Leigh and John Middleton are famous for avoiding fame. This is not an easy task, especially not right now, since they’re the marquee donors behind the just-opened, two-venue, mega art exhibition, A Nation of Artists. One hundred masterworks from their previously unseen family collection — pieces that used to hang in their home — are now on display for all the world to see at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). And the extremely private Bryn Mawr couple are finding this version of spotlight to be, they both say, “surreal.”
No matter that John’s been the public face of the Phillies for a decade. As principal owner and managing partner of the club, he’s grown accustomed to attention, even from the media. (On the other hand, the family’s seats at Citizens Bank Park are strategically located just out of view of TV cameras.) But this exposure, this unveiling of cherished family treasures, works that represent the couple’s lives’ trajectories, feels different.
When John gives the first of a handful of speeches he’ll give over the show’s opening weekend, he chokes up talking about his grandfather, a painter, and, later, Leigh, whom he calls, “the heart of the collection.” To him, to them, these iconic works of American art are not mere showpieces. They’re personal, and while sharing them with the public feels good, it also feels … uncomfortable.
It’s a feeling and lesson the Middletons experienced before. Back in 2012, when they donated $16.2 million to the School District for career, technical and workforce training programs, they wanted to be anonymous. But then-Mayor Michael Nutter told them, “‘You cannot give this amount of money and not be public,’” John recalls. Had they not gotten this push, he continues, “We never would have outed ourselves.”
Do big enough things for your community, and anonymity becomes, it seems, impossible — and can, the Middletons have found, actually work against you.
So, over the years, the couple has learned to step up to accept their flowers. This is something they’ll do again soon, when The Philadelphia Citizen recognizes them as our 2026 Corporate Citizens of the Year. On April 22, the Middletons will join their fellow awardees at a dinner celebration at Fitler Club Ballroom. (You can read about all of this year’s winners here, and find out about tickets and sponsorships for the event here.)
Note: If you see them there, please don’t ask for an autograph. Just smile and nod. They’d appreciate that.
From whence they came
John Middleton is scion of the Philadelphia tobacco company his great-great-grandfather established as a shop in 1856. He grew up on the Main Line, summered in Ocean City, NJ and began working for the family business at 16. After obtaining his MBA from Harvard, he returned to take charge of the John Middleton Co. He was there in the 1980s, when the outfit purchased a handful of pipe tobacco brands from R.J. Reynolds, including Black & Milds.
In the early 1990s, John’s father Herb was approaching retirement. John wanted his dad to have something to look forward to, so together, they purchased a 15 percent stake in the Phillies. The Fightins’ weren’t their best in those days, and the father and son thought maybe they could help turn things around. Sadly, that didn’t happen quickly enough. After Herb died in 1998, John maintained his stake in the team. In the ensuing years, he became the most visible and active member of the Phils’ ultra secretive ownership group, nicknamed “the Phantom Five.”
In 2003, Middleton bought out remaining stakeholders to become the sole owner of John Middleton Co. In 2007, he sold the business to Altira (parent company of Philip Morris) for $2.9 billion. (The sale prompted a heartbreaking and largely unsuccessful lawsuit from his younger sister, who has since passed.)
Leaving the tobacco business freed Middleton up to focus more on the Phillies. As he told a class at Wharton, “If you really want to be in the business of baseball long-term, you have to get into that side of the field and learn something about it.” His method: Hire people who know more than he does, pay attention to the data, don’t skimp on tech, and show up on opening day.
Middleton ushered in a new era for the team, starting with the opening of Citizens Bank Park, culminating with a World Series win in 2008, and continuing with a whole lot of post-season runs since. In 2016, he became the team’s “control person” — and remains bullish on another pennant.
Leigh Powers Middleton grew up in Villanova, the daughter of a Junior Leaguer and a partner in a Rosemont “insurance concern,” according to the couple’s wedding announcement in The New York Times. Leigh attended Shipley, majored in art history at the University of Virginia, and married John in 1978.
It’s soft spoken, press shy, ever aimable Leigh, John has said, who encouraged her husband to start to divest of their fortune.
The Middletons’ contributions have been diverse and local: In addition to the School District and other urban educational institutions, they’ve given to Teach for America, the Salvation Army’s Kroc Center and Dream Camp, their alma maters, their church (Bryn Mawr Presbyterian), Covid relief, and Penn Medicine’s Neuroscience of Behavior Initiative, where they’ve underwritten research in addictive and depressive disorders along with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. They’ve even reached across Pattison Avenue to fund a matching gift challenge for the Eagles Autism Foundation.
The Middletons’ largest largess (that we know of) has gone to Project HOME, the nonprofit that partners with the City to offer 24/7 street outreach and provides housing and wraparound services to Philadelphians in need. Here again, the couple was reluctant to publicize their generosity. But their gift of $30 million in 2011 was, says organization representative Annette Jeffrey, “the largest gift ever made by a private individual to a homeless organization … In the space of homelessness in the country, maybe in the world, there was never a more impactful, generous gift than the one that they made.”
But it wasn’t just the amount that mattered. It was how they leveraged it. “With the Middletons, we started to do things differently,” says Jeffrey. Project HOME purchased more land to build more housing. Again, the couple followed Nutter’s guidance, knowing if they went public, they’d have “so much more impact,” says Leigh, and “honestly, it did. We started out with the Middleton Partnership, which turned into MPOWER, and got a lot of other philanthropists onboard to support.”
(Want to guess why the program’s name changed? Humility, says John, “is a combination of our DNA and how we were raised in our respective homes growing up.”)
Soon, a who’s who of Philadelphia donors — Fitzgerald, Haas, Honickman, Maguire, Roberts, Morris Williams, Connie and Stanley Williams, some 27 $1 million-and-up contributors in all — joined the cause. The result: The nonprofit’s affordable housing production increased 163 percent over 10 years — 500 temporary residences that were, says Jeffrey, “more units than — we had [built] in the first 25 years.”
What’s more, Project HOME could afford to put enough supportive programming in place that their housing now has an impressive 12 percent turnover rate (the percentage of residents who move onto permanent housing).
Along the way, Leigh served three terms on the board (she’s emeritus now, still helping with development and other efforts) and championed, among other causes, housing and programs for young adults aging out of the foster care system. Also, when it became clear that the opioid crisis was adding a formidable obstacle to their goal, the Middletons helped create medication-assisted treatment and recovery housing. N.B.: That $30 million in 2011 was just the start.
The couple has also provided a substantial donation (exact number is undisclosed, naturally) to the PMA and PAFA to help mount and market A Nation of Artists and to support the institutions behind the show.
Art collecting, à deux
Art world insiders have largely overlooked Leigh’s role in shaping the collection. An ArtNews profile positions John as sole collector, writing “the details behind Middleton’s [singular] collecting interests are shadowy.” In truth, John says, he and his wife have always chosen their art jointly — and almost always agree. (At the exhibition press preview, the pair were absolutely, adorably, cuddling.)
Both Middletons grew up around art. John tells the story of his third birthday, when his grandfather, a painter, gave him a painting of a red caboose, and says that was the moment John became “an art guy before I was a sports guy.” (John’s love of baseball, he’s said, began at the ripe age of 5; at the opening, renowned collection aside, he sported his signature Nantucket red suit jacket and Phillies belt buckle.) As a kid, his mother would give him antique furnishings and pewter as gifts for his bedroom — something he didn’t quite appreciate back then.
When John and Leigh were newlyweds in Boston (he was still at Harvard), they spent their free time in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Museum of Fine Arts. They also lived with those previously under-appreciated furnishings, which would become the jumping off point for the couple’s collection of functional and decorative furnishings from the 18th to mid-19th century, and, later, fine art.
The Middletons’ initial investments in the latter milieu were landscapes from the Hudson River School, the same era as their furniture. Their first major art purchase came at auction in 2005: Charles Wilson Peale’s 1779 Portrait of Washington at Princeton. Peale painted several versions of the sizable work that travelled to Europe to boost wartime support for the colonies. The Middletons’ painting spent 200 years in Spain before returning stateside, and its gilt frame still bears its Spanish inscription.
If you go to the exhibition, you’ll see that iconic taste of early patriotism, along with the Middletons’ extremely rare, captured Revolutionary War flags, and, at PAFA, Jasper John’s Flag (1960-1966), purchased for $28.6 million in Christie’s 2010 auction of the estate of Michael Crichton. They join works by Edward Hopper, Mary Cassatt, Willem de Kooning, John Singer Sargeant, Thomas Eakins, Andrew Wyeth, Georgia O’Keefe, Hans Hoffman, along with U.S.-made silver sets, sculpture, furnishings, and 860 works from the museums’ collections.
The all-American exhibition coincides, of course, with the nation’s 250th anniversary and cements the Middletons as “enthusiastic booster of Philadelphia’s commemoration of the Semiquincentennial,” to quote the exhibition guide.
It’s also good timing for the ever-practical couple. John told The Inquirer, “We’re getting older, our [two] kids are getting older, too, and they have their own ideas about the collection and how it should be continued and whatnot, and so we have to start turning over control to them.”
Leigh and John Middleton understand that they can’t take it with them, and wanted to share something of themselves with Philadelphia while they’re still able to enjoy sharing it. Well, sharing: Yes. The attention: Not so much.
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