primary agent in Paris] was with me and he knew that Zborowski had a lot of Soutine’s paintings.” Zborowski remembered things slightly differently. He reported that Barnes saw Soutines for the first time while visiting his home on the hunt for paintings by Modigliani and Kisling. Guillaume, for his part, recalled that Barnes caught sight of Soutine’s The Pastry Chef while at his gallery and fell immediately in love.
Whatever the case may be, Barnes did buy that canvas from Guillaume in 1922 for 3,000 francs. In December of that year or January of the next, the American millionaire spent just over 37,600 francs total on Soutine canvases. He bought primarily from Zborowski, who had the most to offer.
The “unsellable” Soutine made his agent a lump sum of 20,400 francs in that transaction. Guillaume sold Barnes another fifteen paintings in addition to The Pastry Chef, and Barnes bought a final canvas from the dealer Georges Aubry. He returned to Lower Merion in 1923 freighted with fifty-four Soutines. He would acquire only another five in his lifetime, but that first purchase changed Soutine’s life.