Wadsworth Atheneum

Wadsworth Atheneum, the oldest public art museum in the United States, located in Hartford, Connecticut. The museum was founded in 1842 by Daniel Wadsworth, a significant patron of American arts, and opened two years later.

Though originally envisioned by its founder as a gallery for fine arts, the institution was instead established as an “atheneum”—a 19th-century term for an institution devoted to the study of the humanities and science and including a library and works of art and artifacts. The first of what would eventually be five buildings was a Gothic Revival structure designed by Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis. When it opened in 1844, the building also housed the Connecticut Historical Society, the Young Men’s Institute, and the Natural History Society. The Atheneum expanded with the addition of the Colt Memorial building (in memory of firearms inventor and manufacturer Samuel Colt) and the Morgan Memorial building (in memory of financier Junius Morgan), both about 1910. The Avery Memorial building opened in 1934 (in memory of art collector and philanthropist Samuel P. Avery) and the Goodwin building in 1969 (in memory of museum trustee and conservationist James Lippincott Goodwin). It was not until 1964, when all the other organizations had moved out, that the buildings were used exclusively for the collection, preservation, and exhibition of fine arts. In 2010 the museum began a $33 million, five-year restoration project of all five buildings.

In its earliest years, the museum focused on traditional genres and art forms, such as portraiture, history paintings, landscapes, bronze and marble sculpture, and decorative arts. The Atheneum collection saw radical expansion, in both size and vision, in 1927 when the young Harvard University graduate A. Everett (“Chick”) Austin, Jr., was hired as director (through 1944). He expanded the museum’s collection of European paintings, emphasizing works from the Baroque period, and, as one of the first museum directors to do so, began purchasing works by living European and American avant-garde artists. He also ventured into less-traditional art forms to include music, dance, theatre, film, and photography. In 1931 the Atheneum became the first American museum to purchase a work by Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí (La Solitude, 1931). That year the Atheneum also became the first American museum to host a Surrealism exhibition, preceding the Museum of Modern Art in New York City by five years. It also became the first museum in America to purchase works by Joan Miró (1934; Painting, 1933) and Piet Mondrian (1936; Composition in Blue and White, 1935) as well as by Caravaggio (1943; St. Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, 1595–96), among others.

The Atheneum’s collection is made up of about 50,000 objects that span from antiquity to the contemporary period. It has particularly strong collections of works by the Hudson River school, as well as other American paintings; Baroque paintings; American colonial furniture and decorative arts; and Impressionist and modern art. Highlights in the painting collection include Fra Angelico’s Head of an Angel (c. 1445–50), Bernardo Strozzi’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1615), Claude Monet’s The Beach at Trouville (1870), Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Claude Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil (1873), Georgia O’Keeffe’s The Lawrence Tree (1929), Max Ernst’s Europe After the Rain (1940–42), and Robert Rauschenberg’s Retroactive I (1963). In January 2014 the Atheneum purchased Self-Portrait As a Lute Player (c. 1616–18) by Artemisia Gentileschi, making it the first New England museum to own a work by that artist.