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While city commissioners supplied critical operating funds, private citizens provided the means to transform what began as the 1876 Centennial Exhibition Art Gallery into the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This installation profiles eleven individuals whose contributions helped to define the Museum during its first sixty years.

Several of these benefactors had great impact on the physical evolution of the Museum. William and George Elkins and John H. McFadden bequeathed their art collections to the city of Philadelphia on the condition that they be housed in a building more suitable than Memorial Hall, a remnant from the Centennial that served as the Museum’s original home. Their promised gifts provided the incentive for civic-minded individuals such as Eli Kirk Price to champion plans to construct a new building—the now iconic structure overlooking the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. John G. Johnson also left his art collection to the city, but stipulated that it remain on display in his home. Eventually, the collection was transferred to the new museum. Under one roof, these four collections significantly enhanced the Museum’s holdings in European and American painting. Years later, collector Christian Brinton introduced artists unfamiliar to most American museum goers. His gift made to the Museum in 1941 consisted of hundreds of contemporary works of art, primarily from Russia.

Women also played a critical role. In 1883 Elizabeth Duane Gillespie organized a women’s committee to help rescue the Museum’s school. (At that time the Museum operated as the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art.) Clara Bloomfield-Moore and Anna H. Wilstach were among the Museum’s earliest major donors. Combined, their gifts, given between 1880 and 1899, totaled more than three thousand works of European art and other objects. Going beyond Europe’s borders and several generations later, Mary Crozier gifted a unique collection of objects she assembled while visiting China in the 1920s.

These individuals made a lasting impression on the Museum, which in turn remains their enduring legacy. For additional information about their lives, visit An Enduring Legacy: The Philadelphia Museum of Art and Its Benefactors, an electronic resource available on the Library’s online catalog.

The Library is creating distinctive digital collections that provide access to its rare materials to support research and education at the Museum, to enhance scholarship worldwide, to increase access to its holdings, and to promote lifelong learning. Digitizing also aids in preservation by reducing the need for handling the originals. Scrapbooks from the Archives; rare art auction catalogs; books and ephemera on European and American decorative arts and arms and armor; and the Museum’s own publications are just some examples of the items that staff are digitizing and making freely available to all on the Internet Archive.

Browse our contributions to the Internet Archive.