Museum Open

This exhibition of American art, drawn from the New-York Historical Society's venerable collections, presents a chronological and thematic survey of masterworks ranging in date from 1720 to 1917. Included are Colonial, Federal, and Gilded Age portraits; Hudson River School landscapes; marine and maritime paintings, with a focus on works inspired by the War of 1812; and genre, history, and narrative subjects.

In honor of the installation of the ceiling from Keith Haring’s famous Pop Shop above the admissions area in the Robert H. and Clarice Smith New York Gallery of American History, the New-York Historical Society, in collaboration with the Keith Haring Foundation, has created a rotating display devoted to the Pop Shop in the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture. The ceiling is a gift from the Haring Foundation, and all items in the Luce Center display are on loan from Foundation.

Looking at these four watercolors you are enjoying an experience similar to that of John James Audubon’s (1785–1851) original subscribers to The Birds of America (1827-38). The watercolors are rotated on a quarterly basis to limit the potential damage caused by their exposure, ensuring that these national treasures are available to future generations.

Beauty’s Legacy: Gilded Age Portraits in America examines the remarkable critical and popular resurgence of portraiture in the United States during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. The exhibition —presenting over sixty works of art as well as period photographs and graphic materials, all from the New-York Historical Society—will investigate the strong cultural and social legacy of the American portrait tradition, with particular emphasis upon the New York sitters so well represented in New-York Historical's rich collection. With the amassing of great fortunes founded on industrial expansion, came the impetus to document the appearance of those who propelled and benefited from burgeoning wealth, thus echoing a cultural pattern reaching back to the colonial era.

In honor of the installation of the ceiling from Keith Haring’s famous Pop Shop above the new admissions area in the Robert H. and Clarice Smith New York Gallery of American History, the New-York Historical Society, in collaboration with the Keith Haring Foundation, has created a rotating display devoted to the Pop Shop in the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture. The ceiling is a gift from the Haring Foundation, and all items in the Luce Center display are on loan from Foundation.