American Art
The American Art collection includes over 12,000 paintings, sculpture, furniture, ceramics, glass, and metalwork, highlighting work made in Philadelphia. Learn about our nation’s history through decorative arts, the works of Thomas Eakins, the Peale family, and the Pennsylvania Germans.
Collection Highlights
John Singleton Copley
Paul Revere, Jr.
Horace Pippin
Artist/maker unknown
Peter Holl III
Georg HĂĽbener
Charles Willson Peale
Charles Willson Peale
John Aitken
Thomas Eakins
Winslow Homer
Mary Stevenson Cassatt
Henry Ossawa Tanner
Daniel Garber
Georgia O'Keeffe
Wharton H. Esherick
Andrew Newell Wyeth
Jackson Pollock
Roberto Lugo
Florine Stettheimer
About the Collection
American art has been at the heart of the museum’s collection since its founding in 1876. The Department of American Art oversees paintings and sculptures made by artists born or residing in the United States, or by American-born artists working around the world from the 1600s to the 1960s. Our collection also features US-made ceramics, furniture, glass, metalwork, and craft objects from colonial times through the present day.
Visitors to the collection are presented with a chronological survey of American art in the galleries, and can view art in the context of historical settings, such as:
- MĂĽller House Kitchen from Millbach, Pennsylvania (1752)
- The second-floor front parlor from the House of Samuel and Elizabeth Powel on Third Street, Philadelphia (1769)
- Woodwork from the house of Ezekiel Hersey Derby of Salem, Massachusetts (1800)
- The Shaker sleeping room from the North Family Dwelling House in New Lebanon, New York (1818–40)
- Sculptor Wharton Esherick’s library fireplace and entrance to the music room of the Bok House (Gulph Mills, Pennsylvania, 1936)
Notable Works
The collection’s strengths focus on works created in Philadelphia, including its globally recognized collection of Pennsylvania German art, the Peale family paintings, and the work of Thomas Eakins. Other areas of strength include furniture, silver, and ceramics made by US-born artists from the colonial and early national period.
Pennsylvania German Art and American Ceramics
In the 1890s, American ceramics scholar (and future museum director) Edwin Atlee Barber built the foundations of an outstanding ceramics collection, which grew with important gifts of Pennsylvania German art from collectors Titus C. Geesey and J. Stogdell Stokes. The collection now includes the first documented piece of Philadelphia’s eighteenth-century porcelain from the colonial Philadelphia factory of Bonnin and Morris; red earthenware made in the early Pennsylvania German tradition; and porcelain made in the 1820s and 1830s at the Philadelphia factory of William Ellis Tucker.