American Art

The Museum’s collection of American art has been entwined with the school’s history since shortly after its inception as the College of New Jersey in 1746, when portraits of individuals associated with the institution were acquired to bolster its profile. These works were lost in 1777 during the Battle of Princeton, a pivotal conflict of the American Revolution, which culminated at the college’s Nassau Hall. Charles Willson Peale’s iconic painting, George Washington at the Battle of Princeton (1783–84), commissioned to celebrate the American victory there, was later the single work spared from a devastating fire in 1802. Revived in 1825, the collecting initiative was substantially broadened a century later, during the pioneering Museum directorship of Frank Jewett Mather Jr. (1922–1946), who acquired historical American art at a time when few institutions accorded it significance.

Native American materials first came to Princeton in the 1880s through the missionary and exploratory activities of individuals such as Sheldon Jackson and William Libbey, whose acquisition of objects from the Pacific Northwest as well as the American Southwest form the basis of these collections.

The American collection, long focused primarily on Euro-American paintings and works on paper, remains particularly strong in portraiture as well as in landscape painting, and is temporally concentrated in the late-eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Further areas of distinction include folk art, largely the gift of the prominent early collector Edward Duff Balken, and the Boudinot Collection of fine and decorative art associated with that historical local family. Recent efforts have been focused on expanding the presence of art by underrepresented groups in order to bring the collection more in line with historical realities, as well as on building its holdings in applied and decorative arts. Acquisitions have lately included significant examples of historical and modern African American and Latin American art, as well as important modernist, still life, landscape, portrait, and genre paintings, among them works by celebrated figures such as Fitz Henry Lane, Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, Marsden Hartley, Hale Aspacio Woodruff, and Elizabeth Catlett. Research especially revolves around the reinterpretation and renewed understanding of the collection to reveal how hegemonies of gender, race, class, and species are inscribed in works of art.

Native North American art is curated within both the American and the ancient American curatorial areas. Photographs of potentially culturally sensitive belongings have been withheld from the online collections catalogue. The records for funerary objects are not available online. For questions concerning Native North American belongings at Princeton University or the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGRPA), or for information about scheduling an in-person or virtual visit, please contact MaryKate Cleary, curator of provenance at marykate.cleary@princeton.edu.