A charter for the Robert Sterling Clark Art Institute was signed on March 14, 1950, incorporating the Williamstown, Massachusetts organization as both a museum and an educational institution. The act formalized Robert Sterling Clark and Francine Clark's plan to move their largely private collection away from New York and into a purpose-built setting connected to Williams College and the Berkshire museum landscape. The institution later opened to the public in 1955 and became known for European and American painting, sculpture, works on paper, decorative arts, and a research library. Its dual museum-and-study mission was unusually explicit from the start, anticipating the Clark's later role in graduate art-history training, fellowships, conservation, and scholarly publishing as well as public display.
The charter created one of the United States' major art museums and art-historical research centers.