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| Location | West Reading, Pennsylvania |
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| Coordinates | 40°19′38″N75°57′5″W / 40.32722°N 75.95139°W |
The Reading Public Museum is a museum in Reading, Pennsylvania located in the 18th Ward, along the Wyomissing Creek. The museum's permanent collection mainly focuses on art, science, and civilization and contains over 280,000 objects. It also has a planetarium (the Neag Planetarium) and a 25-acre (100,000 m2) arboretum.
The Museum was founded in 1904, when the Reading School District board authorized the purchase of exhibits from the Saint Louis World's Fair . These new purchases were added to the private natural history collections of Dr. Levi W. Mengel. [1] The Museum opened its doors to the general public in 1913; that same year, The Museum started collecting works of art. Levi Mengel was The Museum's first director and was its founding father. Christopher Shearer, a well-known landscape artist was The Museum's first curator of art. Ground was broken at its current location in 1925, and by 1928, the Museum was open to the public in its new Beaux-Art style structure that was designed by William Forbes Smith. [2] In 1998, architect Der Scutt was commissioned to add an atrium entrance to the existing structure. The Arboretum was planned in the late-1920s by renowned American landscape architect John Nolen. [3] Since 1991, The Museum has been operated by The Foundation for the Reading Public Museum.
The Museum's art collection contains works from many cultures but the strengths of the collection include American works of art. Its fine art collection includes more than seven hundred oil paintings by American and international artists. Paintings by Benjamin West, Raphaelle Peale, Thomas Birch, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Sully, Peter Rothermel, Jacob Eichholtz, Paul Weber, Hermann Herzog, Worthington Whittredge, Frederic Church, Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase, John Singer Sargent, John Henry Twachtman, N. C. Wyeth, Edward Redfield, John Fulton Folinsbee, Fern Coppedge, Paulette van Roekens, Walter Elmer Schofield, George Sotter, Daniel Garber, George Bellows, John French Sloan, Frank Weston Benson, William Paxton, Colin Campbell Cooper, Guy Carleton Wiggins, Abbott Handerson Thayer, Elihu Vedder, Joseph Stella, Frederick Judd Waugh, Aldro Hibbard, Alfred Henry Maurer, Arthur B. Davies, and Leon Dabo form the core of the historic American art collection. American modernist works in the permanent collection include those by Milton Avery, Alexander Calder, Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Helen Frankenthaler, Jules Olitski, and Louise Nevelson.
These join a group of European paintings by Edgar Degas, Charles Francois Daubigny, Julien Dupre, Albert Lebourg, Marià Fortuny, Martin Rico y Ortega, Fritz Thaulow, Oswald Aachenbach, and Anton Mauve, among others, which are in The Museum's holdings. Sculptures by Aguste Rodin, Edward McCartan, Harriett Whitney Frishmuth, Cyrus Dallin, James Earl Fraser, Henry Moore, Harry Bertoia, George Segal, Nancy Graves, Frank Stella, and Deborah Butterfield are also part of the permanent collection at RPM. More than 12,000 works on paper from illuminated manuscripts, works by Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Francisco Goya, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, through the prints of Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Chuck Close, and Keith Haring are also housed in the collection. Photographs by Edweard Muybridge, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, Berenice Abbott, and Dorthea Lange are represented in the collection.
The Museum's collection includes Nefrina, a mummy from the Ptolemaic period in ancient Egypt. [4] The ancient collection also includes a notable collection of Greek vases (including the Herakles Vase attributed to the Alkmene Painter), and Greek and Roman marbles. [5] The Arms and Armor gallery features European examples from the sixteenth [6] and seventeenth centuries--including a Maximilian suit of armor-- as well as examples from Japan, the Islamic world, Africa, and the South Pacific.
Hundreds of historic North American Indian artworks from the Lenape, Montagnais, Inuit, Blackfoot, Acoma, Hopi, Sioux, Crow, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Chippewa, Cochiti, and Mandan peoples are housed at The Reading Public Museum. The Museum also includes Asian collections with artwork from China, Japan, India, and Thailand.
The Museum also houses a large collection of Pennsylvania German objects that include fraktur, painted furniture--including one of the finest examples of a dower chest by the Black Unicorn Artist, [7] glazed earthenware, and paintings. [8] The Museum also has galleries dedicated to American Art, Modern and Contemporary Art, European Art, the arts of North American Indians, Ancient Civilizations, Arts of the Ancient Americas, [9] and Natural History, among others.
The Museum's natural history collections include thousands of specimens of moths and butterflies (many of them collected by Levi W. S. Mengel), as well as other insects, birds, nests, bird eggs, mammals, fossils, minerals, botanical specimens, and animal skins.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. In 2022 it welcomed 3,208,832 visitors, ranking it the third most visited U.S museum, and eighth on the list of most-visited art museums in the world. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is by area one of the world's largest art museums. The first portion of the approximately 2-million-square-foot (190,000 m2) building was built in 1880. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from medieval Europe.
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts is the largest museum of European art in Moscow. located in Volkhonka street, just opposite the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The International musical festival Sviatoslav Richter's December nights has been held in the Pushkin Museum since 1981.
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is an art museum in Kansas City, Missouri, known for its encyclopedic collection of art from nearly every continent and culture, and especially for its extensive collection of Asian art.
Walters Art Museum is a public art museum located in the Mount Vernon section of Baltimore, Maryland. Founded and opened in 1934, it holds collections from the mid-19th century that were amassed substantially by major American art and sculpture collectors, including William Thompson Walters and his son Henry Walters. William Walters began collecting when he moved to Paris as a nominal Confederate loyalist at the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, and Henry Walters refined the collection and made arrangements for the construction what ultimately was Walters Art Museum.
The Museum of Fine Arts is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas. With more than 1.2 million visitors a year, it is the 52nd–most visited art museum in the world as of 2019.
The Newark Museum of Art, formerly known as the Newark Museum, in Newark, Essex County, New Jersey is the state's largest museum. It holds major collections of American art, decorative arts, contemporary art, and arts of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the ancient world. Its extensive collections of American art include works by Hiram Powers, Thomas Cole, John Singer Sargent, Albert Bierstadt, Frederick Church, Childe Hassam, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Joseph Stella, Tony Smith and Frank Stella.
Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh are four museums that are operated by the Carnegie Institute headquartered in the Carnegie Institute complex in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The Carnegie Institute complex, which includes the original museum, recital hall, and library, was added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 30, 1979.
The Quadrangle is the common name for a cluster of museums and cultural institutions in Metro Center, Springfield, Massachusetts, on Chestnut Street between State and Edwards Streets.
Hermann Ottomar Herzog was a prominent nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European and American artist, primarily known for his landscapes. He is associated with the Düsseldorf School and Hudson River School of painting. He almost always signed his work "H. Herzog"; as a result of this and the Americanization of spelling "Herman," his first name is spelled both "Herman" and "Hermann" in various sources. "Hermann," however, is the way he signed his name on documents.
The de Young Museum, formally the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, is a fine arts museum located in San Francisco, California. Located in Golden Gate Park, it is a component of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, along with the Legion of Honor. The de Young is named for early San Francisco newspaperman M. H. de Young.
The Birmingham Museum of Art is a museum in Birmingham, Alabama. Its collection includes more than 24,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and decorative arts representing various cultures, including Asian, European, American, African, Pre-Columbian, and Native American. The museum is also home to some Renaissance and Baroque paintings, sculptures,and decorative arts from the late 13th century to c. 1750.
The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum is located on the Voorhees Mall of the campus of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The museum houses more than 60,000 works, including Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art from the acclaimed Dodge Collection, American art from the eighteenth century to the present, and six centuries of European art with a particular focus on nineteenth-century French art. The museum also is noted for its holdings of works on paper, including prints, drawings, photographs, original illustrations for children's books, and rare books.
The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin is one of the largest university art museums in the U.S. with 189,340 square feet devoted to temporary exhibitions, permanent collection galleries, storage, administrative offices, classrooms, a print study room, an auditorium, shop, and cafe. The Blanton's permanent collection consists of more than 21,000 works, with significant holdings of modern and contemporary art, Latin American art, Old Master paintings, and prints and drawings from Europe, the United States, and Latin America.
The Harvard Art Museums are part of Harvard University and comprise three museums: the Fogg Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, and four research centers: the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, the Harvard Art Museums Archives, and the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. The three museums that constitute the Harvard Art Museums were initially integrated into a single institution under the name Harvard University Art Museums in 1983. The word "University" was dropped from the institutional name in 2008.
Christopher High Shearer (1846–1926) was a prolific American painter in Berks County, Pennsylvania, known primarily for his large landscape paintings. Christopher Shearer was born May 18, 1846, in Reading, Pennsylvania to Christopher and Catherine Shearer. As a boy, Shearer spent time in the studios of artists Francis Daniel Devlan and John Heyl Raser. At age 18, Christopher showed an interest in painting professionally, and became a student of both Devlan and Raser. His father helped him by building him a studio in the backyard of his farm in Shearertown. At the age of 21, Shearer opened his own studio in Reading and was very successful in selling his works locally. By age 27 Shearer was nationally recognized artist.
The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the world. It is based in the Art Institute of Chicago Building in Chicago's Grant Park. Recognized for its curatorial efforts and popularity among visitors, its collection, stewarded by 11 curatorial departments, is encyclopedic, and includes works such as Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Pablo Picasso's The Old Guitarist, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, and Grant Wood's American Gothic. Its permanent collection of nearly 300,000 works of art is augmented by more than 30 special exhibitions mounted yearly that illuminate aspects of the collection and present curatorial and scientific research.
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The Palmer Museum of Art is the art museum of Pennsylvania State University, located on the University Park campus in State College, Pennsylvania.
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