Albert C. Barnes spent decades assembling one of the greatest troves of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting in the world, then wrote an ironclad will designed to keep it exactly as he arranged it, in a modest building outside Philadelphia, open to students rather than socialites. The film tracks what happened after his death in 1951, as foundations, politicians, and the very Philadelphia cultural establishment he despised maneuvered for decades to break that will and move the collection, valued in the billions, into the city. Interviews with former students, lawyers, and journalists lay out the legal fights, the funding deals, and the courtroom rulings that eventually cleared the way for the relocation. Talking heads on both sides get airtime, but the film's sympathies sit clearly with the Barnes loyalists who see the move as a betrayal engineered by money and political muscle. Archival footage of the original galleries, crowded with Renoirs, Cezannes, and Matisses hung Barnes's own idiosyncratic way, gives the dispute its stakes: whether a dead man's explicit wishes can survive contact with civic ambition.