History of The St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts

HISTORY OF THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA

The Museum was founded by Margaret Acheson Stuart Photo of Margaret Acheson Stuart (1896-1980), a resident of New York City for most of her life who made St. Petersburg her permanent home in her later years. Mrs. Stuart, an avid student of art and art museums around the world and a discerning collector, set out with quiet determination to establish the first art museum in the city and one of the first on the Florida west coast. She recruited local civic leaders and professionals from some of the finest museums in this country to assist her in this ambitious project. The Museum opened to the public in 1965.

The initial gifts of over 500 artworks established the primary direction of the collection, emphasizing nineteenth-century European art and nineteenth and early twentieth-century American art. Mrs. Stuart was determined that the Museum of Fine Arts would show world-class art, both in special exhibitions and as part of the permanent collection.

Dramatic growth has been a hallmark of the collection and the Museum. The collection now numbers nearly 4,000 objects, extending from antiquity to the present day, and is the only comprehensive art collection on the west coast of Florida. The Museum's collection of more than 700 photographs is one of the largest and finest in the South. A Catalogue of the Collection, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and contributions from Museum members and donors, was published in 1994 and is available through the Museum Shop for $35.

To show more of the collection and to allow for increasingly ambitious programming, the building, designed by John Volk and Associates, has been greatly enlarged during its brief history. At the outset, the Museum consisted of ten galleries, a Great Hall, a library, storage, and offices. The striking and acoustically responsive Marly Room—a lecture hall and theater that seats more than 200—was added in 1974, as was an enclosed Sculpture Garden. The nineteenth-century French sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye's War and Peace are the central works in that garden.

In the mid-1980s, the Board of Trustees and past Director Michael Milkovich launched a building campaign, doubling the galleries to twenty by 1989. The Museum was accredited by the American Association of Museums in 1973 and re-accredited in 1983 and has its second re-accreditation site visit set for the spring of 1998. The MFA is recognized by the State of Florida as a Major Cultural Institution and receives funding from the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, and the Florida Arts Council. The City of St. Petersburg and the Pinellas County Arts Council also support exhibitions and educational programs.

THE MUSEUM BUILDING

The elegant Palladian-style building combines the architecture of a classic art museum and a Mediterranean villa at home in Florida's tropical climate. The museum faces the city, its curving colonnade suggestive of a welcoming embrace. The back of the Museum is on the spectacular downtown waterfront. And Curled Fan by the contemporary American sculptor Lila Katzen creates a sense of graceful motion and energy, connecting the building to the water and attracting the attention of passersby.

From a twenty-four-foot high ceiling inside the entrance hangs a 1790 Irish Waterford chandelier. Beyond the entrance is the striking Great Hall, a grand reception area where artworks are also exhibited as an introduction to the permanent collection and special exhibitions. Immediately visible to the left in the Howard Acheson Gallery are some of the Museum's finest French paintings by Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, and Morisot. The expansive Cyrus Fay Mackey Gallery, perfect for large-scale works, is to the right.

The wood-paneled period rooms, given by Schenley Industries of New York, also enhance the Museum's beauty. The Jacobean Room, originally part of a Staffordshire manor house built around 1610, features carved oak furniture, fine pewter, and works by Dźrer and Rembrandt. The Georgian Room from about 1740 is believed to have come from the Bulls Inn in London. It has a carved mantelpiece, two impressive Queen Anne corner cabinets, two Chippendale side chairs, and Meissen porcelain. Fragonard's The Good Mother (c. 1773-1777) hangs in this room, which leads into the dramatically lit Helen Harper Brown Gallery of Steuben glass.

To emphasize the home-like atmosphere of the Museum, decorative art objects are on view near paintings and sculpture from the permanent collection. For example, Morisot's Head of Julie Manet (1886, cast 1963), one of her few three-dimensional works, rests on an Italian chest of drawers from the eighteenth-century. This approach reflects Mrs. Stuart's desire that the Museum should offer a complete esthetic experience for the visitor--from the building, the grounds, and the waterfront location to the individual artworks and their organization and presentation in the galleries.