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121 those of Georges Braque and JoanMiró, brought the analogies between picture and neigh- bouring ironwork close to an identity of outline, as if picture and ironwork coincided midway between figuration and ornament. Antecedents, Models and Parallels Barnes’s inclusion of ironwork was exceptional in the context of art displays, but not in the broader one of collections andmuseums at large, where precedents and possiblemod- els can be found in the realms of the decorative and applied arts and of ethnography. A local antecedent is the Mercer Museum, a vast collection of early American tools and everyday artefacts assembled by Henry Chapman Mercer, an archaeologist close to the American Arts and Crafts Movement, and displayed on a grand scale in a 1908– 1910 concrete building in his native Doylestown, Pennsylvania, 27 miles north of Philadel- phia. 16 Further away, but internationally famous, was the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles in Rouen. Devoted to all objects made of iron, fromGallo-Roman antiquity to the present (Fig. 3), collected by the painter and photographer Jean-Louis Henri Le Secq Destournelles and his son Henri, it was installed in 1921 in a disused medieval church after partial pres- entations at the 1900 Universal Exposition and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. 17 Barnes started collecting ironwork in the spring of 1936, after visiting the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles. 18 His interest in such collections may seem surprising, since the focus of his own collecting activity until then had been modern painting, but it was connected to his social origins and concerns. 19 Although he had become extremely wealthy, Albert Coombs Barnes was born in Kens- ington, a working-class neighbourhood to the north of Philadelphia. His father was a butcher, probably of Quaker origins, and his Methodist mother was descended from the German immigrants who had colonized a large part of the State. Barnes also collected Pennsylvania German furniture and utensils; their presence is relatively discrete in the galleries of the Foundation but they occupy pride of place in his country house Ker-Feal, a 1775 stone farmhouse in Chester County which he purchased in 1940 and arranged as a small museum of popular art. 20 In the realm of wrought iron, Barnes demonstrated a preference for simple, straightforward objects of everyday use, whereas Le Secq had searched for complex masterpieces. 21 15  Louis [Denis], ‘Definition of Neo-Traditionism,’ 1890, pp. 540–542. It may be worth noting that Barnes, being born in 1872, belonged to the generation that Denis (born in 1870) called ‘of 1890’ and which comprised his fellowNabis.  16 See: The Mercer MuseumGuide , 1957.  17 See: Cathelineau, ‘The Musée Le Secq des Tournelles,’ 2015, pp. 11 –24.  18 See: Cathelineau, ‘TheMusée Le Secq des Tournelles,’ 2015, pp. 25 and 30.  19 See: Meyers, Art, Education, & African-American Culture , 2004. It must be added that Barnes did not only include ironwork in his displays but also, asWattenmaker summarizes, ‘works as diverse as African masks, examples of Chinese painting and calligraphy, NewMexican retablos, and dazzling Nav- ajo rugs’ (Wattenmaker, ‘In the Light of NewMaterial,’ 2015, p. 25).  20 See: Dolkart and Lucy, The Barnes Foundation, Masterworks , 2012, pp. 23 –25.  21 See: Wattenmaker, ‘In the Light of New Material,’ 2015, pp. 25 and 38.