Joseph Humphrey Winterbotham (1852-1954) was born in Columbus, Ohio. Although he was a great entrepreneur in the lumber industry, his true passion was collecting works of art. Winterbotham was a major benefactor of the Art Institute of Chicago. He endowed the museum with a permanent collection of paintings and developed the Winterbotham Plan in 1921, which consisted of a $50,000 donation for the acquisition of new paintings. The project allowed for the sale of purchased works in exchange for replacing them with others of higher quality (Delliquadri, 1994). Winterbotham closely followed the development of the collection, in fact, in a letter he sent to the vice-president of the museum shortly before his death, he proudly celebrated the decisions made: "I congratulate the Art Institute and myself on the fine discrimination you have heretofore exercised in selecting paintings".