Collector No. I

In the spring of 1939 an imposing building was rising in Washington--the new National Gallery of Art, destined (it was hoped) to become one of the world's great repositories of culture, made possible by a gift from the late Andrew Mellon and a promise of perpetual maintenance from Congress. Before long, the gallery would open, with a great fanfare. Inside its vast walls of naked, flesh-colored Tennessee marble, the public would find a trove of masterpieces from the Mellon collection--such unparalleled works as Raphael's Alba Madonna, Botticelli's Adoration of the Magi. But the hideous truth was that the Mellon collection, for all its scope and grandeur, could not begin to fill the gallery's 5 1/2 acres of exhibition space. It looked very much as though the National Gallery would become a half-empty laughingstock of the art world.

Then, in New York, an eccentric old millionaire decided to give 75% of his fabulous collection of Italian art, valued conservatively at $25 million, to the gallery. While Samuel Henry Kress stripped his warehouses and the walls of his Fifth Avenue penthouse of their treasures, the gallery's decorators hastily revised their plans to provide a fitting decor for the new acquisitions. President Franklin Roosevelt wrote a grateful letter to Kress, and when the National Gallery opened, comfortably furnished with masterpieces, it was a sensation.

Talented Copyist. Sam Kress was a man who had something less than a connoisseur's feeling for great art, who often bought his treasures by the lot. And his collection had become great only a few years before he startled the art world with his huge donation.

Kress was better known as an old master of business, but in his business as in his collecting, he was essentially a talented copyist. He was born in eastern Pennsylvania just three weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg, where his uncle and namesake was killed. His Pennsylvania Dutch family was moderately well off, and Sam, the second of six children, became a country schoolteacher at 17. After seven years of frugally saving part of his $25-a-month salary, he bought a notions store in Nanticoke, Pa.; three years later he bought out a wholesaler in Wilkes-Barre and looked around for something worthy of his talents.

He did not have to look far. In 1879 F. W. Woolworth had founded the country's first five & ten, in Lancaster, Pa.

Seven years later he had seven branches in eastern Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey, and his business was flourishing. Kress freely borrowed Woolworth's ideas, shrewdly located his first store in Memphis, where there was a ready market for low-cost merchandise--and no competition.

S. H. Kress & Co. was a runaway success; by keeping prices down the company ultimately became tops for sales per store in its field. Last year, with 264 stores, from New York to Honolulu (most of them concentrated in the South, where "going to the Kress store" is part of the way of life), and 22,000 employees, the company grossed $169,416,847.

The Long Parade. Late in life Kress developed an interest in great art and began to collect paintings on a modest scale.

Once he got the habit, though, he fell briskly in line with a long parade of American millionaires who had gathered up Europe's art and brought it home with voracity and enthusiasm. The senior J. P.

Morgan collected with discrimination and ability, and a purse-clinking line of Fricks, Wideners, Hearsts and Rockefellers made the lives of art dealers happier. At the end of the procession were wispy old Andy Mellon and Samuel Kress, the last of the fabulous private collectors.

Kress selected Italian art from the 13th to the 18th centuries as his field. In 1935, when he acquired Duccio's The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew for $250,000, the Kress collection suddenly rose to topflight eminence. For some years Kress had occasionally done business with Lord Duveen, the noted art broker; in 1937 he increased his purchases to a torrential rate. Duveen had bought and sold art for most of the country's great collectors, but Kress was something unique. In all, he purchased $20 million worth from Duveen; he wanted more than masterpieces; he wanted to be Collector No. 1. "I had thought that in the Mellon business I had reached the limit of good fortune," said Duveen. "The Kress business has made my cup run over." Before Duveen's death, according to his biographer, S. N. Behrman, he "had got Kress well started toward a neck-and-neck position alongside Mellon in the National Gallery and had let him become, indeed, No. 1." Trash & Treasure. If Kress's acquisitions were staggering, his methods of buying were enough to drive an art dealer to madness. Art by the carload, at knockdown prices, was his forte. "How much for the pictures without the bust?" he would ask, or: "Isn't there a reduction when you buy by the lot?" Having become a Collector No. 1, Kress proceeded to give it all away. Over the years, he presented more than 600 works of art to the National Gallery; his gifts hang in a dozen galleries from Columbia, S.C. to Honolulu--all in states where S. H. Kress & Co. has stores.

Nine years ago, Sam Kress's health broke: after a paralyzing stroke he was bedridden. His eyesight failed. Last week, in his 92nd year, he died in his penthouse, surrounded by masterpieces he was unable to see.

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