Bowdoin College Museum of Art

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art is an art museum located in Brunswick, Maine. Included on the National Register of Historic Places, the museum is located in a building on the campus of Bowdoin College designed by the architectural firm McKim, Mead, and White.

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art is the cornerstone of the arts and culture at Bowdoin. One of the earliest collegiate art collections in the nation, it came into being through the 1811 bequest of James Bowdoin III of seventy European paintings and a portfolio of 140 master drawings. Over the years the collection has been expanded through the generosity of the Bowdoin family, alumni, and friends, and now numbers more than 20,000 objects, including paintings, sculpture, works on paper, decorative arts, and artifacts from prehistory to the present from civilizations around the world.

The antiquities collections contain over 1,800 Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine objects and constitute one of the most comprehensive compilations of ancient art in any small college museum. European art includes paintings, illustrated manuscripts, sculptures, and decorative arts. The Museum’s American collection includes an important grouping of colonial and Federal portraits, with, for example, seven major paintings by Gilbert Stuart, including the famous presidential portraits of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, together with other works by Robert Feke, John Copley, Thomas Sully, and Joseph Blackburn. Non-western materials range from Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Southeast Asian prints, ink paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts to modest but distinguished holdings of African, Pacific, Pre-Columbian, and Native American artifacts.