The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts opened in Richmond on January 16, 1936, after a state-backed project rooted in Judge John Barton Payne's 1919 gift of paintings to the Commonwealth of Virginia. Built on Boulevard near the former Confederate Soldiers' Home, the original Peebles and Ferguson building gave Virginia a public art museum with state support during the Depression, a notable model in the American South. Its early encyclopedic mission later expanded through gifts such as the Lillian Thomas Pratt Faberge collection, the T. Catesby Jones modern art collection, and the Mellon and Lewis holdings. The museum's opening mattered not just as a local civic milestone, but as the start of a public collecting institution that developed statewide education programs, fellowships, and one of the region's most substantial art collections.
VMFA became a major state-supported museum and an anchor for art access across Virginia.