Collectors' Pleasures

The art collections of a 19th century U.S. railroad tycoon, a Social Registered Manhattan spinster of Nieuw Amsterdam lineage, and a young Ivy League yarn manufacturer are on display this week in Minneapolis and Manhattan--and they add up a high score for continuous good taste ranging back over 75 years. The lesson seems to be: "If you buy what you like, you are probably right."

Picking the Best. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is showing 65 paintings and sculpture collected by Empire Builder James Jerome Hill, rounded up from descendants and museums for the first time since the founder of the Great Northern Railway died in 1916. A self-educated plunger who grew rich by learning fast and backing his opinions stubbornly, Jim Hill began buying paintings when he was 43, rapidly moved from sentimental genre pictures to the bucolic moodiness of France's Barbizon School and the summery scenes of Corot, in time learned to like Monet and Renoir. Among Hill's favorites were the rousing historical scenes of the great 19th century French Romantic, Eugene Delacroix, including The Algerian Combat.* Hill's own sound maxim, discovered early: good art drives out bad. In his last years, while the townspeople along "Jim Hill's main line" variously called him a robber baron or praised his drive and enterprise, the old tycoon used to spend hours every week in communion with his romantic French artists.

Collector Adelaide Milton de Groot, 82, is one of that expatriate generation that produced Baltimore's Gertrude Stein. The pick of her collection, ranging from Delacroix to choice Modiglianis, is on view at Manhattan's Perls Galleries, to benefit the League for Emotionally Disturbed Children. Heiress to several family fortunes, Collector de Groot lived in Paris' Gare de Lyon hotel for six years, was soon so chatty with art dealers that she was lunching in their back rooms. Her collection is a reminder of what bargains went begging in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. Now snug in her own two-room West Side Manhattan apartment, with her collection stored at (and willed to) the Metropolitan Museum, she leaps at the chance to show her best buys, including a Van Gogh self-portrait, a Matisse Odalisque and early Picassos. Says she: "I've always had a very good eye and could pick the best."

Dodging Bargains. Walter Bareiss, 38, is showing 50 oils, sculptures and drawings in Manhattan at the Museum of Modern Art's Rockefeller Guest House. Given his first print, Picasso's Dance of Salome, by his father when he was a 13-year-old schoolboy in Switzerland, he bought 19th century French Realist Gustave Courbet's Chateau Bleu six months after graduating from Yale. Prosperous from his family yarn business, he has steadily bought works by 20th century French, German and American artists. His house in suburban Greenwich, Conn, is filled to the bathroom walls, and the lawn has a skyward-staring, 5 1/2-ft. bronze, The Manipulator, by British Sculptor-Welder Reg Butler. Still sticking to his father's advice, "Never look for a bargain," Bareiss buys "only what I like."

Also known as Imposing the Arab Tax. Last great canvas painted by Delacroix before his death in 1863, scene may have been inspired by rebellion of Arab chieftains against French forces in Algeria after 1830.

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