Alexandra A. Kirtley, the decorative arts curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, first gleaned the identity of the secretive collector she called “Mr. Big” when she overheard his name at a bar. Mr. Big, who began his collecting with furniture, had been snapping up “the best of the best” American pieces, she said, like a rare Bombé desk and bookcase by Nathaniel Gould, a revered 18th-century cabinetmaker.
Six years later, in 2014, Mark D. Mitchell, her colleague at the museum who is now at the Yale University Art Gallery, burst into the office: “Mr. Big wants us to come to the house!”
At the house, leaning against a wall in Mr. Big’s hallway was Albert Bierstadt’s “The Shore of the Turquoise Sea” (1878), a painting of a thundering wave hurling remnants of a shipwreck toward a beach. The curators tried not to panic when Mr. Big suggested they carry the Bierstadt up the baronial staircase to his office. This meant a nerve-racking do-si-do on the landing to avoid crashing into Charles Willson Peale’s full-length 1779 portrait “George Washington at Princeton.”
Mr. Big is John S. Middleton, a long-anonymous billionaire collector who is now the principal owner of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team. He and his wife, Leigh, have assembled what is regarded as one of the finest collections of American art in private hands, ranking near the one Alice Walton put together for her nonprofit Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in northwest Arkansas.
Some 120 of the Middleton family’s sculptures, furniture, artifacts and paintings — including the Bierstadt and the Peale — make their public debut with the Middleton name attached in “A Nation of Artists,” a pair of exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts timed to the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding in Philadelphia.
The exhibitions reveal a rich cache of Middleton loans, by Thomas Eakins, Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, John Singer Sargent, Edward Hopper, Mary Cassatt and postwar luminaries like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Jasper Johns.
In 2015, Elizabeth Kornhauser, emeritus curator of American paintings and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, borrowed from the Middletons — then anonymous — for the Sargent exhibition she co-curated (“Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends”). The show featured two stellar works: “In a Garden, Corfu” (1909), a luscious light-drenched portrait of Sargent’s friends reading in diaphanous attire, now at the Pennsylvania Academy, and “Group With Parasols (a Siesta)” (1904-5), a luminous tangle of bodies, fabric and foliage emblematic of Sargent’s “off the charts sensuality,” Kornhauser said. “They’ve been at it for decades, yet it’s never been publicly accessible,” she said of the Middletons’ collection.
For the Philadelphia curators, the loans fill gaps in their permanent collections, most notably paintings from the Hudson River School and American Impressionists. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is the nation’s oldest art school and museum, housed in a newly refurbished Victorian landmark designed by Frank Furness and George Hewitt. It had a deep need for Abstract Expressionist works — the result, curators said, of conservative tastes in the 1950s and a focus on realism.
Indeed, seeing the original studio, with its old easels and plaster nudes, recalls the days when Eakins and William Merritt Chase taught there and Winslow Homer’s “The Fox Hunt” — a fox mired in snow being pursued by an ominous Hitchcockian band of crows — was acquired by the museum still wet off the easel in 1893.
The process of divvying up the Middletons’ spoils was helped along by Kathleen A. Foster, the Philadelphia Museum’s senior curator and head of American Art, who had previously spent 11 years at the Academy and had an intimate knowledge of both institutions. Jasper Johns’s 1960 encaustic and paper collage “Flag,” for example, had made a beeline from Christie’s, where it sold for $28.6 million in 2010 anonymously to Middleton, to a long-term anonymous loan to the museum. “It’s been our treasure for about 15 years,” Foster said. “It would have been too greedy of us to keep it.” It’s now at the Academy.
Pairing existing masterpieces with the Middleton paintings “brought their strength to our strength,” Foster said. “The Nation and Nature” — one theme of the exhibit — offers musings on the American landscape as Manifest Destiny and locus of the divine, for instance. It features Bierstadt, Church, Thomas Moran, Jasper Francis Cropsey and Martin Johnson Heade, set within a gallery recalling a Gilded Age salon.
Mitchell said the Middletons began collecting at a time when there was “tremendous competition” for choice works. Most serious collectors specialize in a single artist, genre, medium or time period, he pointed out. Not so with the Middletons.
When Alice Walton and some Crystal Bridges trustees made a pilgrimage in a van to visit the collection outside Philadelphia in 2014, Foster accompanied them. “They shared victories and stories of the hunt and it was all very jolly,” she recalled. Afterward, Foster said, Walton got back in the van and announced: “‘You’ve just seen the greatest private collection in the U.S.’”
Middleton routinely slugged it out for the finest furniture with Edward Johnson III, the chairman of Fidelity Investments, who died in 2022. But his rival in chief was definitely Walton. “Alice and I competed all the time,” Middleton said. “You kind of knew when the other was lurking in the shadows.”
A fit 71-year-old preppy, Middleton made his fortune selling his family’s tobacco business, best known for Black & Mild cigars, to Philip Morris’s parent company, Altria, in 2007 for $2.9 billion in cash, according to Forbes. The original business was founded by his great-great-grandfather in 1856 as a small Philadelphia tobacco shop.
He and Leigh, a youthful and petite 67, met on a blind date concocted by their mothers when they bumped into each other in the B. Altman china and crystal department.
His grandfather was an artist and, when John turned 3, presented him with a painting of a red caboose. Possessed with a “freakish” memory, as his wife put it, he remembers receiving the gift, inscribed “to Johnny from Poppy” in the kitchen.
The couple remained under the radar, always in parentheses as “Private collector.” Much of their philanthropy was also done anonymously. But major donations to the Philadelphia public school system — which required transparency of donations — and to a homelessness nonprofit brought them out of the shadows. When John became the public face of the Phillies in 2015, “our anonymity was blown,” he said.
Their interplay as a collecting couple — they’ve been married for 48 years — was on display during a whirlwind art crawl through both museums last month. Leigh, who was an art history major at the University of Virginia, described herself as “an emotional collector,” gravitating to the “quiet and stillness” of Andrew Wyeth, a local boy whose home ground was in nearby Chadds Ford (his “Crown of Flowers,” from 1974, is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art).
Her husband finds the Hudson River School paintings moving but relates more intellectually to the Abstract Expressionists. An exception is Mark Rothko’s “Orange, Red, Yellow” (1956), also at the museum, which shifts with light and can be “very emotional when the lights are dimmed,” he said The couple bought the Rothko in 2013 at Sotheby’s for “in excess of $30 million,” Middleton said.
Their collecting zeal began as newlyweds with a $195 cane-seated rocker. They started buying seriously in January 2006 with the purchase of the Peale for $21.3 million at Christie’s, a record at the time for an American portrait. They’ve been on a roll ever since. The pace was such that in 2010 Leigh declared a temporary moratorium. “We can’t buy every great painting,” she told her husband.
But Johns’s seminal “Flag” painting from 1960-66 was coming up for auction. Her birthday and their anniversary were approaching, so Middleton decided to buy it — the $28.6 million he paid was a record for Johns at the time, about $42 million today — and surprised her. Then his name started floating around New York as the mystery buyer. A friend told Leigh, “I hear John bought the Flag.” That couldn’t be true, Leigh explained, because they had agreed to stop buying. But his cover was blown. Then it was, “Well, honey, I have a surprise. …”
Visiting the museums felt like seeing old friends, they said. One was Childe Hassam’s impressionistic “Up the Avenue From 34th Street” (1917) — a jubilant Fifth Avenue lined with Stars & Stripes and European allies’ flags, a beloved fixture in the family den.
The exhibitions take an expansive view of American art, trying to dismantle categories like “folk” “fine” and “self-taught.” The curators took deep pleasure in playing yenta. At the Academy, Mary Cassatt’s “Mother and Sara Admiring the Baby’’ (1901) communes with Gisela McDaniel’s nurturing presence in “Auntie Susan a Yo’åmte” (2023), a portrait of a traditional healer of the Indigenous Chamoru of Guam. Jackson Pollock’s “Number 4” (1951), a fever dream of black lines, aluminum paint and other pigments, resides beside Dyani White Hawk’s “She Gives (Quiet Strength VII)” (2020), which echoes Lakota quill work and beadwork in tiny marks of paint. Pollock drew inspiration from Indigenous iconography, including sand painting. White Hawk’s work is “an implied critique of the appropriation of Indigenous motifs by non-Indigenous artists,” said Leah Triplett, the Academy’s curator of contemporary art.
After seeing the magnificent paintings, furniture, ceramics, silver, art glass and artifacts by America’s premier talents, it will be hard to miss a heavy dose of Philadelphia pop culture nearby. “Rising Up,” which opens next Saturday, is a tribute to the city’s civic identity, the “Rocky” statue that draws millions of people a year. It has it’s own impeccable provenance: Sylvester Stallone.
A Nation of Artists
The dual-venue exhibition runs through July 5, 2027, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, philamuseum.org/visit; through Sept. 5, 2027, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 118-128 North Broad Street, Philadelphia, pafa.org/museum/visit.
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