John Middleton’s art collection will be showing at the PMA and the PAFA next year

In Philadelphia, John Middleton is known as the baseball guy with some very baseball ambitions. The managing partner of the Phillies has boldly declared his intention to make the team one of the winningest ever.

In another realm, though, Middleton has already achieved a distinction — as one of the world’s top art collectors.

Middleton and his wife, Leigh, have amassed “one of the greatest collections of American art in private hands,” said the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Kathleen A. Foster. “It’s a set of masterpieces.”

Those masterpieces have been a closely held asset. “The details surrounding Middleton’s collecting interests are shadowy,” wrote ARTnews in its Top 200 list of international art collectors. Works have been quietly loaned here and there, but the family’s art has never been put on public display in a big way.

Now the couple is stepping out of the shadows.

Their collection guest stars in a major, unprecedented exhibition opening in Philadelphia in 2026. About 120 paintings and pieces of furniture and decorative arts from the Middleton Family Collection will be split between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and surrounded by at least a thousand other objects from both museums in a blockbuster double show.

Organizers are billing the sweeping, three-century view as “the most expansive presentation of American art ever mounted in Philadelphia.” The show, “A Nation of Artists,” is set to be announced to journalists Tuesday at the U.S. Travel Association’s trade show in Chicago. It’s being promoted as one of the major draws in Philadelphia during the Semiquincentennial celebration.

“We’ll be the cultural highlight of the country’s anniversary,” said PAFA board chair Donald R. Caldwell.

“In a moment when people are talking about nothing happening in 2026, we’re really feeling the momentum and hoping this can be something that gives everybody a place to stand and celebrate,” said Art Museum president Sasha Suda.

The Middletons are not only lending their works for the exhibition but are also giving each museum a donation — the exact amounts undisclosed, but in the millions — to underwrite costs related to the project.

An All-Star collection

John Middleton is hoping that mounting this show during the nation’s 250th will hook new art lovers — that viewers will find something that “really interests them and intrigues them intellectually and that they like aesthetically, and that’ll be their entry point,” he said.

His own entry point was a familial one, and arrived early.

“I was an art guy before I was a baseball guy,” Middleton said in an interview last week at the Art Museum. “I’m not an artist. There are artists in my family. My grandfather was one, his mother was even better, apparently. My older sister is, my son is.”

You might say Middleton’s life as a collector began the day he turned 3.

“My birthday present from my grandparents was a painting of a caboose in some part of Philadelphia, and so I’ve grown up with art, my grandfather’s art in particular. And my mom collected American furniture, not great stuff back then. They didn’t have the money to collect great stuff — I mean, probably on the good side, not even very good. But I kind of grew up with an appreciation for aesthetics.”

That sensitivity, plus an analytical approach and a fortune stemming from the $2.9 billion sale of his family’s tobacco business in 2007, has allowed the Middletons to selectively assemble a blue chip collection focused squarely on American art.

In furniture and decorative arts, that means early American tables and chairs, Revolutionary War flags, a c. 1765-66 teapot emblazoned with “No Stamp Act/American Liberty Restored,” and other early American items.

Their art collection spans styles and centuries, from landscapes by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole to oils by Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, John Singer Sargent, and Jasper Johns.

The most contemporary work is by Andrew Wyeth.

One through line:

“I’m going to make a baseball analogy here and say he wanted to have the All-Stars. He was ambitious. He wanted the very best,” said Foster, the PMA’s senior curator of American Art, director of its Center for American Art, and one of several cocurators for “A Nation of Artists.”

 “And so I think that sense of wanting to build an important collection with the very best examples that he could find, I think that’s John’s driving ambition,” Foster said. Leigh is “the one who loves the Impressionist paintings. I think she’s the one who put the Sargent painting in their bedroom.”

John Middleton says art is more subjective than sports, but for the couple it’s about “having paintings that we really love and love over time, and that continue to challenge us as we continue to learn more about the artist and what the artist is doing in any particular work. And you see new things in it, not maybe every time you look at it, but often, and that’s kind of cool. I like that a lot. My wife likes that, too.”

Both studied art — he took art history courses while majoring in economics at Amherst College, and she was an art history major at the University of Virginia. After Amherst, where he was a wrestler, Middleton earned his MBA from Harvard Business School and then returned to work at the family’s tobacco business. They are active philanthropists, and have been particularly involved with Project HOME, the organization made prominent by Sister Mary Scullion to fight poverty and housing insecurity.

Middleton’s mother used to buy antique furniture for his bedroom and give it to him for Christmas and birthdays, “which, you know, when you’re 10 years old isn’t the greatest thing you’ve ever seen.”

But it stuck. The Middletons, who reside in Bryn Mawr, bought their first piece of antique furniture together shortly after they were married in June of 1978 — “a really cool little cane sled rocker, up in Boston, and we just kind of went from there.”

He says the first “really great” piece of art they acquired came around 2005 — a Charles Willson Peale painting of George Washington at Princeton.

They make decisions together about what to acquire.

“You sit down and talk about the individual pieces and see where we agree. We kind of rank them and talk about which ones we want to go after and which ones kind of what we think the price point is. And we do that, and easily 95% of what we’ve purchased we’ve always agreed on.”

For the other 5%: “Generally what we’ve done in those cases is the one who really wants it makes the decision, and then the one who doesn’t want it just acquiesces.”

‘A feast for visitors’

Many of their choices, it turns out, dovetail nicely with collections at PAFA and the PMA.

“It fills a lot of holes for us,” Foster said of how the Middleton collection will complement “A Nation of Artists.”

One such area is in landscape painting. “The Pennsylvania Academy was always about figure painting when you think about the Peale family and Thomas Eakins, and landscape painting was never the highest priority. Our collection [at the PMA] is small, and, oh my God, the Middleton collection is just extraordinary — extraordinary 19th-century landscape paintings.”

Another strength of the Middleton collection is American Impressionist painting.

“Again, we have a good collection,” Foster said. “It’s very locally based, very powerful for the New Hope School and the Pennsylvania Impressionists. But the things that the Middleton collection is dropping into the mix — for us to put our Pennsylvania impressionists alongside [Childe] Hassam and Sargent, this is just going to be a feast for visitors.”

It was John Middleton and former Art Museum board chair Leslie Anne Miller who several years ago first discussed the idea of putting the Middletons’ collection on public view. Now it is happening, and with elegant synchronicity.

 At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “A Nation of Artists” marks the reopening of the second phase of renovations to the American Galleries. It will be the first show in PAFA’s Historic Landmark Building when it reopens after a yearlong renovation with a new HVAC system.

 “It’s an extraordinary opportunity for the public to see a world-class private collection,” said PAFA’s Caldwell, “and when you combine that with the collections from the two museums, I know it sounds like hyperbole from where I sit, but I honestly believe it’ll be the world’s biggest, best show of American art ever.”

The exhibition will have slightly different runs at each museum — both opening in the spring of 2025, with the embedded Middleton Family Collection surfacing in public for about 16 months. Beyond that, discussions have already begun about the future of the collection, Middleton says.

“It’s not my wife’s and my collection, it’s a family collection, and so we’re getting older, our [two] kids are getting older, too, and they have their own ideas about the collection and how it should be continued and whatnot, and so we have to start turning over control to them.”

What form will that legacy take?

“I don’t know. They’re going to have an outsize say in it.”

Whatever it may be, John Middleton has already transferred ownership of one historically significant work — his grandfather’s painting of the caboose.

“I gave it to my son when he was 3. So it’s somewhere.”

“A Nation of Artists” is scheduled at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from April 12, 2026, to July 5, 2027, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from May 2026 to September 2027.