Worcester Art Museum - History

History

In September 1896 Stephen Salisbury III and a group of his friends gathered together to created the Art Museum Corporation. Salisbury then gave a tract of land, on what was once the Salisbury farm (now fronting Salisbury Street in Worcester, Massachusetts), as well as $100,000 USD to build an art museum. The museum was designed by Stephen C. Earle, a Worcester architect, and formally opened in 1898. The museum's collection at this point consisted largely of plaster casts of "antique and Renaissance" sculptures as well as a selection of 5,000 Japanese prints, drawings, and books, willed to the museum from John Chandler Bancroft, son of John Bancroft.

In 1905, Stephen Salisbury died and left the "bulk" of his five million-dollar estate to the museum.

The Worcester Art Museum continued to grow and slowly gathered a world-class art collection. The WAM became the first museum in the United States to purchase works by Claude Monet as well as Paul Gauguin. The museum was also the first institution to transport a medieval building, the chapter house, from Europe and install it in America.

Between 1932 and 1939, the Worcester Art Museum joined a consortium of museums and institutions to sponsor expeditions to the archaeological sites where the city of Antioch once stood. This group of museums, including Princeton University, the musée du Louvre, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and Harvard University's affiliate Dumbarton Oaks, discovered hundreds of intricate floor mosaics. the Antioch mosaics as they are now known, were split up among the institutions The WAM received many mosaics including the Worcester Hunt, which now is installed in the Renaissance Court's floor.

On May 17, 1972, The Art Museum suffered a major theft of artwork. Two men wearing masks entered the museum just before closing and shot a guard in the side. The two men stole The Brooding Woman and Head of a Woman by Paul Gauguin, Mother and Child by Pablo Picasso, and St. Bartholomew by Rembrandt, a collection of works worth over one million dollars. Four individuals were charged with the theft as well as the theft of seven artworks stolen from the Boyden Library at Deerfield Academy.

Beginning in the 1990s, the WAM began renovating all of its galleries. Beginning with the European galleries and then the Chinese Decorative Arts Gallery, the museum then moved onto its Early American Galleries, and Art Since the Mid-20th Century Galleries. The Art Since the Mid-20th Century galleries had been closed for about a decade before they were reopened as part of this program. The renovation of there two galleries cost 85,000 USD and included new flooring, lighting, wall refinishing, and some conservation work.