New Britain Museum: America's First Art Museum for American Art
Near Hartford, Connecticut
When John Butler Talcott founded this museum in nineteen oh three, he was making an argument. European art dominated American cultural life at the time, and Talcott, a New Britain industrialist, believed the United States had its own artistic tradition worth preserving and studying. The result was the first museum in the country dedicated exclusively to American art.
The collection now holds more than eight thousand two hundred works spanning three centuries, with particular strengths in colonial portraiture, the Hudson River School, American Impressionism, and the Ashcan School. Its most famous single work is Thomas Hart Benton's mural series The Arts of Life in America, painted in nineteen thirty-two, a room-filling panorama of American creativity made during the depths of the Depression. The museum traces its roots further back to the New Britain Institute, chartered in eighteen fifty-three to bring education and art to the city's growing immigrant population.
