Davis Museum and Cultural Center Collection (Wellesley College)

Overview

The Davis Museum and Cultural Center's collections are encyclopedic in scope, numbering over 10,000 objects of Ancient to Contemporary art. Selections from the Davis Museum and Cultural Center's collections are represented in ARTstor with approximately 500 images, focusing on primarily on prints, but also including examples of paintings, sculpture, and drawings from the museum's holdings.

The Davis Museum and Cultural Center was founded in 1889 by the first president of Wellesley College, Ada Howard. However, the collection dates from the opening of the college in 1875, when Wellesley College's founder, Henry Fowle Durant, and his friends donated paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and plaster casts to support the students' study of Art History. Alice Van Vechten Brown was appointed as museum director in 1897. She modeled the museum after the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), and also developed a curriculum for Art History that focused on the original object (later called the “Wellesley Method”). Later, in 1926, Brown hired Alfred H. Barr, who developed the first course on Modern Art in the United States, based on objects from the museum's collections. Over time, the need for additional space for the museum's growing collections, ongoing arts curriculum, and expanding exhibitions programs led to a series of moves and expansions. In 1993, the museum opened in a new building designed by Rafael Moneo specifically as a museum, with space for the permanent collection, as well as a rotating series of temporary exhibitions.

Selections from the Davis Museum and Cultural Center's collections are represented in ARTstor, with approximately 500 images, focusing on primarily on prints, but also including examples of paintings, sculpture, and drawings from the museum's holdings.

Collection information

* Image totals should be regarded as an approximation until a given collection is 100% complete. Users should also bear in mind that the number of images available to them may vary from country to country, reflecting ARTstor’s approach to addressing an international copyright landscape that itself varies from country to country.

Last updated: September 17, 2009

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