Mead Art Museum

Stearns Steeple
and the Mead Art Building

Mead Art Museum is an art museum associated with Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts and is a member of Museums10.

The Mead Art Museum has a wide ranging collection of approximately 18,000 items, with a particular strength in American art, including notable works of the Hudson River School and woodcut artist J. J. Lankes, as well as a wide range of European, Japanese, and Ancient art. Mead is currently developing a significant collection of Russian Modernist works, complementing the collections of the Amherst Center for Russian Culture. The works in the Museum's collection can be searched on the database maintained by the Five College Museums/Historic Deerfield.[1]

Notable benefactors include Herbert L. Pratt. Pratt was an art collector, particularly portraits and miniatures. When Rotherwas Court, Herefordshire, was dismantled and auctioned in 1913, Pratt purchased the dining room for his neo-Jacobean mansion "The Braes," then under construction. His bequest to Amherst College included the Rotherwas Room and over eighty American portraits and miniatures, as well as an extensive collection of decorative arts. The Rotherwas Room was incorporated into the Mead Art Museum when it was built at Amherst College in 1949.

The museum is named after William Rutherford Mead, co-founder of the prominent architectural firm McKim, Mead and White, who graduated from Amherst in 1867.

See also

• List of Museums in the United States

External links

• Official website