John G. Johnson's Art

The colossal, rambling Philadelphia Museum of Art, which stood so long half-occupied at the end of the Parkway like an Acropolis with painted toenails, last week formally took its place as one of the most important museums of painting in the U.S. Opened to the public was the most comprehensive collection of European painting ever privately assembled in the U.S., covering virtually the entire history of European art: 575 canvases, displayed in 20 new galleries, some 600 more in storerooms available to students. The collection was the achievement of a lifetime of picture-buying by one of Philadelphia's lustiest characters, the late, great corporation lawyer John G. Johnson.

A beefy, full-bellied, roundheaded Philadelphian, Lawyer Johnson once earned a $50,000 fee for scrawling the word "No" across the front of a bulky, corporate financing plan. He became absorbed in art collecting back in the 1880s. Leaving the more expensive masterpieces to his friend, the late Multimillionaire Peter A. B. Widener, Johnson concentrated on completeness and comprehensiveness. In a massive, Edwardian mansion on South Broad Street, Collector Johnson plastered walls from floor to ceiling with gilt-framed masterpieces. Finally strapped for space, he had to hang his canvases in bathrooms and inside closet doors. He even hung some on the foot of his bed.

When Lawyer Johnson died in 1917 his will left his entire collection (valued between five and twelve million dollars), along with his house, to the City of Philadelphia. He stipulated that his paintings should never leave his house for permanent exhibition "unless some extraordinary situation shall arise making it extremely judicious." Before he died, he had barked: "I don't intend my pictures shall ever be used as bait for the construction of any blankety blank marble palace."

But when Philadelphia's palatial Museum of Art was built a few years later, Philadelphians began to wonder whether its empty spaces might not constitute a "situation" extraordinary enough to warrant moving Lawyer Johnson's art. The trustees finally decided it needed the museum's fireproof housing.

At last week's opening Philadelphia art lovers found that John G. Johnson had been one of the most choosy and well-informed of all U.S. collectors of his generation. His collection was the finest in the U.S. in works of the Flemish school, was also unexcelled in Dutch masterpieces and Spanish and German primitives, trailed only the top-ranking U.S. collections in Renaissance Italians. It also contained a masterwork that would have watered the mouths of such Johnson rivals as the late Andrew Mellon: a postcard-sized St. Francis by van Eyck, whose $500,000 valuation makes it the most expensive painting per square inch in the U.S.

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