The Parrish Art Museum

Samuel Longstreth Parrish was a lawyer from a Philadelphia Quaker family who spent his summers in Southampton and fell in love with Italian Renaissance art. Having collected Italian art since the eighteen eighties, he resolved to build a public museum out here on the East End, and in eighteen ninety seven he built one on a parcel along Jobs Lane. He hired a fellow Southampton resident, the architect Grosvenor Atterbury, and the modest building opened to the public as the Art Museum at Southampton.

Over the years it grew, with an art hall, a concert hall, and new wings, and it became a cornerstone of the summer colony's cultural life. A century later, in two thousand twelve, the museum moved to a striking new home in Water Mill, a long low building of raw concrete and wood designed by the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron, stretched out like a gigantic barn under a peaked metal roof. Today the Parrish holds one of the finest collections of American art on Long Island, with deep holdings from the artists who made the East End a capital of modern painting.