Museums

Museums Museums of ArtMuseums of Science and Technology
Museums of Art Nationalism and concern for cultural development impelled nineteenth‐century Americans to create art museums. With industrial growth, wealthy individuals formed collections that became the basis for such institutions. Assisted by voluntary groups of literary figures, philanthropists, civic leaders, and artists, they founded academies and museums designed to mount regular exhibitions and provide art education programs to the public.

The first important art museum in the United States was established by the artist Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827) in Philadelphia. Founded as a museum of natural history in 1784, by 1791 it included a portrait gallery of American revolutionary heroes. Before Peale, short‐lived enterprises, such as duSimitière's in Philadelphia or the Tammany Society's in New York occasionally exhibited works of art, as did early art academies such as New York City's American Academy of Fine Arts (1802–1808) and Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1805). The academies gradually accumulated permanent collections as did the Boston Athenaeum's Gallery (1822), the National Academy of Design in New York (1825), Yale College's Trumbull Gallery (1832), and the Hartford or Wadsworth Athenaeum in Connecticut (1841–1844), becoming in effect museums of art. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, cities such as Albany and Troy in New York, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Louisville, and New Orleans encouraged artistic interests through exhibitions; however, limited funds and the absence of artists’ communities undercut such enterprises.

The movement to found art museums accelerated after the Civil War. The popularity of art exhibitions at the Sanitary Fairs held in northern cities to aid Union soldiers convinced many civic leaders that permanent art institutions were desirable. In 1867, the New York Historical Society, enriched by the Luman Reed collection in 1858 and the Bryan Gallery of Christian Art (1867), unsuccessfully sought a site for a museum. Its efforts stirred enough interest for a group of eminent New Yorkers, members of the Union League Club, to launch the Metropolitan Museum of Art “free alike from bungling government officials and from the control of a single individual” (1869). At the same time, Bostonians voted to establish a Museum of Fine Arts, under the auspices of the Athenaeum, which since 1827 had held annual loan exhibitions. Incorporated in 1870, the museum opened its first section in Copley Square on 3 July 1876.

With New York and Boston having taken the lead, prominent citizens and women's clubs in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis, and other cities raised funds for art museums. The Progressive Era reform movement, with its emphasis on education and city beautification, encouraged private citizens and public institutions to mount exhibitions that became the nucleus of local museums. At the turn of the century, universities introduced art‐history courses and, in turn, were given buildings and collections designed to educate students in art history. College and university museums at such institutions as Mount Holyoke, Smith, Bowdoin, Princeton, Harvard, Rochester, and Stanford strengthened the movement for public art institutions.

Individual entrepreneurs shared the enthusiasm for museums. Through institutions that either bore their names or fostered their aesthetic beliefs, they hoped to influence the American public. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the Henry C. Frick Collection in New York were personal creations, reflecting the collector's taste for Europe's masters; the Freer Gallery, accepted by the U.S. government in 1906, proclaimed Charles Lang Freer's love of Oriental art, while the Whitney Museum of American Art (1930) expressed the determination of sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to support American artists. The industrialist Solomon R. Guggenheim brought modern expressionist art to New York in 1937 in a museum that bore his name, as a counterpoint to the conservative policies of the Metropolitan Museum adopted during the presidency of the financier J.P. Morgan. Frank Lloyd Wright's circular Guggenheim Museum (1959) became a New York landmark.

French and American impressionist art constituted the Washington collection of Duncan Phillips, heir to a steel fortune. Financier Andrew Mellon's decision to found a National Gallery of Art (1937–1941) influenced the Wideners, Kresses, Chester Dale, and Lessing Rosenwald to donate their collections to that institution. The Smithsonian Institution benefited from the gift of the Hirshhorn Collection in 1971; its art museums in Washington and New York made it a national cultural force. In the mid‐twentieth century, a new generation of business benefactors endowed such California art institutions as the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

By 1977, the United States boasted at least 150 important art museums, with collections ranging from antiquity through contemporary art. Subsequently, numerous private collections became public institutions, providing both general and special art education and experience in cities throughout the country.
See also Education: Collegiate Education; Education: The Rise of the University; Gilded Age; Painting; Philanthropy and Philanthropic Foundations; Sculpture; Women's Club Movement.

Bibliography

Lillian B. Miller , Patrons and Patriotism: The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States, 1790–1860, 1966.
Calvin Tomkins , Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1970.
Walter M. Whitehill , Museum of Fine Arts Boston: A Centennial History, 1970.
Nathaniel Burt , Palaces for the People: A Social History of the American Art Museum, 1977.
E.P. Richardson,, Brooke Hindle,, and and Lillian B. Miller , Charles Willson Peale and His World, 1983.
Joel Orosz , Curators and Culture: The Museum Movement in America, 1740–1870, 1990.

Lillian B. Miller

Museums of Science and Technology Museums originated as a way to manage collections of objects that had special meaning to owners and, usually, a larger community as well. By the eighteenth century, museums had become well‐established agencies for housing and displaying unusual natural specimens that exploring expeditions brought to European collectors. In North America, Philadelphia's American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1769, collected animal, vegetable, and fossil specimens, as well as models of machines and other instruments.

The Peabody Museum of Salem, Massachusetts, established by the shipmasters of the East India Marine Society (1799), displayed a rich array of items from the Pacific islands and Japan; maritime instruments and ship models; and botanical, zoological, and geological samples from surrounding Essex County. In Philadelphia, artist Charles Willson Peale started a display in his home that soon moved to the APS and then to Independence Hall, creating a commercial museum that was imitated by his sons in Baltimore and New York as well as by ambitious savants and entrepreneurs from Cincinnati to St. Louis.

Simultaneously, a number of natural‐history societies established shared collections to be used primarily for serious research, artistic representations, and educational purposes. Thus the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, the Boston Society of Natural History, and the New York Lyceum all built collections that attracted visiting European scholars. Members acted as voluntary curators, but the collections grew faster than reliable staff, and all these voluntary societies experienced periods of financial hardship. More successful was the well‐endowed, federally subsidized Smithsonian Institution, opened in Washington, D.C., in 1846, whose holdings came to include materials from the Wilkes expedition (1838–1842) and various western exploring trips. With its excellent library, publication facilities, and natural‐history collections, the Smithsonian became a scientific clearinghouse. Under George Brown Goode, the leading museum theorist of the late nineteenth century, the Smithsonian's displays focused on educational exhibits featuring instructive labels.

Post–Civil War urbanization and industrial growth led to an expansive period of museum building. Symbolizing the new public‐museum movement was the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where wealthy patrons created the nation's largest museum. Drawing children as well as adults, it relied in part on connections with Columbia University to facilitate research activities. The appearance of the great Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, endowed by the merchant Marshall Field and using collections first displayed at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, marked the end of the “golden age of museums.”

During the nineteenth century, as colleges included more natural sciences in their curricula, they relied on museums to provide specimens for student reference and research. Louis Agassiz's Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard was the best known, but other significant collegiate museums dotted the country, from Princeton to Berkeley. The natural‐history museums reflected changing research agendas as well as different audiences. While zoology had dominated early nineteenth‐century collections, anthropology loomed large in the early twentieth century. Curators, who sought to maintain a scientific outlook while serving a diverse public, debated whether to arrange materials by type or to demonstrate some theory of development.

The impulse to display machinery and other technological objects, which dated back to the APS's early museum, increased during the era of “world fairs” that followed England's Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851. The Smithsonian and other museums held such materials, but only began systematically developing them in the 1880s. Inspired by Munich's Deutsches Museum, which developed active displays with working machinery, Julius Rosenwald, head of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, endowed the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, which opened in 1933. Economic circumstances forced it to rely heavily on industrial sponsorship for its major exhibits, however. After World War II, increasing interest in the physical sciences and technology led to the establishment of a range of museums, from the adult‐oriented Corning Museum in New York and Hagley Museum in Delaware to the child‐friendly Boston Museum of Science (1939), the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley (1968), and San Francisco's Exploratorium (1969). Moving beyond merely celebrating science and technology, public museums of the late twentieth century increasingly tried to explore their social and cultural contexts and implications in a balanced way.
See also Industrialization; Philanthropy and Philanthropic Foundations; Science; World's Fairs and Expositions.

Bibliography

Edward P. Alexander , Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums, 1979.
Charles Coleman Sellers , Mr. Peale's Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the First Popular Museum of Natural Science and Art, 1979.
Sally Gregory Kohlstedt , Museums on Campus: A Tradition of Inquiry and Teaching, in The American Development of Biology, eds. Ronald Rainger, Keth Benson, and Jane Maienschein, 1988.
Joel Orosz , Curators and Culture: The Museum Movement in America, 1740–1870, 1990.
Karen Wonders , Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History, 1993.

Sally Gregory Kohlstedt