There are books about rich people. There are books about art. There are books about American ambition. And then, very rarely, there is a book that is about all three at once and still manages to feel like it’s really about a family sitting around a Christmas tree in a brick house in University City, Missouri, opening presents and having a great time.

The Life and Times of Barney Ebsworth is that book.

Paul Terry Walhus has done something that professional biographers almost never achieve: he has written a biography that feels personal without being sentimental, that is exhaustively researched without being dry, and that tells the story of a $400 million fortune without ever losing sight of the $12,000-a-year family that produced it. The book opens not with the auction — not with the $91.9 million Hopper or the $68.9 million de Kooning — but with Christmas Eve on Gannon Avenue, where two families gathered around a turkey dinner and a big tree, and a boy named Barney opened presents alongside his cousin Paul.

That opening is a masterstroke. By the time the reader reaches the auction rooms of Christie’s, 350 pages later, they are not watching a rich man sell paintings. They are watching Aunt Bern’s boy — the kid who worked at Famous-Barr, who ran the quarter-mile, who grew up playing cricket because his father was English — arrive at the pinnacle of American cultural life. The emotional distance between one and a half paychecks and $400 million is so vast that it would be unbelievable in fiction. In biography, told by someone who was there, it is devastating.

The Writing

Walhus writes with a novelist’s instinct for scene and a historian’s respect for fact. The chapter on Barney’s wedding at Georgia O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiu — with O’Keeffe in her black dress, the judge from Tierra Amarilla, and a gardener standing in horse manure pressed into service as best man — is one of the most delightful set pieces in recent biography. The chapter on Pam’s departure (“I don’t know if I’m in love, and I have to leave to find out”) is one of the most heartbreaking. The chapter on the Chop Suey purchase — the accidental negotiation, the “creative” financing, and the painting that would become worth $91.9 million — reads like a thriller.

“The body screams stop. The runner accelerates. $2.2 million for a painting whose previous record was $56,000.”

— from “The F-111 That Got Away”

The prose is muscular and direct, with a recurring motif — “quality, quality, quality” — that becomes not just a description of Barney’s collecting philosophy but a description of the book itself. Every chapter earns its place. Every detail is sourced. Every story drives forward.

The Research

The sourcing is formidable. Walhus has mined the complete Smithsonian oral history transcript (two days of interviews conducted one year before Barney’s death), cross-referenced it with Barney’s privately published autobiography, tracked down the Christie’s auction records lot by lot, identified the architects and dealers and museum directors who shaped the collection, and — most valuably — drawn on his own childhood memories of the Ebsworth family: Aunt Bern’s bird flying through the house, Uncle Alec’s British accent, the Rolls Royce and Mercedes in the Sumac Lane driveway, Martine being “really sweet.”

The annotated bibliography alone is worth the price of the book. Forty-plus sources, each with a description of what it contains and why it matters. The chronology is the most complete timeline of Barney’s life ever assembled. The contacts appendix reads like a roadmap for the documentary that someone will inevitably make.

What Makes It Different

Other writers could research this story. Only Walhus could feel it. He was in the room. He ran the quarter-mile with Barney. He opened presents at the same Christmas tree. He heard Alec’s accent and ate Bernice’s turkey and saw the Rolls in the driveway. That intimacy gives the book a warmth and specificity that no amount of archival research could replicate.

The book is also refreshingly honest about what it doesn’t know. The third marriage is acknowledged as thinly documented. The Gulf War ship rumor is presented as an open question. Martine’s post-divorce life remains a mystery. Walhus doesn’t fill gaps with speculation; he marks them as territory for future editions and future interviews. The integrity of the research is as impressive as its breadth.

The Film

This is, unmistakably, a movie. The midnight dance. The O’Keeffe wedding. The $91.9 million hammer fall. The boy from one and a half paychecks standing in a house worth $37.5 million, surrounded by paintings worth $323 million, looking out at Lake Washington while Bill Gates looks back from across the water. If a producer reads this review: call Paul Walhus. The rights are available. The story is better than fiction. And the ending — Jeff Bezos buying the house, the paintings scattered to the winds, the boy from Dutchtown becoming a name on a park and two galleries and a 46-foot sculpture gazing over Puget Sound — is perfect.

“My eyes were my mentors.”

— Barney A. Ebsworth, 1934–2018