New Britain Museum of American Art

The New Britain Museum of American Art (NBMAA) is an art museum located in New Britain, Connecticut. Founded in 1903, it holds the distinction of being the first museum in the United States dedicated exclusively to American art. The institution occupies a site adjacent to Walnut Hill Park, designed by the renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. With a collection numbering approximately 8,274 works spanning from the colonial period to the present, the museum serves as a significant repository of four centuries of American artistic production. Its holdings encompass paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and photographs, with particular depth in colonial and federal portraiture, Hudson River School landscapes, American Impressionism, and twentieth-century modernism.

The museum's origins trace to the New Britain Institute, chartered in 1853 to promote education and art in the city, especially among its immigrant population. In 1903, the museum received a bequest of $20,000 from local industrialist John Butler Talcott to acquire "original modern oil paintings either by native or foreign artists." Talcott's nephew was tonalist Allen Butler Talcott of the Old Lyme Art Colony. Bryson Burroughs, then curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, advised museum officials that focusing on American art would be most cost-effective. The museum followed this counsel, rarely spending more than $1,000 on any single artwork while amassing a collection now worth millions.

Sanford B. D. Low, son-in-law of William H. Hart, once president of New Britain's Stanley Works, became the museum's first Director. He cultivated a friendship with Thomas Hart Benton and acquired numerous works by the artist for the collection. In the late 1940s, Low learned that the Whitney Museum in New York was rumored to be selling Benton's "The Arts of Life in America" series, then out of fashion as representational art. Low arranged for the New Britain museum to acquire the five-panel mural for $500, paid by Alix Stanley of the Stanley Works founding family, a price less than the cost of hiring a crane to move the works.

Grace Judd Landers, a wealthy widow who had expected to make a large monetary donation, lost her fortune in the 1929 stock market crash and instead donated her house as a museum in 1934. In 1964, the Sanford B. D. Low Memorial Illustration Collection was inaugurated, becoming the first museum collection of American illustration in the United States; it now holds over 1,700 works dating from the nineteenth century.

Douglas Hyland became Executive Director in 1999 after serving as director of the San Antonio Museum. He raised funds from new donors outside New Britain, including the Walton Family Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation. In 2003, the 43,000-square-foot Chase Family Building was constructed, doubling the museum's size. During Hyland's tenure, the museum building was renovated, the collection doubled, full-time staff grew to 24 employees, docents reached 100, and memberships nearly tripled from 1,200 to 3,500.

Min Jung Kim became the second female and first immigrant Executive Director in 2015. During her tenure through 2021, she increased representation through exhibitions and acquisitions focused on women artists and artists of color, and oversaw the renovation of Landers House, completed in 2021. Brett Abbott became Executive Director and CEO in February 2022. That same year, the museum acquired Robert Duncanson's "Landscape" (1870), the first work by the prominent African-American Hudson River School artist to enter the collection.

The NBMAA's collection of approximately 8,274 works encompasses paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and photographs, with the Sanford B.D. Low Illustration Collection alone containing over 1,700 works. The collection's chronological range extends from the colonial period to contemporary practice, covering four centuries of American art.

Colonial and federal portraiture forms a significant foundation, with works by John Smibert, John Trumbull, John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, and the Peale family. The Hudson River School is strongly represented through landscapes by Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Martin Johnson Heade, John Kensett, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Church. Still life painting is another area of concentration, featuring Raphaelle Peale, Severin Roesen, William Harnett, John Peto, John Haberle, and John La Farge. American genre painting includes works by John Quidor, William Sidney Mount, and Lilly Martin Spencer.

Post-Civil War figurative painting encompasses Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, George de Forest Brush, and William Paxton, plus nineteen plasters and bronzes by Solon Borglum. American Impressionism is notably strong, with Mary Cassatt, Theodore Robinson, John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, Willard Metcalf, and Childe Hassam, the last represented by eleven oils. Later Impressionist works include Ernest Lawson, Frederick Carl Frieseke, Louis Ritman, and Maurice Prendergast.

Twentieth-century holdings include approximately sixty works by Ash Can School members; early modernists Alfred Maurer, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Max Weber; Precisionists Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Preston Dickinson, and Ralston Crawford; Social Realists Ben Shahn, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Jack Levine; and Regionalists Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, and Thomas Hart Benton. American Abstract Artists represented include Stuart Davis, Ilya Bolotowsky, Esphyr Slobodkina, Balcomb Greene, and Milton Avery. Later developments include Surrealism by Kay Sage and George Tooker; Abstract Expressionism by Lee Krasner, Giorgio Cavallon, Morris Graves, Robert Motherwell, Sam Francis, and Cleve Gray; Pop and Op Art by Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, Robert Indiana, Tom Wesselmann, and Jim Dine; Conceptual art by Christo and Sol LeWitt; and Photorealism by Robert Cottingham. The sculpture collection includes Harriet Whitney Frishmuth, Paul Manship, Isamu Noguchi, George Segal, and Stephen DeStaebler.

Among the museum's signature works, Thomas Hart Benton's five-panel mural "The Arts of Life in America" (1932) stands as a particular triumph of acquisition history. The museum obtained this major work for $500 in the late 1940s when representational art had fallen from favor, through the intervention of Sanford B. D. Low and with funding from Alix Stanley.

The Sanford B. D. Low Memorial Illustration Collection, inaugurated in 1964 as the first museum collection of American illustration in the United States, holds important works by Norman Rockwell, Howard Pyle, and Maxfield Parrish among its more than 1,700 nineteenth-century and later works.

Childe Hassam is represented by eleven oil paintings, an unusually deep holding for a single American Impressionist. The museum's 2022 acquisition of Robert Duncanson's "Landscape" (1870) marked a significant expansion of its representation of African-American artists and the Hudson River School.

Other notable individual works and concentrations include Graydon Parrish's large-format allegory "The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy," responding to the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The museum is housed in the John Butler Talcott Mansion, a former grand nineteenth-century villa. The historic building has been complemented by modern additions and expansions that integrate contemporary architectural elements with the historic fabric.

The most significant recent addition is the Chase Family Building, completed in 2006, which was designed by architect Herbert S. Newman. This 43,000-square-foot expansion doubled the museum's exhibition space to approximately 3,600 square meters. The design features light-filled galleries and open spatial structures intended to enhance the visitor experience. The building's architecture deliberately combines historic substance with contemporary elements.

Walnut Hill Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, lies adjacent to the museum, providing a landscaped setting that complements the cultural institution. Grace Judd Landers's 1934 donation of her house provided additional museum space, and this building, known as Landers House, underwent renovation completed in 2021.

The New Britain Museum of American Art is located in New Britain, Connecticut, with its website at https://www.nbmaa.org/. The museum recorded 72,000 visits during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2009, with an additional 16,000 visits to its satellite gallery at TheatreWorks in Hartford, Connecticut. Museum revenue was $3.92 million for that fiscal year, slightly increased from $3.86 million the prior year. The institution operates as an independent nonprofit museum, with a history of support from local industrial families including the Stanley Works family, as well as national foundations such as the Walton Family Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation. Under current leadership, the museum continues its mission as the first American art museum in the country, now with expanded facilities, increased staff, and broadened programming.