Paul Cézanne Vincent van Gogh Paul Gauguin Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Amedeo Modigliani Berthe Morisot This Hollywood Golden Age income enabled Robinson to buy works by artists he’d long admired, with most of his favorites culled from 19th and early 20th century France. In his autobiography he described drooling over an unusualstill life featuring a black clock and aportrait of his paint dealer, Père Tanguy, while gallery-hopping with composer George Gershwin; in time Robinson bought both. He evicted that quaint cow painting in favor of scenes byandand, among others in a collection that numbered roughly between 70 and 90 works.

“Other Hollywood notables owned renowned art,” Alan Gansberg, a director and former film professor who authored Little Caesar: A Biography of Edward G. Robinson (2004), explained, “but not as renowned collectors.”

Unlike film industry moguls who paid experts to strategically place a couple easily recognizable masterpieces above their fireplaces, Robinson selected his artworks himself, bought art regularly, and concentrated on a specific era. “One cannot emphasize enough that Robinson did not seek consultants,” Gansberg said. “Hollywood money bought art then and it buys art now. But Robinson knew the market and became a world-famous collector without ‘guidance.’”