His interest in art did not awaken until he saw the
World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he was most taken with the work of
James McNeill Whistler and
Auguste Rodin. Eddy, who traveled to Paris in the middle of the 1890s, was portrayed by Whistler in the painting
Arrangement in Flesh Color and Brown: Portrait of Arthur Jerome Eddy. Around the same time Rodin also sculpted a portrait bust of Eddy, bronze casts of which are in the Musée Rodin in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History. In 1902 his first book about art, titled
Delight, the Soul of Art, was published. In the following year he published
Recollections and impressions of James A. McNeill Whistler. Thus through 1912 he focused on the art of the late 19th century. For Eddy, as for many Americans, the 1913
Armory Show proved a revelation of
modern art. Fascinated by the efforts of these artists, he immediately began his collection of
avant-garde art with the purchase of a
Brâncuși sculpture and 25 paintings. "In New York, Eddy purchased 15 of the most radical works on display, including
Marcel Duchamp's
Portrait of Chess Players (1911) and
The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (1912),
Albert Gleizes's
Man on a Balcony (1912), and
Francis Picabia's
Dances at the Spring (1912). In Chicago, he purchased three additional paintings by the Portuguese artist
Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, as well as three lithographs by
Maurice Denis and four by
Édouard Vuillard." On two occasions during the show, Mr. Eddy lectured on "Cubism" at the
Art Institute of Chicago. On trips to London and Germany he came to know of Wassily Kandinsky and by 1920 had bought four of his paintings. Kandinsky introduced Eddy to another artist in working in Munich at the time,
Albert Bloch. Eddy would become Bloch's most important collector, owning over forty paintings and etchings. Eddy's collection in modern art would grow to over 100 works of art. The year 1914 saw the publication of perhaps his most important writing,
Cubists and Post-Impressionism, a large portion of which was based on information that Eddy obtained from the artists themselves. It is considered to be the first work published in the United States in which Modern Art was presented and explained sympathetically. Additionally it was the first adequate account of Kandinsky in America; the artist had been represented by only one painting in the Armory Show the year before. In his last years of life Eddy shifted the focus of his collecting to the
American moderns, including some paintings by artists such as
Arthur Dove. == Death ==