Celebrating American Art at Princeton

American art has been part of Princeton University’s collections since at least 1783, when its trustees commissioned Charles Willson Peale to paint George Washington at the Battle of Princeton (1783–84). The commission marked the renewal of collecting at the University, then called the College of New Jersey, after its initial collection was destroyed during the Revolutionary War. The painting’s ornate frame survived the Battle of Princeton, when the artwork it first housed—a portrait of Great Britain’s King George II—was damaged by cannon fire. A gilded coronet that had originally topped the frame was removed because “you couldn’t crown George Washington when he had just fought a war to be rid of the king,” explained Karl Kusserow, John Wilmerding Senior Curator of American Art.

By coincidence, George Washington at the Battle of Princeton was the first work installed in the new Museum. Its home in the Wilmerding Pavilion—comprising the galleries of American art—was named by Louisa Stude Sarofim to recognize the contributions of John Wilmerding (1938–2024), who served as Princeton’s inaugural Christopher Binyon Sarofim ’86 Professor in American Art, the first endowed position exclusively devoted to the teaching of American art at any university. 

“I did not know John Wilmerding well personally, but I had a deep admiration for his scholarship about the world of American art,” wrote Sarofim. “He always enlightened me when we met on campus at the Princeton University Art & Archaeology Advisory Committee meetings. With my respect for him and my abiding interest in his subject matter, I thought it appropriate to give the gift in his honor.” 

As a distinguished professor at Princeton since 1988, a “volunteer” curator of the Museum, and chair of the Department of Art & Archaeology from 1992 to 1999, Wilmerding strengthened a branch of art history that had been deemed unworthy of serious study before he and a small cohort earned doctorates in the subject in the 1960s. “John was involved with the Museum from the start of his time here,” said Kusserow, whose own endowed position is named in recognition of Wilmerding’s influence on the field. “He served as a steadfast adviser and promoter, and he reinstalled the American collection in the old building.” 

Despite the long history of American art at Princeton, the Museum did not employ a specialist curator for the collection until 2006, when Kusserow assumed the role. Before then, American art was subsumed under the rubric of “Western art.” Kusserow notes that Princeton’s original holdings of American art were composed primarily of portraits of distinguished men. It wasn’t until 1909 that a portrait of a woman—Isabella Guthrie McCosh by John White Alexander—entered the collections. The first works of American art by a woman (three works by Wanda Gág) were donated in 1938. 

Over the years, the collections have expanded to include objects that represent the breadth and depth of the art of North America more broadly, including gifts and acquisitions of decorative art and works by African American, Native American, and Latin American artists. “Thanks to the largesse of our donors and our unusual capacity among academic art museums to make transformative acquisitions by purchase, we’ve moved from spotty to strong in many aspects of American art,” Kusserow said.

One of these benefactors is the Anschutz Foundation, which named the five individual galleries of American art housed in the Wilmerding Pavilion. “I deepened my love for American art during my time at Princeton,” said Sarah Shaw Anschutz, Class of 1993, and a member of the Anschutz Foundation’s Board of Directors. “My father has been collecting Western American paintings for nearly six decades, and I was fortunate to have grown up surrounded by the genre, so I was naturally drawn to the Museum’s collection of American art when I was a student. I spent considerable time in those galleries in the old Museum. The Anschutz Foundation was honored to name the American galleries given the family’s long connection both to American art and to Princeton.”

The Anschutz galleries “are a quantum leap in how we’re able to represent American art,” Kusserow said. “There are now nearly three hundred works on display, as opposed to the forty that were on view in the old building, including greatly expanded representations of Native and Latin American art both within the pavilion and in its flanking galleries, as well as meaningful displays of decorative art and works on paper. One-third of these objects have come to the Museum in the last twenty years, including at least a dozen truly stellar works that will be mainstays in the galleries for years to come.”

Among these recent transformative acquisitions are Mary Cassatt’s Little Girl in a Large Red Hat (ca. 1881), Martin Johnson Heade’s Newburyport Marsh (Marsh Haystacks) (ca. 1871–75), and Office Board for Christian Fraser (1881) by John Frederick Peto. All three were acquired by purchase in the past few years, in—as Museum Director James Steward puts it, “a remarkable testament to past benefactors who enabled Princeton to acquire intentionally through purchase by establishing magnanimous endowments for the purpose.”

These paintings will make their public debut at Princeton with the new building. Fittingly, the Peto was acquired in 2024 in memory of John Wilmerding—the preeminent scholar of the artist—whose legacy endures in the vitality of the Museum’s leadership in the field of American art.