110 Years in Hartford

The founding fathers of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford believed in American art--and the closer to Connecticut the better. Painting No. 1 in the first catalogue the Atheneum ever published was The Battle of Bunker's Hill by John Trumbull, and the catalogue took pains to point out that "Col. Trumbull, the artist, was on that day adjutant of the First Regiment of Connecticut troops stationed at Roxbury, and saw (the) action from that point." Last week, no years after its founding by Daniel Wadsworth, the Atheneum was proudly showing the public how its horizons have broadened.

Along the walls hung a special exhibit of 66 canvases (the museum has some 800 in all) representing most of the important schools of 17th-, 18th-, 19th-and 20th-century painting, with a scattering from earlier periods. In sum, the Atheneum's interests over the years pretty well reflected a century of U.S. taste and curiosity.

In the '90s, the Atheneum reached out for more English landscapes and portraiture, samples of Dutch, French and Italian masters. A generation ago, thanks in part to a million-dollar bequest from Hartford Banker Frank C. Sumner, the directors began sampling modern art as well, e.g., Mondrian, Dali, Picasso, Miro.

But the Atheneum never lost its head over the moderns. It has had a friendly eye for such conservatives as Eakins and Andrew Wyeth, has spent much of recent purchase budgets (currently more than $50,000 a year) to build up its stock of the Renaissance and baroque schools. This year's latest acquisition is The Tiger Hunt by Rubens (1577-1640). And the most popular painting in the whole collection is still a crisply clear, 18th-century portrait of Mrs. Seymour Fort by John Singleton Copley (TIME, Dec. 31).

The Atheneum has gone modern in other ways. It started out more of a club than a public museum, open only to those able to pay 25-c- (the price of a gallon of whisky in those days) for a look. The gallery was deserted, and the first curator complained bitterly that "to hoard up and secrete works of art is an offence against humanity." The Atheneum long ago dropped admission charges. Last week, to make the Atheneum's invitation to the public as informal as possible, a loudspeaker in the court boomed out When It's Springtime in the Rockies and other cheerful, not too raucously modern masterpieces of popular melody.

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