Samuel Henry Kress

Kress was born in Cherryville, Pennsylvania, near Allentown, the second of seven children born to John Franklin Kress and Margaret Dodson (née Conner) Kress. His father was a retail merchant. 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. Kress never married or had children. He was a Mason.

Young Kress attended schools in Slatington, Pennsylvania.

Kress worked for a while in the stone quarries. He earned his teaching credentials by age 17 and began work as a schoolteacher in Emerald, Pennsylvania. His first position was instructor for a class of 80 students, and he 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 became 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, which 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.

Kress was founder and president of the eponymous Samuel H. Kress Foundation. An avid art lover, he acquired, through art dealers Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi and Joseph Duveen, often with the advice of art historian William Suida, a collection of paintings and sculpture, primarily of the Italian Renaissance school. 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 became 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 large gifts of art to the people of the United States and the nascent National Gallery 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.