History of the Museum

Such a collection would not, however, have constituted an art museum as we understand the term. That transformation was to come nearly a century later, when the Scottish educator James McCosh arrived in Princeton in 1868 to modernize the College as its new president. This meant the importation of a number of then-new, progressive disciplines from Europe, including the history of art. By 1882, McCosh charged William Cowper Prime, Class of 1843, and General George McClellan (the former Civil War general and governor of New Jersey) with preparing a curriculum in the history of art. Prime, a New York journalist, collector, and founding trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, worked with McClellan to envision a curriculum that would offer direct access to works of art in a museum. They argued, 

From the beginning, its reach was to be interdisciplinary, moving well beyond the fields of art and classics to include “many other branches of the collegiate course.” “Expectations of large future growth,” for which Princeton could “look with confidence to her sons, in all parts of the world,” were to be anticipated. 

The Museum and what is now the Department of Art and Archaeology—the second oldest in the nation—formally came into being in 1882, founded on a philosophy that positioned Princeton at the cutting edge of scholarship in an era when the history of art was a new academic discipline, largely confined to the more advanced universities of Europe. Prime gave impetus to the establishment of a museum with the promise of his collection of pottery and porcelain upon the completion of a fireproof building to house it. From the beginning, the Museum was meant to serve a dual purpose: to provide exposure to original works of art and to teach the history of art through a collection of the world’s art. From the beginning, too, the Museum was to be a public good: The non-collegiate public was invited to view the collections, so long as they applied to the janitor of East Pyne for the key. 

Allan Marquand, Class of 1874, had been teaching Latin and logic at Princeton and was made a lecturer in the new Department of Art and Archaeology—a choice no doubt informed by the fact that Marquand’s father, Henry G. Marquand, was a collector and one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. College trustees began soliciting funds for the fireproof building they had by then promised Prime, and by 1886–87, Marquand’s notebook listed a dozen names of donors whose combined gifts amounted to just over $40,000. This wasn’t enough to complete the architect A. Page Brown’s entire plan, which included a central section, two projecting wings, and a lecture hall in the back, but it was sufficient to construct the central core in a Romanesque Revival style. By 1890, the three-story building with eighteen-inch brick walls on a stone foundation measuring some seventy-five by twenty-five feet was complete, at a final cost of $49,061. The building—known as the Museum of Historic Art—miraculously accommodated (for many years) the museum, the department, the fine arts library, and the newly created School of Architecture. In 1890, the Trumbull-Prime Collection, which also bore Prime’s wife’s name, was delivered to Brown’s building, and the first phase of the Museum’s formal development was concluded. 

In this new building, museum, department, and library operated as three interwoven strands. Marquand had been named professor in 1883 and was also quickly named director of the Museum, a position he held until his retirement in 1922. The first pages of Marquand’s notebook contained not only lists of gifts—and those promised—of works of art but also lists of subscriptions to journals and purchases of photographs and slides for teaching. Marquand was also the Museum’s primary patron, funding the bulk of its operating expenses as well as acquiring works of art for it from his personal assets. Early purchases included a large collection of Cypriot pottery from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection in 1890; Etruscan, Roman, and South Italian pottery; and objects from later periods. To provide more direction to the collection’s haphazard development, Marquand began an endowment (also evidently from his own significant financial resources) that was then considerably enhanced by a gift from Edward Harkness; these gifts gave birth to a set of acquisitions resources that have become one of the Museum’s most distinguishing features. 

Paintings slowly made their way into the Museum’s collections, especially after Frank Jewett Mather Jr. joined the faculty in 1910 to teach Renaissance art and then became director of the Museum in 1922. The institution Mather inherited had been a highly improvised place, and in his own words he “found [himself] presiding over the oddest kingdom of shreds and patches imaginable.” The same year, McCormick Hall, an addition in Venetian Gothic style after the plans of University Architect Ralph Adams Cram, was added to the west side of the A. Page Brown building. The first of many extensions to the Museum, McCormick Hall was a welcome gift from the family of Cyrus H. McCormick, Class of 1879, and Fowler McCormick Sr., Class of 1895, and contained space for teaching art history. The McCormick gift and the new Cram building allowed the original Museum building to be converted solely to Museum functions, and led to the creation of a “hall of casts” on the ground floor. 

A former art critic for The Burlington Magazine, The New York Evening Post, and The Nation, Mather collected in the fields of medieval and Renaissance art but also propelled the Museum into significant holdings of prints and drawings, particularly through the collection bequeathed to the Museum in 1933 by Junius S. Morgan, Class of 1888—a collection numbering several thousand objects and requiring the financial assistance of the Carnegie Corporation to fully catalogue. Following in Marquand’s footsteps, Mather was also a distinguished collector and donor of art to the Museum, often buying for the Museum works of art acquired with his own assets. For years, the top price Mather paid for a drawing had been twenty-five dollars, but his tastes were wide-ranging, and he found himself amassing classical and pre-Columbian antiquities, illuminated manuscripts, and works by American artists. Indeed, it was through Mather’s efforts and generosity that the Museum built a collection of American drawings and watercolors that became one of the finest in the country.

Major gifts came to the Museum throughout the 1930s, including a collection of more than forty Italian paintings given by Henry White Cannon Jr., Class of 1910, from his family’s villa in Fiesole, and a collection of more than five hundred snuff bottles willed by Colonel James A. Blair, Class of 1903—still regarded as one of the finest early collections of such material in this country. In the 1930s significant gifts of Chinese and Japanese art came to Princeton to support George Rowley’s courses, the first in that field offered at an American university. Courses in American art entered the curriculum during World War II. Mather’s connections in the art world made possible important exhibitions, including showings of work by Paul Cézanne borrowed from Duncan Phillips, who had established the nation’s first museum of modern art in Washington, DC, in 1921, and of highlights from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, whose founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., was a member of Princeton’s Class of 1922. Under Mather’s direction, the first work by a sub-Saharan African artist entered the collection in 1937. His own gifts of Ethiopian Christian art—including a royal illuminated manuscript—would further enrich this collecting area in the following decades. 

Mather retired as director of the Museum in 1946, but not before welcoming to Princeton many shipments of Roman mosaics and other antiquities from the excavations at Antioch-on-the-Orontes in present-day Turkey, cooperative digs in which Princeton had a leading part. The Antioch mosaics remain a collection of ancient mosaics all but unrivaled in the United States, and some of them feature significantly in the galleries and public spaces of the new Museum, opened in 2025. An equally significant bequest, again numbering in the thousands of objects, came from Dan Fellows Platt, Class of 1895, and his widow, Ethel Bliss Platt. Mather once described Platt as “the most enthusiastic, learned, various, and unexpected collector I have ever known,” and the bulk of Platt’s collection came to the Museum by van in wartime, carrying antique Italian furniture, large drawings albums, and barrels containing paintings and other objects. 

Mather was succeeded as director by Ernest DeWald, Graduate School Class of 1916, one of the so-called Monuments Men who played such an important part in salvaging Europe’s artistic treasures at the end of World War II. A remarkable number of Princetonians—faculty and alumni—served in this way, in recognition of which Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum lent Johannes Vermeer’s Artist in His Studio, the painting that Adolf Hitler had considered the most important acquisition for the museum he had planned as a monument to himself and to Germanic culture. As director, DeWald led the Museum into a significant commitment to art conservation—he is remembered as cleaning paintings himself in his office at the old Museum. DeWald oversaw the refurbishing of the Museum’s galleries for the University’s bicentenary in 1946–47, including displays of a new collection of Chinese scrolls given on the occasion by Dubois Schanck Morris, Class of 1893, and of a borrowed collection of prehistoric Chinese vessels. Indeed, the Museum’s collections of Asian art grew greatly during DeWald’s directorship, under the guidance of Professor Wen Fong, Class of 1951, who went on to become the founding director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Asian Art Department. The African collection was enlarged by a diverse group of 150 works from the Democratic Republic of Congo, gifted in 1947 by Joyce Doyle in honor of her husband Donald B. Doyle, Class of 1905. These and other strides, such as the establishment of the Friends of the Art Museum in 1949–50 and, notably, the acquisition of the Museum’s first fine art photograph, Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage, in 1949, ushered in a new era in the Museum’s history, with frequently changing temporary exhibitions and significant new outreach efforts—even while the Museum continued to be operated by a skeleton staff. 

Another Monuments Man, Patrick Joseph Kelleher, Graduate School Class of 1947, became director in 1960. Following on DeWald’s efforts, Kelleher championed the dire necessity of a new home for the Museum, whose collections and activities had come to completely outstrip the spaces within the original Museum building. With the success of the University’s $53 million capital campaign (a landmark achievement of the time), a new building came into sight, and the collections were packed for removal in 1962. The A. Page Brown building and the northern portion of the Cram building were razed in 1963 to make way for an International Style design by the New York firm of Steinmann and Cain; construction was completed in 1966. When it opened in 1966, the new Steinmann and Cain building was deemed so large that it was dubbed by a student writing for The Daily Princetonian the “massif central,” requiring that students eddy and detour around it. During this era, the Docent Association was established to provide Museum guides and to staff the Museum Store. In these years, too, the art of the ancient Americas became an important new focus, thanks to the ambitious collecting of Gillett G. Griffin, lecturer in the Department of Art and Archaeology, faculty curator, and generous benefactor. 

Visitors to Princeton’s campus must inevitably come into contact with its outdoor sculpture collection, which has become one of the most important in the country. Largely the result of an anonymous benefaction named for the World War II fighter pilot John B. Putnam Jr., Class of 1945, who died in a plane crash in 1944, the John B. Putnam Jr. Memorial Collection is substantially the fruit of purchases and commissions carried out during Kelleher’s directorship and includes works by Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, David Smith, and Tony Smith—works that added immeasurably to what had been a shortcoming in the collecting of modern and contemporary art. The Putnam Collection and the campus art collection more generally have also seen robust growth in recent decades, with the addition of works by Maya Lin, Ursula von Rydingsvard, the Starn brothers, and many others. 

Photography also came into focus during this time, with the gift in 1971 of the David Hunter McAlpin, Class of 1920, collection of photographs and the establishment of a fund enabling the purchase of photography. In 1972, Peter Bunnell, previously a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, came to Princeton to occupy the first endowed chair in the history of photography in the United States, also funded by McAlpin. Together, the identification of photography as a major focus of the Museum’s collecting efforts and the creation of the McAlpin chair in the history of photography established what can be described as the most rigorous and disciplined center for the study of photography as a legitimate medium at that time. Bunnell became director of the Museum in 1973, a position he held until 1978; he was the first non-Princetonian to occupy the role. Bunnell’s impact as scholar, mentor, and Museum director led to the training at Princeton of generations of the nation’s leading scholars and curators of photography, and, along with the initial McAlpin benefaction, has led Princeton to a preeminent role in the field, with collections now numbering more than 27,000 photographs as well as the archives of major figures such as Clarence White, Minor White, Ruth Bernhard, and most recently Emmet Gowin. 

In 1980, Allen Rosenbaum, who had served as associate director during the Bunnell years, was promoted to director. A specialist in old master painting, Rosenbaum had the vision to build up major holdings in Renaissance and Baroque painting, particularly works in the Mannerist tradition. In addition to developing major exhibitions of Maya art and celebrating the University’s 250th anniversary, Rosenbaum led an extensive campaign resulting in the renovation of the Museum’s interiors and in a 27,000-square-foot addition—the Mitchell Wolfson Jr., Class of 1963, Wing, designed by Mitchell/Giurgola and dedicated in 1989. This expansion provided new exhibition space, a spacious paintings conservation studio, and new seminar and study-storage rooms for all areas of the collections, facilitating their use for teaching. 

The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed another period of growth, during which a new director, Susan M. Taylor, was able to establish the first endowed positions at the Museum with the support of benefactors that included Diane and James Burke, Preston Haskell, Class of 1960, and the Peter Jay Sharp and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations. In doing so, Taylor substantially advanced the Museum’s professionalism and deepened its connections to the University’s core curriculum, both in art history and in an array of related disciplines. 

Today the Museum, under the leadership of director James Steward, who took the Museum’s helm in April 2009, is one of the nation’s foremost art museums. The collections established under the directorships of Marquand and Mather, as well as those initiated later, have come to be among the most globe-spanning under a single roof on any university campus in the world. Numbering more than 117,000 objects, the collections range chronologically from ancient to contemporary art and concentrate geographically on the Mediterranean regions, western Europe, Asia, the United States, Central and South America, and Africa. An outstanding collection of Greek and Roman antiquities includes ceramics, marbles, bronzes, and Roman mosaics. Medieval Europe is represented by sculpture, metalwork, and stained glass. The collection of European paintings and sculpture includes important examples from the early Renaissance through the twentieth century. The collection of prints and drawings now numbers over 20,000 objects. The collection of twentieth-century and contemporary art—with a particular collecting emphasis on undervalued artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—has been for over twenty years the focus of sustained collecting activity, as we seek to assure that the voices of women artists and artists of color balance out the collections. Spanning some 2,500 years of history and twenty-three countries, the African art collection includes exceptional examples of sculpture in wood and metal, with a particular depth in art from Nigeria. The collections continue to be supplemented by exceptional long-term loans whose histories are now intertwined with that of the Museum—including perhaps the finest collection of paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat in the world, lent by Lenore and Herbert Schorr, Graduate School Class of 1963, and their family. 

In 2018, the Museum announced plans to construct a new building on its existing site at the heart of Princeton’s campus, doubling the space for the exhibition, conservation, study, and interpretation of the Museum’s globe-spanning collections; for mounting temporary exhibitions; and for a new range of social gathering spaces and visitor amenities, including a restaurant. Overseen by Museum Director James Steward and designed by the firm Adjaye Associates in collaboration with executive architects Cooper Robertson, the new building was completed in 2024 and opened in fall 2025. The design allows the Museum’s collections to be exhibited substantially on a single level, shaping new ways of encountering works of art, privileging ideas of cultural contact and exchange, and fostering new modes of storytelling. It also supports the University’s core research and teaching functions with purpose-built spaces, including a ground-floor Education Center with five object-study classrooms for investigating works of art in the original, two creativity labs for art making, a small lecture hall, and two seminar rooms. A sixth object-study classroom is located within new state-of-the-art conservation studios, which provide care for paintings, objects, and works on paper. Flexible retractable seating in the Grand Hall allows for both large lectures and performances in the round, as well as for informal social gathering and lingering. 

The existing Marquand Library was preserved and incorporated into the new Museum’s design but given a new stone facade, integrating it into the new facility, as well as new systems to allow for the care of its special collections. The facility is also home to the University’s Department of Art and Archaeology; together, the three units continue to function as a dynamic center for research and teaching, as they have since 1890. 

An initiative to acquire transformational gifts and promised gifts of art from friends, alumni, and community members on the occasion of the new building brought to the collections more than 1,000 new works of art that amplify existing strengths and fill gaps in the Museum’s holdings. These include groundbreaking Abstract Expressionist paintings by, among others, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Gerhard Richter, and Mark Rothko; important eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European paintings, drawings, and prints; historical American works by artists such as Arthur Dove; and remarkable photographs from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Stewarded by the Museum’s leadership and its curators and buttressed by teams of staff, faculty, colleagues, and students, these globe-spanning collections continue to grow to support the University’s teaching and research mission and act as a beacon for regional, national, and international publics, fulfilling the Museum’s original purpose of serving as a dynamic laboratory for the study of art.