Ebsworth was invited to visit a private collection containing
multiple Old Master paintings by
Rembrandt and
Frans Hals. Realising he could not compete, he returned
home and arranged a meeting with Charles Buckley, then director
of the St. Louis Art Museum.
‘[Buckley] suggested French Impressionism,’ Ebsworth recalled.
‘I told him I couldn’t afford that. He then suggested School
of Paris and I told him I couldn’t afford that either. So
he suggested American Impressionism, and I said, “What is
it?” Somehow we got into American modernism, and that’s how
it started for me.’
It was agreed Ebsworth should start with the Ashcan School
— early 20th-century painters of ordinary New York scenes such
as
Robert Henri,
William Glackens,
Everett Shinn,
George Luks and
John Sloan.
‘In real estate, they say three things matter: location, location,
location. For me,’ said Ebsworth, ‘collecting art was about
quality, quality, quality. I would rather have a smaller
collection of the finest pictures than dozens of so-so ones.’
Vowing that he would only buy the very best, or ‘only what
could hang on the museum wall right now, and not sometime
in the future’, Ebsworth’s other ground rules were to buy works only by dead artists — so that he could make choices
from their whole range of work — and to focus on objects
rather than artists. ‘All that mattered was what I could
see in the piece, and how well I understood it in comparison
to the artist’s range of work,’ he explained.
