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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, Susan Macdowell Eakins, 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, Robert Henri, William Glackens, George Bellows, John French Sloan, Frank Weston Benson, William Paxton, Colin Campbell Cooper, Guy Carleton Wiggins, Abbott Handerson Thayer, Martha Walter, 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, Robert Gwathmey, 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 contains 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 exceptional 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, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the fourth-largest museum in the world and the largest art museum in the Americas. With 5.36 million visitors in 2023, it is the most-visited museum in the United States and the fifth-most visited art museum in the world.
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The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at Eakins Oval. The museum administers collections containing over 240,000 objects including major holdings of European, American and Asian origin. The various classes of artwork include sculpture, paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, armor, and decorative arts.
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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.
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TheBarnes Foundation is an art collection and educational institution promoting the appreciation of art and horticulture. Originally in Merion, the art collection moved in 2012 to a new building on Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The arboretum of the Barnes Foundation remains in Merion, where it has been proposed that it be maintained under a long-term educational affiliation agreement with Saint Joseph's University.
The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) in Baltimore, Maryland, is an art museum that was founded in 1914. The BMA's collection of 95,000 objects encompasses more than 1,000 works by Henri Matisse anchored by the Cone Collection of modern art, as well as one of the nation's finest holdings of prints, drawings, and photographs. The galleries currently showcase collections of art from Africa; works by established and emerging contemporary artists; European and American paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts; ancient Antioch mosaics; art from Asia, and textiles from around the world.
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 Yale Center for British Art at Yale University in central New Haven, Connecticut, houses the largest and most comprehensive collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. The collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, rare books, and manuscripts reflects the development of British art and culture from the Elizabethan period onward.
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 Hudson River Museum, located in Trevor Park in Yonkers, New York, is the largest museum in Westchester County. The Yonkers Museum, founded in 1919 at City Hall, became the Hudson River Museum in 1948. While often considered an art museum by the public, due to the extensive collection of Hudson River School paintings, the museum also features exhibits on the history, science and heritage of the region.
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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.
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