I went to visit the Barnes Collection when it was still in Merion County, wanting to see its idiosyncratic system of stacked display before it was moved downtown after much controversy to a new and grandly corporate building on the Parkway leading to the Philadelphia Museum (I initially mistook it for a research laboratory).   It was designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects, who were responsible for the American Folk Art Museum next door to MOMA and the Asia Society building in Hong Kong.   What I had forgotten (I half knew) is that the compromise struck with the original terms of the bequest is that one walks out of the grandly neutral central court into a replica of the original rooms, with the pictures – Renoirs by the yard, a fantastic Seurat (Poseuses), Cézanne’s Card Players (no labels, no photography) – still hung floor to ceiling on yellow burlap, interspersed by the wrought iron ornaments which he collected in the 1930s and, in other rooms, American folk arts.

I was initially sceptical, but was won round by the integrity with which the original settings and ensembles have been maintained:-