The Princeton University Art Museum (PUAM) is the Princeton University gallery of art, located in Princeton, New Jersey. With a collecting history that began in 1755, the museum was formally established in 1882, and now houses over 117,000 works of art ranging from antiquity to the contemporary period. The Princeton University Art Museum dedicates itself to supporting and enhancing the university's goals of teaching, research, and service in fields of art and culture, as well as to serving regional communities and visitors from around the world. Its collections concentrate on the Mediterranean region, Western Europe, Asia, the United States, and Latin America.
The museum has a large collection of Greek and Roman antiquities, including ceramics, marbles, bronzes, and Roman mosaics from Princeton University's excavations in Antioch. Medieval Europe is represented by sculpture, metalwork, and stained glass. The collection of Western European paintings includes examples from the early Renaissance through the nineteenth century, and there is a growing collection of twentieth-century and contemporary art. Photographic holdings are a particular strength, numbering over 27,000 works from the invention of daguerreotype in 1839 to the present. The museum is also noted for its Asian art gallery, which includes a wide collection of Chinese calligraphy, painting, ancient bronze works, jade carvings as well as porcelain selections. In addition to its collections, the museum mounts regular temporary exhibitions featuring works from its own holdings as well as loans made from public and private collections around the world.
Admission is free and the museum is open Monday - Wednesday 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, Thursday - Friday 10:00 am to 8:00 pm, Saturday 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, and Sunday 12:00 to 5:00 pm.
A new building for the museum has been constructed on the same site over the course of four years starting in 2021 with David Adjaye serving as architect. Demolition of the former facility began in June 2021; construction of the 145,000 square foot facility began late that year. The Museum reopened on October 31, 2025, with a 24-hour open house to commemorate the occasion.
The Princeton University Art Museum is part of the Monuments Men and Women Museum Network, launched in 2021 by the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art. Several "monuments men" are alumni of Princeton University.
History
Beginnings
The first art work owned and displayed by the College of New Jersey (renamed Princeton University in 1896) was a full-length portrait of Jonathan Belcher, the governor of the province of New Jersey who had promoted the establishment of the college. The portrait was a donation from Belcher himself, given shortly before the college moved in 1756 to the newly built Nassau Hall. It was joined by a portrait of King George II, who had issued the letters patent establishing the college. The two portraits hung in the central prayer hall, and were displayed alongside various antiquities and objects of natural history. The two paintings were destroyed during the 1777 Battle of Princeton and further objects were lost in the 1802 Nassau Hall fire, but the college continued its commitment to collecting and teaching from works of art and historical note.
Establishment
The creation of the Art Museum in a more formal sense took place under the leadership of James McCosh, who served as president of the College of New Jersey from 1868–88. The Scottish McCosh brought with him from Europe new progressive academic disciplines, including the history of art. By 1882, McCosh charged William Cowper Prime, a Princeton alumnus and founding trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and George B. McClellan, the Civil War general and then governor of New Jersey, with creating a curriculum in the subject. They argued: "The foundation of any system of education in Historic Art must obviously be in object study. A museum of art objects is so necessary to the system that without it we are of [the] opinion it would be of small utility to introduce the proposed department.” The intention was to go beyond the fields of art and classics to include, “many other branches of the collegiate course.” They anticipated, “large future growth,” as the college could “look with confidence to her sons, in all parts of the world,” for future donations.
Allan Marquand (1882–1922)
The museum, and what is now the Department of Art and Archaeology, were formally created in 1882, with Allan Marquand, of the Princeton Class of 1874, serving as the inaugural lecturer in the new department and director of the museum, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1922. Marquand was previously instructor in Latin and logic at the college and was the son of Henry Gurdon Marquand, a major benefactor of the college and one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The collections of the museum were initially held in Nassau Hall, along with the growing natural history collection of professor Arnold Henry Guyot, part of which is still on display in Guyot Hall. A new purpose-built fireproof Romanesque Revival Museum was designed by A. Page Brown and completed in 1890 on the site of the current museum.
On completion of the building the museum received the Trumball-Prime collection of pottery and porcelain from William Prime and his wife. Early additions included the purchase of a large collection of Cypriot pottery from the Metropolitan Museum in 1890, and purchases of Etruscan, Roman, and South Italian pottery. Marquand established an endowment from his own resources to enable further purchases and it was significantly augmented by a donation from Edward Harkness.
Growth
Frank Jewett Mather Jr. (1922–46)
Frank Jewett Mather joined the faculty in 1910 and succeeded Marquand as museum director in 1922. He was a collector of Medieval and Renaissance art but also led the university to large holdings of paintings and prints, including the 1933 bequest of several thousand objects by Junius Spencer Morgan II, of the Princeton Class of 1888. In 1923, the first of many expansions of the Art Museum was completed with the addition of the Venetian Gothic McCormick Hall, designed by Ralph Adams Cram and donated by the family of Cyrus McCormick, Jr., Class of 1879 and Harold Fowler McCormick, Class of 1895. The new building enabled the older structure to be devoted solely to the museum, and led to the creation of a hall of casts on the ground floor.
As Marquand had before him, Mather augmented the museum's collections through the use of his personal fortune, with contributions ranging from Classical and Pre-Columbian antiquities, to illuminated manuscripts, and what became one of the finest collections of American drawings in the country. Major gifts during the 1930s included a collection of more than 40 Italian paintings from Henry White Cannon, Jr., of the Class of 1910, and more than 500 snuff bottles, still one of the finest such collections in the country, from Colonel James A. Blair, Class of 1903. The decade also saw significant collections of Chinese and Japanese art added to support the courses of George Rowley, the first in those fields in an American university. The World War II years ushered in the first classes in American art.
Notable exhibitions during Mather's tenure included one of works by Paul Cézanne, borrowed from Duncan Philips, and one of highlights from the Museum of Modern Art. Before his retirement in 1946, he oversaw a massive influx of Antioch mosaics from the archaeological digs at Antioch-on-the-Orontes in which the university had played a leading part. Some of the mosaics can be found today not only in the museum but also in various places in Firestone Library. He also welcomed the collection of Dan Fellows Platt, a massive assortment of fine objects which arrived by van during the war.
Ernest DeWald (1946–60)
Mather was succeeded by Ernest DeWald, a graduate school alumnus of the Class of 1946, one of the Monuments Men who had been charged with protecting the cultural heritage of Europe during the war. A large number of Princetonians, both alumni and faculty, served with the Monuments program, leading the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna to loan the museum The Art of Painting by Johannes Vermeer as a sign of gratitude. DeWald was noted for his conservation work, personally cleaning paintings in his office on the top floor of the museum. For the university's bicentennial in 1946, he refurbished the galleries, including displaying a new collection of Chinese scrolls and paintings donated by Dr. DuBois Schanck Morris, Class of 1893. Under DeWald's tenure, the museum's collection of Asian art greatly increased, aided by the guidance of Professor Wen C. Fong, Class of 1951, who would go on to be the founding director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Asian department. In 1949, Alfred Stieglitz's 1907 The Steerage was the first of the museum's now considerable collection of photographs.
Patrick Joseph Kelleher (1960–73)
Patrick Joseph Kelleher, Class of 1947 and another Monuments Man, succeeded DeWald as director in 1960. He spearheaded the construction of a new home for the museum, made possible by the university's landmark $53 million capital campaign. In 1962 the collections were removed to enable the demolition of the A. Page Brown building and the northern wing of the Ralph Adams Cram structure to make way for a Steinmann and Cain designed, International Style building, completed in 1966.
Perhaps the most visible art on the campus is the Putnam Collection of Sculpture. The collection is the result of an anonymous million dollar 1968 donation in honor of Lieutenant John B. Putnam Jr., of the Princeton Class of 1945, who lost his life in a plane crash during World War II. The collection was assembled in 1969 and 1970 by a committee led by Kelleher and including Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Thomas Hoving. It contains works by seventeen major twentieth century sculptors, including Alexander Calder, Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, David Smith, and Tony Smith.
Kelleher's directorship also saw an increasing focus on photography as an important element of the museum's collections. David Hunter McAlpin, Class of 1920, gave a major collection of photographs to the museum in 1971 as well as endowing a fund for further purchases and a professorship, the first endowed chair in the history of photography in the country. That professorship was occupied by Peter Bunnell, who would go on to succeed Kelleher as director in 1973.
Further expansion Peter Bunnell served as director until 1978, training a generation of leading scholars and curators of photography, and giving Princeton a preeminent place in the field with a collection in excess of 27,000 photographs, and significant archives of photographers including Clarence Hudson White, Minor White, and Ruth Bernhard. In 1980, Allen Rosenbaum became director, focusing on expanding the museums collection of Old Masters, notably Renaissance and Baroque paintings in the Mannerist tradition. In 1989, Rosenbaum oversaw another expansion of the museum's physical plant, the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr., Class of 1963, Wing. The new wing, designed by Mitchell/Giurgola, provided additional exhibition space, a conservation studio, as well as seminar and study-storage rooms for all areas of the museum's collection.
Under Susan M. Taylor's directorship in the first decade of the 21st century, the museum established its first endowed curatorships. The current director, James Steward, presides over a collection of more than 117,000 objects, supplemented by notable collections on long-term loan, including works of modern art from the Sonnabend Collection and perhaps the finest collection of paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, on loan from Herbert Schorr, Graduate School Class of 1963, and his wife, Lenore.