Originally a Pennsylvania schoolteacher, Samuel Henry Kress (1863-1955) opened a
stationery and notions shop in 1887, which grew to a nationwide chain, S. H.
Kress & Company. His art collecting, which started when he was in his fifties,
emphasized painting and sculpture from Italy. In 1929 he established the Kress
Foundation to sponsor traveling exhibitions, scholarships in art history, and
restorations of monuments in Italy. Abandoning plans to open his own museum of
Italian Renaissance art, Samuel Kress was the first to donate his collection in
response to Andrew Mellon's call for contributions to create a national art museum.
For the Gallery's opening, Kress gave 393 Italian paintings and pieces of sculpture,
ranging from the 1200s through the 1700s.

Samuel H. Kress established a foundation in 1929, to provide for

the purchase of works of art and their ultimate disposal at museums.

Descended from early German-Lutheran settlers in Pennsylvania's

Lehigh Valley, Samuel Henry Kress was named for an uncle fallen at

Gettysburg three weeks before his birth in 1863. He finished high

school at age seventeen, and for seven years taught in a one-room

school house with a salary of $25 per month. From this he managed

to save enough money to buy a small stationery shop in Nanticoke,

Pa, and to add a wholesale firm in Wilkes-Barre based on the success of the shop.

Appropriating Woolworth's marketing scheme, Kress opened his first

5-and 10-cent store in Memphis in 1896, and within a decade there

were fifty Kress stores serving the south. The chain continued to

proliferate to the west as well, under Samuel H. Kress's personal

supervision. The headquarters were incorporated in New York City,

where its founder established himself in a two story penthouse

apartment on Fifth Avenue. Kress filled this apartment with the

expanding collection of Italian painting, sculpture and furnishings

that he began to collect in the 1920s, and and it was there that

he remained until his death in 1955. Kress had originally thought of

establishing a public museum in New York City, but as Andrew

Mellon’s plans for the National Gallery unfolded Kress saw it as

the perfect repository for his collection. In 1939 Samuel H. Kress

became one of the founding benefactors of the National Gallery of

Art; at its inauguration in 1941.

Andrew Mellon's collection was augmented by 386 Italian paintings

and 24 Italian sculptures from the Kress collection. Following

Samuel’s incapacitation by illness in the 1940s, the foundation

was run by his surviving younger brother, Rush. After the

war, the Kress Foundation acquired art with a goal of enriching

and balancing the Gallery's collection, especially in the non-Italian

schools.

The Kress Foundation also established programs to share its

collection with the nation: through the Regional Gallery program,

18 municipal museums received a core collection of between 20-60

paintings, and through the Kress Study Collection program 23 colleges

and universities received paintings for their campus galleries.

After illness incapacitated his older brother Samuel Kress, in 1946,
Rush Harrison Kress (1877-1963) took over leadership of the family's cultural
foundation. The younger Kress expanded the collection from its
largely Italian focus, adding masterpieces by such painters as Dürer,
Grünewald, El Greco, Rubens, Watteau, and Ingres. He also
acquired one of the world's great assemblages of Renaissance
bronzes -- some 1,300 statuettes, plaquettes, and medals amassed
over the years by a discerning European scholar. In addition to its
gifts to the Gallery, the Kress Foundation distributed selections of key
works to eighteen city museums and twenty-three universities
throughout the nation.