About the Images

The works of art shown on this website are from the American art collection at the Harvard Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although the Department of American Art at the Harvard Art Museum was founded as recently as 2002, Harvard University has been collecting Colonial and American art since the seventeenth century.  Major strengths of our collection include Colonial and Federal painting (by John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, Washington Allston, Robert Feke and various members of the Peale family); late nineteenth-century painting and sculpture (by Albert Bierstadt, Sanford R. Gifford, Winslow Homer, James A.M. Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Hiram Powers, and Edmonia Lewis, among others); twentieth-century art (by Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jacob Lawrence, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and David Smith), and American drawings and watercolors of all periods. The Museum also possesses a small but significant collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century silver and furniture, including several historic Harvard pieces in both mediums. The Harvard Portrait Collection includes approximately 1200 objects, many of which are displayed in more than 100 buildings across campus.