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Expire: August 31, 2013

A Brief History of the Wadsworth Atheneum

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, the oldest public art museum in the United States, was founded in 1842 by Daniel Wadsworth, one of the first important American patrons of the arts. 

Its collections of nearly 50,000 works of art span 5,000 years and feature the Morgan collection of Greek and Roman antiquities and European decorative arts; world-renowned baroque and surrealist paintings; an unsurpassed collection of Hudson River School landscapes; European and American Impressionist paintings; modernist masterpieces; the Serge Lifar collecton of Ballets Russes drawings and costumes; the George A. Gay collection of prints; the Wallace Nutting collection of American colonial furniture and decorative arts; the Samuel Colt firearms collection; costumes and textiles; African American art and artifacts; and contemporary art. Daniel Wadsworth planned to establish “a Gallery of Fine Arts,” but he was persuaded to establish an “atheneum,” a term used in the nineteenth-century for a cultural institution with a library, works of art and artifacts, devoted to history, literature, art and science.

The Buildings

The Wadsworth Atheneum is comprised of five connected buildings. The first is the Gothic Revival Wadsworth building of 1844, designed by the eminent architects Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis.  It originally housed the art gallery, the Connecticut Historical Society, the Young Men’s Institute (which became the Hartford Public Library), and the Natural History Society. 

The Watkinson Library of Reference was added to the original building in the 1860s. The Tudor Revival Colt Memorial of 1910 and the Renaissance Revival Morgan Memorial of 1910-15, designed by Benjamin Wistar Morris, provided additional space for the growing fine arts collection.

The Avery Memorial opened in 1934 and was the first American museum building with a modern International Style interior. By 1964, the institutions not affiliated with the art museum had moved to other Hartford locations.  When the Goodwin building, designed in a late modernist style, opened to the public in 1969, the entire facility was devoted to the fine arts for the first time, Daniel Wadsworth’s original intention.

Growth of the Collections

The Wadsworth Atheneum’s art gallery developed slowly during its early years. The collection consisted mostly of history paintings, portraits, and American landscapes by artists such as John Trumbull, Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, along with examples of Victorian sculpture.1889: The Atheneum entered a period of rapid growth when the Goodwin and Morgan families spearheaded a public fundraising campaign for a renovation and expansion program, completed in 1893.1905: Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt bequeathed over 1,000 objects to the museum, including paintings from the Husdon River School, decorative works, and the firearms collection of her late husband Samuel Colt, as well as funds for the construction of the Colt Memorial.1907: Hartford native J. Pierpont Morgan offered to build the Morgan Memorial, and in 1917 J.P. Morgan, Jr., presented the museum with his father’s collection of ancient bronzes, Renaissance majolica, seventeenth-century ivories and silver gilt objects, and Meissen and Sevres porcelains.  In 1926 Morgan purchased for the Wadsworth Atheneum the preeminent Wallace Nutting collection of American “Pilgrim Century” furniture and decorative arts.1927: The bequest of Frank C. Sumner established the Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection fund, in memory of his wife and sister-in-law. This fund continues to enrich the museum’s holdings by enabling it to purchase paintings of the highest quality. The Wadsworth Atheneum was the first American museum to acquire works by Caravaggio, Miró, Mondrian, Balthus, Harnett, Cornell and Dalí.