History of art department
NATIONAL MUSEUM
Founded as a single lantern-lit gallery in 1910, the Fennimore Lantern Museum has grown into one of the city's most loved houses of art. Our halls gather four centuries of painting, drawing and sculpture, from Dutch masters to the first voices of abstraction.
Every room is arranged for slow looking: wide walls, natural light and quiet corners where a single canvas can hold you for an hour. Docents lead daily walks, and the study rooms welcome sketchers, students and the simply curious.
The collection spans the Dutch Golden Age, French Impressionism, American watercolor and early modernism. Rotating loans arrive each season, so no two visits are ever quite the same.
Admission includes all permanent galleries, the lantern court and the garden terrace. Members enter early on weekends and preview every new exhibition first.
View moreThe Museum archive
WORKS OF ART
More than two thousand works rest in the Fennimore archive, from sunlit Provençal landscapes to the boldest experiments of the twentieth century. Our curators rotate the rooms through the year, pairing old favorites with pieces unseen for decades.
Each work is researched, conserved and photographed in our own studios, and every label is written to open a door rather than close one.
Exhibition highlights
CURRENTLY ON VIEW
History of the Museum
NEW READINGS
A century of rooms, gifts and reopenings — the story of how a small lantern-lit gallery became the Fennimore.
History of the Museum
THE ARCHIVE
Industrialist Miriam Fennimore opens her private collection to the public in a former lantern factory on Linden Avenue. Forty Dutch and French canvases hang under the original skylights, and admission is a single penny on Sundays.
The founding charter promises two things that still guide us: free hours for schoolchildren every week, and labels written for neighbors rather than specialists.
Moving in
NEW HOME
The museum moves into its present building, adding the spiral rotunda and three floors of modern galleries. The opening show pairs the old Dutch rooms with the first great gift of abstraction, and attendance triples in a single season.
The beloved lantern court — a quiet atrium glowing with paper lanterns each evening — is built at the building's heart and remains our signature room.
Art & Science
EVENTS
The conservation studios open their doors with a celebrated series of public restorations, and the museum launches its evening program of concerts, lectures and lantern-lit tours that still sells out every month.
Today the calendar holds more than two hundred events a year, from dawn sketching clubs to midsummer concerts on the terrace.
Museum news
MUSEUM NEWS
Exhibition previews, conservation stories and first word on tickets — written by our curators, sent twice a month.
Subscribers enter the galleries thirty minutes early on the first Sunday of every month.
Museum news
CURATED VISITS
See the collection the way our curators do. Small-group visits pair twelve guests with a specialist for ninety unhurried minutes — through the Dutch rooms at opening time, or among the watercolors as the afternoon light arrives.
Private tours, school programs and sketching mornings run daily. Every guided visit ends in the lantern court with tea, where your guide answers the questions the labels only begin.
Evening visits are our best-kept secret. On Fridays the galleries stay open late, musicians play in the rotunda, and the paper lanterns are lit one by one as the daylight fades from the skylights.
Groups of eight or more reserve ahead for dedicated guides, step-free routes and foreign-language tours in six languages.
Museum news
LATEST BLOG POSTS
THE QUIET GEOMETRY OF CÉZANNE'S APPLES
How a plate of orchard fruit taught modern painting to see structure in everything — and what our conservators found beneath the varnish.
Read More
AN AFTERNOON IN THE IMPRESSIONIST WING
Follow head docent Mara Ellison through five rooms of broken color, from the cliff paths of Normandy to the gardens of the south.
Read More
NOVEMBER IN THE MUSEUM
Shorter days, longer looking: the autumn program brings lantern-lit evenings, slow-art mornings and new rooms to get lost in.
Read MoreOur products
MUSEUM SHOP
Prints, keepsakes and studio goods drawn from the collection — every purchase supports conservation.
