Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

Hartford, Connecticut

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The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art was founded in 1842 by Daniel Wadsworth, one of the first major American art patrons. The museum’s 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 collection 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.

Wadsworth Atheneum, 1844. Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis, Architects. 

Daniel Wadsworth originally planned to establish a “Gallery of Fine Arts,” but he was persuaded to create an atheneum, a term popular in the 19th century used to describe a cultural institution with a library, works of art and artifacts, devoted to learning history, literature, art, and science.

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art is the oldest continuously-operating public art museum in the United States.

Morgan Memorial Building, 1915. Benjamin Wistar Morris, Architect.

The Morgan Memorial Building—the first Beaux-arts museum building in the U.S.—is the largest of the five interconnected buildings of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. The building spans 35,961 square feet. In 1907 renowned financier J. Pierpont Morgan proposed building the Morgan Memorial in honor of his father, and pledged $500,000 for construction. Benjamin Wistar Morris, who also designed the adjoining Colt Memorial, was selected as architect and the final price tag for the Morgan Memorial was $750,000.

The Morgan Memorial Building, fully opened to the public in 1915, provided exhibition space for the Wadsworth Atheneum’s growing fine arts collection. In 1917, J.P. Morgan, Jr., presented the Wadsworth Atheneum—per his father’s will—with more than 1,300 objects from J. Pierpont Morgan’s collection of decorative arts, many of which have been on view in the building over the years.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ GALLERIES ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Morgan 1: European Galleries

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, The Building of the Trojan Horse, c. 1773-74, Oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1950.658