- The Yale University Art Gallery completed a ten-year renovation and reopened to the public December 2012. Founded by John Trumbull, who donated many of his own works in exchange for an annuity of $1000, the renovation links together three architecturally diverse buildings that, once inside, seem very much a whole. There is a wonderful collection of American art — one of the best in the country — including a room devoted to paintings by Trumbull (69 miniatures and iconic historical paintings are on view), as well as paintings by his contemporaries.
Yale University Art Gallery Reopened
By modern standards there is something unlikeable about John Hancock. His type of patriotism and charity is as obsolete as his brocaded dressing-gowns and jewelled buttons. He was one of those men who curiously go in and out of style. Once they are out they are hard to value. ‘The golden showers of guineas’ that marked his almost royal progress, his big speeches, like ‘burn Boston and make John Hancock a beggar if the public good requires it,’ do not arouse in us the same genuine enthusiasm they did in his contemporaries. Such men as Paul Revere, [Royal Governor Thomas] Hutchinson, Joseph Warren, or Sam Adams never are in style or out. Their personalities exist quite independently from the accident of their birth in the first half of the eighteenth century. This is not quite true of John Hancock.
Paul Revere & The World He Lived In (1942)