Samuel Henry Kress - Biography

Biography

Kress was born in the village of Cherryville, near Allentown, Pennsylvania, the second of seven children born to John Franklin Kress and Margaret Dodson (née Conner) Kress. His siblings were Mary Conner Kress, Jennie Weston Kress, Palmer John Kress, Claude Washington Kress, and Rush Harrison Kress. Another sibling, Elmer Kress, died ten days after birth. His father was a retail merchant. Kress never married or had children. He was a Mason.

Young Kress worked in the stone quarries. Intelligent, energetic and precocious, he earned his teaching credentials by the age of 17 and began work as a schoolteacher. His first position was instructor for a class of 80 students, and was paid $25 per month. He walked 3 miles each way to the schoolhouse.

In 1887, Kress opened a stationery and notions store in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania. As the business prospered he used his profits to open additional stores, naming his chain "S. H. Kress & Co." These eventually would become popularly known as the "Kress Five and Dime" stores. Unlike many businessmen of his day who only opened their stores in large urban areas, Kress wisely located his stores in smaller cities in 29 states he felt had growth potential. These stores became the jewel of many of these cities, who only had a dry goods or general store until then. By the mid-1920s, he was living in a penthouse at 1020 Fifth Avenue in New York City, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which he visited and contributed to regularly.

He was the founder and president of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. An avid art lover, he acquired, thorough art dealer Joseph Duveen, a collection of paintings and sculpture, primarily of the Italian Baroque school. Luckily for Kress, these paintings were thought to be "out of date" and "old fashioned" during the Victorian and Edwardian age, so he was able to purchase them at relatively low prices. In 1929 he gave the Italian government a large sum for the restoration of a number of architectural treasures in Italy. Beginning in the 1930s Kress decided to give much of his art collection to museums across the country while he was still alive. Many paintings were donated to the same smaller cities that had brought him his fortune with their stores. In several cases, his gifts become the founding basis for museums in those areas which otherwise could never have afforded artworks of such importance and quality.

On March 17, 1941, Kress and Paul Mellon gave a large gift of art to the people of the United States, thereby establishing the National Museum of Art in Washington, D.C. Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted the gift personally.

Today, the masterpieces Kress donated are considered priceless and the Kress Foundation has dispensed millions of dollars to worthy organizations and institutions in the years since.