Albert du Aime had one close encounter with Albert C. Barnes. The two met by chance in Merion. Then about 15, du Aime was riding his bike near the Barnes home. The heralded art hoarder invited him inside. Reluctantly, du Aime accepted. “He enjoyed seeing the collection,” says du Aime’s widow, Rosemary, who turns 99 next month.
There are parallels between the two Alberts. Both had deeply personal private art collections. Both were explicit in the way the pieces in their possession were to be preserved and presented, and both were overbearing when it came to allowing access. But there was one key difference, as former gallery owner Drew Saunders notes: “[Du Aime] was the artist—then also became the collector.”
Barnes was killed in car accident in 1951. Decades later in 2012, his $30 billion collection was relocated to a Philadelphia museum after the courts determined the move didn’t violate the terms of his will. Du Aime passed away in 2008, and his collection has led to tension among his descendants. Initially a street painter in Paris, du Aime is better known as novelist William Wharton. The 1943 Upper Darby High School graduate engineered an artistically prolific career, leaving behind 3,000 late-impressionist oil paintings and 20 books, three of which became films.
In July 1992, Saunders and Naomi “Teddi” Newman spent an afternoon with Wharton at his studio in France, trying to convince him to sell his art in this country through their Newman & Saunders Galleries in Wayne. “It was pretty magical, like walking into a jewel box,” recalls Saunders, who’s late business partner was descended from the owner of Philadelphia’s Newman Galleries, with a history that dates to 1865. “It’s what we came for—the Holy Grail.”
Wharton had a distaste for gallery owners and art agents, who’d take 50% of a sale. “Museums are mummy shows—nobody goes,” he once wrote. “Private collections are money tombs, cut off from the world.”
They left empty-handed, save for some photos taken that day and a few letters that involved their meeting. “We were wowed and dazzled, but he made it real clear that he didn’t want to sell any paintings,” says Saunders.
Wharton was 53 when his first novel was published in 1978. Birdy made him a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won him the National Book Award for First Novel. After the movie rights sold for $350,000, Wharton swore he’d never part with another painting. Right now, as many as 2,500 of his works remain vaulted in France’s Burgundy region. And the plan is for them to be sold, likely online to individual collectors—not to dealers or galleries. The family would keep what they determine to be the 100 best works, making them available for exhibition at carefully vetted events.
The current self-appointed guardian of the collection is Wharton’s youngest child, Will, who presides over the works at a remote rural location called the Study Center. Though it’s technically open to the public, there are no operating hours—or guests, for that matter. Will lives there and serves as curator.
The family has sold the 300-year-old mill home in the Burgundy village of Montigny-en-Morva and a houseboat in Port-Marly on the Seine River. Much of this is calculated to save on estate taxes. As Rosemary puts it, she needs to die “unconnected to France.”
Wharton succumbed an infection in a hospital in Encinitas, California. He was 82. “When the doctors said he had 24 hours [to live], I had to help hold him down as they intubated him,” says Wharton’s oldest son, Matt, who’s now 68. “He was lifting four of us as we were holding him down. He lived four more days, enough time for everyone to get there.”
Albert “Bert” du Aime’s maternal relatives were Whartons. He took his pen name from William Wharton, a live-in uncle who’d been gassed in World War I. While the Whartons ran generations of Philadelphia haberdasheries, the du Aimeses were Wisconsin farmers. After losing the family farm, Wharton’s paternal ancestors came to Philadelphia to work in the shipyards. The du Aimeses bought five connected rowhouses in Upper Darby—setting the scene for Wharton’s heavily autobiographical novels, many anchored to Philadelphia. Wharton liked to tour the city by bike, often stopping at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He could fix anything, having grown up building porches with his father during the Great Depression.
Wharton’s literary debut is a book about a boy who breeds canaries. Birdy takes his infatuation to the extreme, actually trying to fly. But he ultimately flies off the deep end after experiencing unspeakable wartime horrors. Set in the Stonehurst section of Upper Darby, Birdy references Springfield, Media, Cheltenham, Lansdowne, Haverford Township and Yeadon, along with the Tower Theater, the Parkway, the Franklin Institute, and South and Front streets.
Oscar-nominated British director Alan Parker directed the 1984 film version of Birdy, which starred Nicholas Cage and Matthew Modine and featured a soundtrack by rock superstar Peter Gabriel. Two other Wharton books—1981’s Dad and 1982’s A Midnight Clear—also made it to the big screen. The former is a dramedy with Jack Lemmon and Ted Danson, the latter a 1992 wartime drama with an ensemble cast that includes Ethan Hawke and Gary Sinise. Much like the books, all three films were generally well received by critics.
Wharton’s spouse—who now lives in Solana Beach, California—has her own Delco roots, having grown up in Springfield and Chester. Rosemary’s father managed the Springhaven Club in Wallingford and later Rolling Green Golf Club in Springfield. She met her husband while he was on military leave in California, where both families had relocated. “I danced every night with him for 17 days,” she remembers.
Soon after, Wharton would parachute into France five days ahead of World War II’s Normandy invasion. Selected for the Army Specialized Training Program because of his off-the-charts IQ, he would’ve likely been sent to Drexel University to study engineering if the program hadn’t been dropped. Instead, he was assigned to an intelligence and reconnaissance unit and severely injured in the Battle of the Bulge. Written in 2000, Wharton’s memoir, Shrapnel, tells of the trauma. “He came out saying, ‘Don’t tell me what to do. I’ll do it my way,’” says his son Matt.
Following his discharge, Wharton attended UCLA, where he graduated with an undergraduate degree in art and a doctorate in psychology. He gave up a job teaching art at a junior high school to move to France with Rosemary and their children. His wife would go on to teach kindergarten at the American School of Paris.
Initially, the family lived in a one-room apartment without a telephone or refrigerator. By 1967, there was a larger, fancier apartment. Then it was a centuries-old mill on weekends and a houseboat during the week. The boat was in the family for 50 years. The couple purchased it for $10,000, and it recently sold for almost $500,000. In 1988, they converted an old hotel into the Study Center, moving the collection of paintings there. The climate-controlled environment is also houses Wharton’s ashes.
The du Aimeses were their own version of a 1960s-era counterculture hippie couple. “They lived like millionaires on a shoestring,” Matt says.
Wharton hated America. He thought they could live more frugally in Europe, and he worried about the impact of TV on his children. “His attitude was that a bag of potato chips had one 10th of a kilo of potatoes, and a bag of potatoes is $2,” says Matt. “He took it a step further—he made his own potato chips.”
Retired from a 40-year teaching career, Matt lives in Spain. Camille, 66, and Will, 56, are also in Europe. Another daughter, Kate, died with her husband and two children in a car accident in 1988. The tragedy inspired Wharton’s 1995 book, Ever After: A Father’s True Story.
Matt speaks of a childhood that embraced transhumanism, a sort of rise-above-the-rank-and-file survivalist pedagogy. For eight years, the family moved every three months to four rotating locations in Paris, Germany and Spain. Later trips included summers at a Christian tent community on the beach in Ocean Grove, New Jersey. “In general, it was a pretty doggone good life—all because of his energy and his individuality,” says Rosemary. “He was always doing things the way he wanted—and I went along. He was I clever, and I followed well.”
In the summer of 1976, Rosalie Siegel received two of Wharton’s manuscripts—Birdy and Scumbler. “I was bowled over—especially by Birdy,” says Siegel, then a 35-year-old literary agent.
Siegel handed it to an editor at Alfred A. Knopf publishing company in New York City, who was “bowled over” too. Next to be wowed was Knopf editor-in-chief Bob Gottlieb. “He liked the authentic voices and genuine stories,” says Siegel, now in her early 80s, who represented Wharton throughout his career. “Knopf fell in love, as I had.”
Following Birdy’s 1978 release, Wharton toured Poland 11 times. Crowds awaited every arrival, the women carrying napkins of baked goods. Birdy soared to No. 3 on the bestseller list in that country. “The Poles lapped him up,” Siegel says. “They loved his lapse in Catholicism, his creativity and his ability to live on nothing. Where the Polish were generous and warm and wanted to satisfy him, Americans did not.”
Through the early 1990s, Wharton published seven more novels. Eventually, many were translated and published exclusively in Poland, where he remained a literary superstar. “He was a very unusual author, very suspicious and very distrustful of even me,” Siegel recalls. “He was so antiestablishment and anti-capitalism—unless it pertained to his best interest. He didn’t want to be edited or told what to do.”
Wharton’s first book was a home run. Written in 1978, Birdy made him a Pulitzer prize finalist at age 53 and won him the National Book Award for First Novel. After the movie rights sold for $350,000, Wharton swore he’d never part with another painting.
Frequent friction with Knopf led to the company cutting ties with Wharton. “He didn’t understand that he needed them more than they needed him,” Siegel says.
Wharton also had a distaste for gallery owners and art agents, who’d take 50% of a sale. “Museums are mummy shows—nobody goes,” he once wrote. “Private collections are money tombs, cut off from the world. One good thing about being a painter is you usually die before you see what some moronic museum director is going to do with your work.”
“He had a golden opportunity to promote his paintings, but he did the exact opposite,” says Matt. “Now, it’s a heavy lift. Why should anyone go out of their way [to promote or buy them]?”
One devotee is Villanova’s George Rothacker, an artist and novelist who grew up a decade after Wharton in Upper Darby’s Stonehurst section. A fellow Upper Darby High alum, Rothacker honored Wharton as the prototype for his art series celebrating American writers. His was the last portrait Rothacker painted this past fall. “Nobody I ask knows who he is or remembers the three movies made from his books,” Rothacker says. “His lack of celebrity has pretty much erased him from notoriety for later generations. His desire to keep his artwork also removed him from collective consciousness.”
Wharton’s legacy now rests in his children’s hands. “We’re still exploring just how to market and sell the paintings—or even get at them,” says Camille.
For her part, Camille has launched a website devoted to her father’s work. And in 2017, she self-published Invitation Into a Neighborhood, a book about a neighborhood in Paris’ Latin Quarter painted by her dad in the 1960s. “He was always sure of his specialness, so [fame] didn’t change him or make him more egotistical or driven,” says Camille. “He was already all of that.”
But Wharton did see the potential of his success as an author belittling his work as a painter. “It was important to him not to be seen as one and not the other,” says Camille.
Wharton’s youngest son remains the caretaker of his father’s art collection in France. By his own admission and others’ accounts, Will is on the autism spectrum. A hermit and hoarder, his brother says, Will doesn’t communicate well, reading all day until 4 a.m. by candlelight. He has also decided that he’s at war with Camille. “He refuses to even have her name mentioned in his presence,” Matt says. “Will is an impediment, a roadblock and a source of problems.”
As Wharton disintegrated mentally and physically, Will was his caregiver the last eight years of his life. When their mother passes, his siblings are prepared to play hardball to get into the vault.
Rosemary is on board, but she’s not quite ready to throw her youngest under the bus.
“It’s a fabulous collection,” she says. “The more who see it, the better.”
Visit wharton-duaime.wixsite.com/williamwharton.
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