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Credits
The collection of European paintings at the Allentown Art Museum owes its origins to a bequest from Samuel H. Kress, amplified by a gift from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in 1960. Samuel H. Kress was born in Cherryville, Pennsylvania, nine miles north of Allentown. He was an entrepreneur with a genius for marketing who formed a highly successful chain of five-and-dime stores bearing his name. Kress started collecting old master paintings as early as 1927.
By the time of his death in 1955, he and his Kress Foundation, founded in 1929, had amassed a collection of over 1300 European paintings. Rush H. Kress, Samuel's brother, inherited the task of researching, conserving and eventually, dispersing the collection, surely the largest and most comprehensive assemblage of Italian Renaissance painting anywhere.
Samuel H. Kress and Rush H. Kress were two of the founding benefactors of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and their gift of painting to the nation was widely and justly celebrated. Less recognized was the great giveaway to eighteen regional museums, twenty-three college and university collections, and fifty other institutions spread across the United States.
The Allentown Art Museum was selected to be one of the eighteen Kress regional galleries. Conversation between Kress and the Allentown Art Museum Board of Trustees regarding the disposition of a part of the Kress collection to Allentown had begun as early as 1938. Legend has it that in response to Sam Kress's query which paintings would Allentown like, William B. Butz, President of the museum, responded: "the paintings found in the Kress Fifth Avenue apartment." While the paintings in the apartments were frequently rotated, Butz's canny request for some of Kress's favorite pictures may in part account for the exceptionally fine quality of the paintings in Allentown. The Kress gift to the Museum represents an abbreviated but balanced survey of Italian Renaissance art. It also includes, in response to the region's German heritage, a fine selection of Dutch and exceptionally rare German paintings.
Strength begets strength, and the Kress gift has helped to attract additional donations of Old Master artworks from the Merle-Smith and Garbaty families. In 1966, the Society of the Arts (SOTA), one of the Museum's volunteer organizations, established the SOTA Print Fund, to which it regularly makes financial contributions. In the years since its inception, the Print Fund has enabled the purchase of Old Master prints among others. A Merle-Smith gift of 1974 included more than 2,500 textiles, a number of them from Renaissance Europe, thereby adding a decorative arts context to the Kress paintings and sculptures. The Kress gift has thus served as a foundation upon which to build other allied collections.
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