The Memorial Art Gallery is a municipal museum in Rochester, New York. It was established in 1913. forms part of the University of Rochester and occupies the southern position of the earlier Prince Street campus. It is the center of the fine arts in the region. It is also the home of the Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition and the Clothesline Festival.
The Gallery is a tribute to James George Averell, a great-grandson of Hiram Sibley. When Averell passed away at age 26, his maternal grandmother, Emily Sibley Watson (by then the wife of James Sibley Watson), was looking for an opportunity to remember his passing in public. In the meantime, Rush Rhees, president of the University of Rochester, had been seeking benefactors to aid in the expansion of the campus of the university, which was situated at Prince Street in the City of Rochester. He included a separate art gallery on the campus map in 1905. It was the Rochester Art Club, the central point for art lovers of the area. It was a regular exhibitor and teacher at various art venues in the past (Reynolds Arcade and Bevier Memorial Building, the Bevier Memorial Building, and Powers Block). Powers Block) supported the establishment of the Gallery. Since the Gallery’s opening in 1912, it was an official department that is part of the University with an independent board that oversees the Gallery’s collections and programming. Rush Rhees assembled the initial management team, including the president of the Art Club, George L. Hurdle, in November 1912 and was the gallery’s director from the time of its opening on the eighth day of the following month in October.
The first exhibition, which George Hurdle directed, consisted of contemporary American paintings and sculptures, many of which were available for sale or on loan by the artist or dealers. Because the Gallery was not endowed with funds to purchase artworks during its initial decades, exhibitions provided an occasion for donors to buy paintings and to immediately donate any purchases made to the Gallery to begin their permanent collection. Some early gifts received from exhibitions included: Willard’s [Golden CarnivalJoaquin Sórolla’s [Oxen on the Beach, and Paul Dougherty’s [Coast from Cornwall, in the vicinity of St. Ives].
Collections
Collections of the Gallery’s collection includes around 12,000 items, including artworks from Monet, Cezanne, Matisse, Homer, and Cassatt. Contemporary masters that belong to the group are Wendell Castle, Albert Paley, and Helen Frankenthaler. Some other notable works include:
- Eastman’s collection of around sixty Old Master, British, Dutch, American, and French Barbizon School paintings, including Rembrandt’s Portrait of an Old Man sitting in an armchair[Portrait of a Young Man in an Armchair]
- The Encyclopedia Britannica collection of twentieth-century American art.
- The collection of the Charles Rand Penney collection
- Jean-Leon’s [Interior of Mosque], which is the only painting in Hiram Sibley’s group that is on display at the Gallery’s premises
- Egyptian as well as Eastern Mediterranean antiquities from the collection of Herbert Ocumpaugh, a 19th-century businessman
- Near East antiquities from the collection of Frederic Grinnell Morgan of Aurora, NY
- English as well as Continental silver dating from the 17th and the 19th centuries, taken from the collection of Ernest Woodward, heir to the Jell-O fortune
- El Greco’s”The Apparition of El Greco’s [The Apparition of the Virgin in St. Hyacinth], the first painting to be purchased from the gallery’s Marion Stratton Gould endowment
- Portrait of Colonel Nathaniel Rochester
Address: 500 University Ave, Rochester, NY
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