Yale University Art Gallery

New Haven
CT
Yale University Art Gallery

The renovated Art Gallery comprises three structures — Street Hall, the Old Art Gallery building, and the Kahn building. Below, John Trumbull and contemporaries.

Yale University Art Gallery - John Trumbull and Contemporaries
QUICK FACTS
  • The original neoclassical Picture Gallery had two large skylit rooms on the upper floor for the display of art. The north gallery was devoted to Trumbull’s paintings; the south gallery displayed paintings by other artists, including John Smibert, Ralph Earl, and Samuel F.B. Morse.
  • When collection in the Picture Gallery moved to Street Hall in 1867, the original building served as office space until it was demolished in 1901.
  • John Trumbull and his wife are buried in a stone tomb beneath the Old Art Gallery.
LINKS
LOCATION

Home to one of the finest collections of early American art anywhere, the Yale University Art Gallery was founded in 1832 when John Trumbull gave more than one hundred of his portraits and historical paintings to Yale and designed a Picture Gallery for them. It is the oldest university art museum in the western hemisphere.

In December 2012 the Yale University Art Gallery reopened to the public after completing a ten-year renovation and expansion. It comprises three structures — Street Hall (1866), the Old Art Gallery building (1928), and the modernist and magnificent Louis Kahn building (1953).

The art of Trumbull and his contemporaries and other early American art are located in Street Hall (the building designed by Trumbull was razed in 1901).

Associated People
Trumbull, John

George Washington ordered his overseers to begin the 1767 wheat harvest on June 24, a hot, cloudy Saturday at the end of a dry week. Thus began twenty days of unrelenting exertion for Mount Vernon’s slaves and no little anxiety for their master, who for the first time had given over his holding almost entirely to the cultivation of grain. Much depended on the success of this experiment, which was a crucial element in Washington’s scheme to free himself of the debts he had accumulated over the years of failing to produce tobacco that would sell on London’s finicky market. Rich as he was in land, he feared that, like so many of his fellow planters, he too would become permanently dependent on his English merchant creditors. It was a fate he dreaded above all, for to suffer it meant that he would lose the essence of a gentleman’s character, independence, and with it the capacity to behave in a truly virtuous way.

— Fred Anderson
Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754 - 1766 (2000)