The Wadsworth Atheneum is an art museum in Hartford, Connecticut. The Wadsworth is noted for its collections of European Baroque art, ancient Egyptian and Classical bronzes, French and American Impressionist paintings, Hudson River School landscapes, modernist masterpieces and contemporary works, as well as collections of early American furniture and decorative arts.
Founded in 1842 and opened in 1844, it is the oldest continually operating public art museum in the United States.[5]
The museum is located at 600 Main Street in a distinctive castle-like building in downtown Hartford, Connecticut, the state's capital. With 75,000 square feet (7,000m2) of exhibition space,[6] the museum is the largest art museum in the state of Connecticut. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970.[4]
The Wadsworth, as it is most commonly known, was constructed on the site of the family home of Daniel Wadsworth[7] in the heart of downtown Hartford. Its architects were Alexander Jackson Davis and Ithiel Town, who designed the "castle" that is the Atheneum's oldest building. Construction began in 1842 after the museum was incorporated on June 1 of that year. The museum opened on July 31, 1844 and has operated continuously since then.
The Wadsworth family, being one of the oldest and most affluent in the city, contributed numerous valuable pieces of art to be displayed at the time the museum opened. The first collection consisted of 78 paintings, two marblebusts, one portrait miniature, and one bronze sculpture. In addition to the fine arts collection, the original building housed the forerunners of the Hartford Public Library and Connecticut Historical Society, giving rise to the name "Atheneum," an institution broadly devoted to culture and learning. In light of that public role, the Wadsworth has, since its founding, played host to a wide variety of cultural and community activities, including dramatic and dance performances, exhibits of historical artifacts, social functions, and benefits.
Modern history
Building on the Wadsworth family's largess, generations of more recent donors have added to the museum's collections and resources. Foremost among them are Elizabeth Jarvis Colt, widow of firearms magnate Samuel Colt, and financier and Hartford native John Pierpont Morgan. They each contributed more than 1,000 objects to the museum's collections, the former a significant group of Hudson River School landscapes and the Colt firearms collection, the latter an assemblage of priceless Renaissance decorative arts and Colonial-era American furniture. Samuel P. Avery donated works ranging from a Babylonian clay tablet to Chinese Qing Dynasty porcelain and mid-19th century French sculpture, as well as funds for new construction, producing the country's first museum interior designed in the International Style.
In 1927, the museum received a million-dollar bequest (about $20million today in inflation-adjusted terms) from banker Frank Sumner, establishing a sizable acquisitions endowment. In the hands of forward-thinking museum directors, particularly A. Everett 'Chick' Austin and Charles Cunningham, the fund has enabled the purchase of major works by masters including Caravaggio, Dalí, Gauguin, Miró, Strozzi, Tintoretto, Van Dyck, and Zurbarán.
In the 1940s and 1950s, bequests by Clara Hinton Gould and Anne Parrish Titzell enriched the museum's holdings of Hudson River School and Impressionist paintings, with celebrated pieces by Church, Cole, Gifford, Monet, and Renoir entering the collection. In the same period, artwork and funds bequeathed to the museum by Henry Schnakenberg led to the acquisition of a group of Cypriot, Egyptian, and Greek antiquities as well as paintings by modernists including Peter Blume, Stuart Davis, and Reginald Marsh. It is also in the 1940s that the museum becomes the haunt of Marguerite Yourcenar as she is writing the Memoirs of Hadrian.
In 2001, the museum announced a large-scale $100million expansion designed by the Amsterdam-based architects UNStudio;[9] the architects were chosen from a short list of innovative design teams, including Zaha Hadid, Thom Mayne, and Brad Cloepfil.[10] The design required demolishing the Goodwin Building, put up in 1969, and enclosing the Avery Courtyard.[11] However, the proposal was scrapped in 2003 due to fundraising difficulties and changes in the museum's leadership.[9] A later plan to expand into the former Hartford Times building was also abandoned due to cost concerns. In March 2010, the museum announced the start of a comprehensive renovation project across all five of the museum's buildings, which at completion resulted in the addition of 16,000 square feet (1,500m2) of refurbished gallery space and the complete reinstallation of the museum's permanent collections of European art, European decorative arts, and contemporary art. The $33million renovation, designed by the Hartford-based architecture firm Smith Edwards McCoy, was completed in 2015, garnering praise from local and national art critics.[9][12][13]
Structure and contents
The structure itself consists of the original, castle-like building, plus four wings that have been added during the intervening years, in styles ranging from Tudor Revival and Renaissance Revival to International. The museum is home to approximately 50,000 objects, including ancient Roman, Greek, and Egyptian bronzes; paintings from the Renaissance, Baroque, and French and American Impressionist eras, among others; 18th-century German and French porcelains (including Meissen and Sèvres); Hudson River School landscapes; early American clothing and decorations; early African-American art and historical artifacts; and more. The collections span more than 5,000 years of world history.
The Atheneum also owns the A. Everett Austin House, a National Historic Landmark and home of one of the museum's most distinguished directors. The house, located in Hartford's historic West End, is open to the public as a museum.
Museum firsts
Since its beginning, the Wadsworth has had a long tradition of "firsts".
In 1933, the Wadsworth sponsored George Balanchine's immigration to the United States from the Soviet Union. Shortly after his immigration, Balanchine founded the School of American Ballet, which led to the formation of the New York City Ballet. He then chose to have the Producing Company of the School of American Ballet's first performances at the Avery Memorial Theatre of Wadsworth in December 1934, including his first ballet choreographed in America, Serenade.[14]
↑ Darbee, Herbert C. (August 25, 1969). "Wadsworth Atheneum"(PDF). National Register of Historic Places – Nomination and Inventory. National Park Service. Retrieved May 25, 2012.
Frederic Edwin Church was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, best known for painting large landscapes, often depicting mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets. Church's paintings put an emphasis on realistic detail, dramatic light, and panoramic views. He debuted some of his major works in single-painting exhibitions to a paying and often enthralled audience in New York City. In his prime, he was one of the most famous painters in the United States.
Milton Clark Avery was an American modern painter. Born in Altmar, New York, he moved to Connecticut in 1898 and later to New York City. He was the husband of artist Sally Michel Avery and the father of artist March Avery.
The Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism. Early on, the paintings typically depicted the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and White Mountains.
Thomas Cole was an English-born American artist and the founder of the Hudson River School art movement. Cole is widely regarded as the first significant American landscape painter. He was known for his romantic landscape and history paintings. Influenced by European painters, but with a strong American sensibility, he was prolific throughout his career and worked primarily with oil on canvas. His paintings are typically allegoric and often depict small figures or structures set against moody and evocative natural landscapes. They are usually escapist, framing the New World as a natural eden contrasting with the smog-filled cityscapes of Industrial Revolution-era Britain, in which he grew up. His works, often seen as conservative, criticize the contemporary trends of industrialism, urbanism, and westward expansion.
Julian Alden Weir was an American impressionist painter and member of the Cos Cob Art Colony near Greenwich, Connecticut. Weir was also one of the founding members of "The Ten", a loosely allied group of American artists dissatisfied with professional art organizations, who banded together in 1898 to exhibit their works as a stylistically unified group.
Lincoln Edward Kirstein was an American writer, impresario, art connoisseur, philanthropist, and cultural figure in New York City, noted especially as co-founder of the New York City Ballet. He developed and sustained the company with his organizing ability and fundraising for more than four decades, serving as the company's general director from 1946 to 1989. According to the New York Times, he was "an expert in many fields", organizing art exhibits and lecture tours in the same years.
Alexander Jackson Davis was an American architect known particularly for his association with the Gothic Revival style.
Daniel Wadsworth (1771–1848) of Hartford, Connecticut, was an American amateur artist and architect, arts patron and traveler. He is most remembered as the founder of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in his native city.
Philip Grausman is an American sculptor who continues to push the limits of the time-honored portrait in art.
The New Britain Museum of American Art is an art museum in New Britain, Connecticut. Founded in 1903, it is the first museum in the country dedicated to American art.
Arthur Everett "Chick" Austin Jr. was the director of the Wadsworth Atheneum from 1927 through 1944. Austin persisted in the introduction of then-modern theater and modern design and especially contemporaneous art. Salvador Dalí, Alexander Calder, and Gertrude Stein benefited from his advocacy.
Chick Austin helped alter the way Americans looked at and thought about modern art. For starters, he organized the first Picasso retrospective in the United States, put on the first show of Surrealist art and, with Kirstein, helped engineer the immigration of choreographer George Balanchine and sow the seeds for Balanchine's School of American Ballet.
The Florence Griswold Museum is an Art Museum at 96 Lyme Street in Old Lyme, Connecticut centered on the home of Florence Griswold (1850–1937), which was the center of the Old Lyme Art Colony, a main nexus of American Impressionism. The Museum is noted for its collection of American Impressionist paintings. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993. The site encompasses 12-acres of historic buildings, grounds, gardens, and walking trails.
Sylvia Plimack Mangold is an American artist, painter, printmaker, and pastelist. She is known for her representational depictions of interiors and landscapes. She is the mother of film director/screenwriter James Mangold and musician Andrew Mangold.
Edward Sheffield Bartholomew was a noted American sculptor active in Italy.
The Hartford Public Library serves the city of Hartford, Connecticut, United States. The library's main branch is located at 500 Main Street in downtown Hartford. The nine branch locations are named Albany, Barbour, Blue Hills, Camp Field, Dwight, Goodwin, Mark Twain, Park and Ropkins. All branches feature free public access computers and free Wi-Fi.
Downtown Hartford, Connecticut is the primary business district of the city, and the center of Connecticut's state government. Because of the large number of insurance companies headquartered there, Hartford is known as the "Insurance Capital of the World".
Ancient Rome is a name given to each of three almost identical paintings by Italian artist Giovanni Paolo Panini, produced as pendant paintings to Modern Rome for his patron, the comte de Stainville, in the 1750s.
Mary Rogers Williams was an American tonalist and Impressionist artist known for pastel and oil portraits and landscapes. She was second in command of Smith College's art department from 1888 to 1906 under Dwight William Tryon and earned acclaim for paintings of her native New England and scenes from her wide travels in Europe, from Norway to the Paestum ruins south of Naples. She often depicted high horizons, whether in meadows or medieval hill towns, under ribbons of sky.
Self-Portrait as a Lute Player is one of many self-portrait paintings made by the Italian baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi. It was created between 1615 and 1617 for the Medici family in Florence. Today, it hangs in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, US. It shows the artist posing as a lute player looking directly at the audience. The painting has symbolism in the headscarf and outfit that portray Gentileschi in a costume that resembles a Romani woman. Self-Portrait as a Lute Player has been interpreted as Gentileschi portraying herself as a knowledgeable musician, a self portrayal as a prostitute, and as a fictive expression of one aspect of her identity.
The Master of the Hartford Still-Life or simply the Master of Hartford was an Italian painter in the Baroque style who worked in Rome from the 1590s to the 1610s and specialized in lavish still-lifes. Together with the Master of the Acquavella Still-Life, he helped establish a brighter style for the Italian still-life, as opposed to the prevailing dark style of the Netherlands.
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