The Metropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera had been founded in 1883 by a group of wealthy New York City businessmen who wanted to run their own theater. From its inception it attracted top Read more…
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Hidden Gems: Community Museums
Some of America’s best art and history isn’t found in big cities or major institutions. It’s located in places where formative events took place. Many of these community museums were Read more…
Rare Books Made Accessible by Berg and Rosenwald
In the 1940s, donors established two major collections of rare books at America’s most significant libraries. In 1940, Albert Berg, a New York surgeon from a Hungarian immigrant family, donated Read more…
Taming Western Art
Thomas Gilcrease, whose parents had Creek ancestry and whose first wife was Osage, grew up on Indian lands within present-day Oklahoma. Oil was eventually discovered under 160 acres he had Read more…
Old Sturbridge Village
Albert Wells was an executive in the thriving American Optical Company of Southbridge, Massachusetts, built up by his father. In 1926, A. B. (as he was called) went antique hunting Read more…
New York City Ballet
Until the 1930s, American ballet dancers had to rely on touring foreigners for teaching. Heir, cultural impresario, and donor Lincoln Kirstein, who came from a wealthy family of clothing retailers, Read more…
Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke
Walter Paepcke made his fortune as a corporate executive in Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century before launching a career in philanthropy. The town of Aspen, Colorado, Read more…
Corning Museum of Glass
A classic example of a corporation doing philanthropy that only it could carry out, the Corning Museum of Glass was very unlike most corporate museums. It was opened in 1951 Read more…
Cultural Kingmaker at the Ford Foundation
Sometimes the most significant successes of even the biggest foundations come down to one person. By the 1960s, the Ford Foundation was the largest entity making grants to the arts Read more…
Getty Museum
“Twentieth-century barbarians cannot be transformed into cultured, civilized human beings until they acquire an appreciation and love for art,” pronounced the cranky J. Paul Getty. Born in 1892, the immensely Read more…
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
As one of America’s foremost female patrons of the arts, Isabella Stewart Gardner was determined to open a museum that would be available “for the education and enrichment of the Read more…
Carnegie and Music for God
When some relatives approached Andrew Carnegie in 1903 about supporting their church, he balked. Instead of money, he offered to provide it with an organ. Even skeptics like himself could Read more…
Juilliard School
Frank Damrosch was born into music. His father was a conductor and his mother a singer; his godfather was composer Franz Liszt. The household moved from Germany to America when Read more…
Longwood Gardens
In 1906, Pierre du Pont purchased some land from Philadelphia-area farmers in order to preserve an arboretum that had been established on the acreage. Du Pont was the fourth-generation executive Read more…
Preserving Fort Ticonderoga
The scene (during the French and Indian War) of the bloodiest battle in America until the time of the Civil War, Fort Ticonderoga on the New York shore of Lake Read more…
Loeb Classical Library
A book from the Loeb Classical Library is instantly recognizable. Each of the 518 hardbound volumes is uniformly sized and sports a minimalist cover—red for works in Latin and green Read more…
Museum of the American Indian
George Heye (pronounced “hi”) was raised in a wealthy home in New York City, and despite finishing college with an electrical-engineering degree in 1896, opted in 1901 to start an Read more…
Godmother of the Harlem Renaissance
Charlotte Mason was a wealthy white widow who in the 1920s thought black art had a spirituality and “primitive energy” that nothing else mustered. She was a controversial figure even Read more…
Joseph Pulitzer Celebrates Letters and Arts
At Joseph Pulitzer’s death, the self-made Hungarian immigrant who built the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and later the New York World into hugely successful newspapers left $2 million to Columbia University Read more…
Frick Collection
Henry Clay Frick was a Pittsburgh industrial magnate who made his money in coal and steel. He built an impressive mansion in New York City that was designed, from its Read more…