In the years leading up to the Grand Opening in 1972, members of the Kimbell Art Foundation and the first director, Richard F. Brown, laid out broad parameters for the Museum’s collecting. Over time, the strategy has become more focused. Today the Museum does not collect American art, nor works created after 1950, in order to more effectively complement the offerings of its neighbors, the Amon Carter Museum, which is devoted to American art, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which focuses on art since World War II.

Visitors to the Kimbell during the inaugural year were greeted by more than 125 new acquisitions, extending back as far as early antiquity and medieval times and as late in history as the early 20th century, as well as a generous representation of British 18th and 19th-century portraits that reflected Kay and Velma Kimbell’s legacy and taste. Goya’s Portrait of the Matador Pedro Romero, executed at the height of the artist’s career as a court painter; Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Bruns’s immensely confident self-portrait at 26 years of age; and Monet’s La Pointe de la Héve at Low Tide, one of the painter’s first large showpieces: these were among the paintings that thousands of Americans encountered for the first time in the natural light of Louis I. Kahn’s barrel-vaulted galleries. Visitors to the smaller non-Western collections encountered works collected according to the highest connoisseurial standards, ranging from a rare Cycladic female figure to important Greek and Roman statuary to Buddhist deities crafted of stone or bronze. In the years directly following the Grand Opening, the Museum added still more masterworks, including Duccio di Buoninsegna’s emotionally expressive panel painting The Raising of Lazarus, and El Greco’s magisterial Portrait of Dr. Francisco de Pisa.

In 1980, several months after the Board of Directors acquired Cézanne’s Man in a Blue Smock in memory of Brown, who had died the previous year, Edmund P. Pillsbury, previously director of the Yale Center for British Art (another Kahn building), was appointed Brown’s successor and initiated a second very active period of acquisitions. Guided by Pillsbury, the Board’s purchase of La Tour’s Cheat with the Ace of Clubs in 1981 set the stage for an inspired pairing when, six years later, Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps entered the collection. Nowadays these two masterpieces—which warn of the dangers of indulgence in wine, women and gambling, while evoking those activities in seductive color and form—often hang in close proximity to Murillo’s Four Figures on a Step, also thought to encode a morality tale. Fra Angelico’s minutely limned The Apostle Saint James the Greater Freeing the Magician Hermogenes, Velázquez’s imposing Don Pedro de Barberana, and Caillebotte’s pivotal On the Pont de l’Europe are among other noted works acquired during Pillsbury’s tenure. These acquisitions were supported partly by selective deaccessioning of works, including all of the Museum’s drawings and prints.

Pillsbury also extended the Museum’s coverage of Impressionist and modern art with paintings by Gauguin, Monet, Miró, Matisse, and Mondrian. Overall, by the end of his directorship in 1998, the collection had been reduced in size but enhanced in quality.

During the tenure of Timothy Potts (1998–2007), the Museum particularly sought out important examples of European sculpture, until then still a relatively small category within the collections. A number of these works are now highlights of the permanent collection, among them Gianlorenzo Bernini’s 1653 presentation model (modello) for the Fountain of the Moor in Piazza Navona, Rome—which the Museum acquired in 2004, shortly after its dramatic rediscovery—and a rare and important portrait bust of a woman, probably Isabella d’Este, c. 1500, attributed to Gian Cristoforo Romano. The Moor is probably the finest surviving terracotta by Bernini’s hand, and the Romano, the finest terracotta female portrait of the period in this country. Other major sculptures to enter the collections during this period represent the art of ancient Greece (Head of an Athlete), Renaissance Italy (Michelozzo, Saint John the Baptist), and Late Gothic Germany. The German work is a Virgin and Child crafted of silver, gilt, and precious stones, and, as such, a rare survivor of the Reformation.

In 2006 a rare terracotta relief by the early Renaissance master Donatello entered the permanent collections. The Borromeo Madonna, dating to about 1450, is a tender depiction of one of the most popular subjects of the Renaissance, and one that Donatello did more than any other artist to develop—the Madonna and Child. Although long known to scholars, the relief had been hidden beneath as many as ten layers of stucco and paint applied over the last 500 years, obscuring its beauty and history. A significant cleaning allowed the attribution to Donatello to be made. The Borromeo Madonna forms a new historical starting point and context for such other recent acquisitions as the Saint John the Baptist mentioned above. Michelozzo, its creator, was Donatello’s contemporary and collaborator.

The Museum never ceased to value the grand British portraiture that was Mr. Kimbell’s original enthusiasm. In 2003 it was able to identify and purchase a remarkable double portrait from the early 1790s by Sir Henry Raeburn. The Allen Brothers is a large canvas upon which the Scottish artist conjures an endearingly playful, informal scene of two boys of the upper class with confident, free brushwork. Malcolm Warner, acting director of the Kimbell since September 2007 and senior curator since 2002, brings his particular expertise in British art to acquisitions and exhibitions in this area.

A year after the Raeburn purchase, the Kimbell acquired the German painter Lucas Cranach’s The Judgment of Paris, c. 1512–14, the first of his several versions of this tale from classical mythology (one of the later depictions may usually be found in the Northern European painting galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Remarkably for a painting of this age, the Kimbell’s Cranach has never suffered from overzealous cleaning. All the glazes, modeling, and fine details are intact, preserving the rich colors and enamel-like surface that are synonymous with Northern Renaissance oils.

The Kimbell continues to collect. This summer it placed its latest acquisition on view. Vase of Flowers with a Curtain, created by Jacques de Gheyn II in 1615, is a landmark in the history of flower painting, even though it was a “lost” work, kept in a British private collection since 1924, never exhibited in public, and known only in the form of old, black-and-white reproductions. Its acquisition by the Kimbell is a significant event in the study of Dutch art.

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