America’s first public art gallery
The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art is America’s oldest public art museum, in continuous operation since 1844 in downtown Hartford, Connecticut. Daniel Wadsworth, an important patron of American artists Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church, founded the “atheneum” as a cultural institution devoted to history, literature, art and science. Home to 50,000 objects spanning 5,000 years, the museum has strong holdings in European and American paintings and decorative arts, notably Hudson River School landscapes, the Italian baroque and surrealism. Among the highlights of a 2015 refurbishment are the salon-style displays of the Morgan Great Hall and the recreation of a cabinet of curiosity from 17th-century Europe, featuring many objects donated to the museum by financier J. Pierpont Morgan in 1917.
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