The Museum of Art at Stanford University is unique among American museums for having been founded by a private family as a general collection of world art on a par, in the 1880s, with the great public museums being built at that time. Among these were the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, both founded in 1870 by groups of art-minded citizens. By the turn of the century, however, the Stanford Museum was housed in a structure larger than either of these city museums; indeed, it was the largest privately owned museums; indeed, it was the largest privately owned museum building in the world.
Opened to visitors in 1894, its archeological and ethnological holdings were a rarity on the Pacific Coast; by 1905, its collection of Far Eastern materials was unsurpassed in the western United States. But perhaps more startling than the Museum's phenomenal growth was its sudden collapse: in 1906, the SF earthquake leveled 3/4 of the huge structure and symbolically set into motion years of decline. Revitalized since the 1960s in concert with the art history program at Stanford, the Museum's encyclopedic beginnings have long been forgotten despite their singularity. This book attempts to reconstruct the Museum's original make-up - both architectural and its holdings - as well as to study the art patronage of its founders in the context of the American Renaissance.
