History
The land that eventually became the museum grounds was previously the undeveloped portion of Cedarmere, poet William Cullen Bryant's retreat from his busy life in New York City. In the 1890s, his family sold all but seven acres to former congressman Lloyd Bryce, who hired Ogden Codman, Jr. to build a Georgian Revival mansion on the high ground in the middle of the property, overlooking nearby Hempstead Harbor. He named it Clayton.
In 1919 Bryant’s heirs sold the estate to Henry Clay Frick, the co-founder of U.S. Steel, for his son, Childs Frick. The architect Sir Charles Carrick Allow was commissioned to redesign the facade and much of the interior. The Fricks named their home Clayton. Childs Frick and his wife Frances lived at Clayton for almost 50 years, until his death in 1965. The county bought the estate four years later and converted it into a museum, called Nassau County Museum of Art. In 1989, NCMA became a private not-for-profit institution and since has been governed and funded by a private board of trustees which includes many of Long Island’s most prominent business, civic and social leaders.
The Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, which spun off from the Nassau County Museum of Art, operated from 1978 to 2003.
Read more about this topic: Nassau County Museum Of Art
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)