The American Wing
Paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, and period rooms illustrating American artistic achievement from colonial times through the early twentieth century.
Armchair1795–1805
Armchair1795–1805
A young country inventing its own past.
or a nation barely a century old, art was a way of claiming a heritage it hadn't had time to accumulate — borrowing European grandeur, then breaking from it to paint a landscape and a people that felt distinctly American.
Walk from a colonial portrait through Bierstadt's operatic West to Sargent's society sitters and Tiffany's stained glass, pausing in the period rooms where it was all meant to be lived in. A self-portrait of a country, assembled as it went.