Hyde House and The Permanent Collection

Overview

The Hyde Collection offers works of American and European art that span almost 6,000 years of art from antiquity to the present. The Museum’s founders, Louis and Charlotte Hyde, acquired the majority of objects during a fifty-year period of avid and highly informed collecting. Many of these works are displayed in Hyde House, the founders’ former home.



The permanent collection consists of more than 4,000 objects, comprising paintings, works on paper, sculpture, and decorative arts, including furniture and textiles. When the Hydes began collecting, their focus was not unlike that of their contemporaries. They acquired Old Master paintings and drawings by such artists as Sandro Botticelli, Claude Lorrain, El Greco, Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, and Giambattista Tiepolo. In their most important decisions, notable scholars William R. Valentiner and R. Langton Douglas often guided them. The Hydes also assembled a significant group of works by important American artists including Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, John Frederick Peto, Albert Pinkhma Ryder, Elihu Vedder, and James McNeill Whistler.



To further enhance their growing art collection and the Italian Renaissance-style villa they built in 1912, the Hydes acquired sixteenth-century Renaissance tapestries and furniture, as well as late-eighteenth-century Neoclassical French seating furniture and marquetry desks.

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