Collection Highlights

Explore a world of art. Eight of the eleven galleries at the Palmer Museum display art from the museum’s permanent collection of more than 5,000 objects. Included are American and European paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, and sculptures; contemporary European and Japanese studio ceramics; Asian ceramics, jades, paintings, and prints; and objects from ancient European, African, and Near Eastern cultures.

Nearly a quarter of the Palmer’s permanent collection is comprised of works on paper, including prints, drawings, watercolors, and photographs. Because of the vulnerability of works on paper to light, these pieces are rotated in the museum’s American Works on Paper Gallery or can be viewed in the print study room by appointment. Call 814-865-7672 for more information.

Fine Art Reproductions

Licensed museum quality archival reproductions of select works of art from the Palmer Museum of Art's permanent collection are available to purchase by ordering through Rudinec & Associates.

To view availabe images or place an order click here.

Orders placed through this site are fulfilled, billed, and shipped through Rudinec & Associates. A portion of each sale benefits the museum.

AMERICAN ART

American art, from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraiture and landscape painting to modern abstraction and contemporary art forms, is the strength of the Palmer’s permanent collection.

Early American Portraiture and History Painting
Because of the absence of art academies, many early American painters sought instruction in Europe. Benjamin West left Pennsylvania in 1760, becoming the second president of the Royal Academy in London in 1792, where he gained fame for such history paintings as The Bath of Venus, in the Palmer Museum. Most eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American painters, however, supported themselves as portraitists. The Palmer Museum has works by early practitioners in the genre, including John Brewster and Gilbert Stuart, as well as two important Pennsylvania artists, Jacob Eichholtz of Lancaster and Rembrandt Peale of Philadelphia.

Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting
The Palmer Museum is particularly strong in works by the Hudson River School of landscape painters. Works on display by Sanford Robinson Gifford, John F. Kensett, and William Trost Richards demonstrate the manner in which artists sought to preserve in paint a wilderness that was quickly disappearing amid the industrial revolution. Also included are tonalist pieces by George Inness and Charles Walter Stetson, works that document the transformation in landscape painting from a linear, celebratory Hudson River School style to a more painterly, subjective mode.

Gilded Age America
American art of the late nineteenth century is replete with allusions to other civilizations and expresses the complex values of an era that was simultaneously promoted by some as a golden age, yet reviled, by Mark Twain and others, as a “gilded age.” Gilded age works in the Palmer Museum by Frederick MacMonnies, Theodore Robinson, Edmund C. Tarbell, and Abbott Handerson Thayer demonstrate the strong influence of French Impressionism, as well as a new, modern approach to self-identity in portraiture.

Ashcan and The Eight
Led by Robert Henri, the so-called Ashcan School depicted the social transactions of an industrial, immigrant-laden, urban environment, capturing the thriving intensity of human beings. Several of these urban realists exhibited together in a 1908 exhibition—called The Eight—at Macbeth Galleries in New York, where they protested the official dictates of the art academy. The Palmer Museum collection includes several works by artists who participated in this exhibition: William Glackens, Robert Henri, Everett Shinn, Maurice Prendergast, and John Sloan.

Early American Modernism
The Palmer Museum has several pieces by twentieth-century American modernists—including Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Joseph Stella, and Marguerite Zorach—who experimented with the formal possibilities of the picture plane. Also in the collection are twenty-eight sculptures and maquettes and 248 drawings by the Abstract Expressionist sculptor Seymour Lipton.

American Printmakers
Printmaking in America came into its own in the early decades of the twentieth century. While young modernists inspired by the Armory show sought to achieve a new sense of space and form in their work, the majority of printmakers remained devoted to the realist depiction of the American scene. The holdings of the Palmer Museum of Art include a significant survey of prints by American artists working in the first several decades of the twentieth century. Artists represented include Peggy Bacon, George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, Isabel Bishop, Howard Norton Cook, John Steuart Curry, Fritz Eichenberg, Edward Hopper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Doris Lee, Clare Leighton, Martin Lewis, Louis Lozowick, Reginald Marsh, Arnold Ronnebeck, Charles Sheeler, John Sloan, and Benton Spruance. Click here for the University Libraries Print Collection Web site.

Picturing the 1930s
The Palmer Museum is fortunate to have in its collections several works produced by the so-called Fourteenth-Street School. Among these are Reginald Marsh’s painting-replete with Michelangelesque laboring—Gathering the Mail (1934) and Kenneth Hayes Miller’s The Little Coat and Fur Shop (1931) depicting the “new woman,” that quintessential shopper-provocateur of 1930s America.

Photography
Photography is a growing area of strength for the Palmer and is an important aspect of the museum’s sizable American works on paper collection. Early practitioners of the medium represented include Mathew Brady, William Henry Jackson, and Carleton Watkins. The permanent collection also includes such modern masters as Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Karl Struss, Berenice Abbott, Lewis Hines, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and W. Eugene Smith. The Palmer is also dedicated to collecting photography by notable contemporary artists and has works by Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems, Ana Mendieta, William Wegman, and Bill Jacobsen. The collection also features a select number of photographs by non-American artists, including André Disderi, Pierre Petit, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Alexander Rodchenko.

Contemporary Art
American art since 1945 is amply represented in the permanent collection of the Palmer Museum of Art and is on display in the Pincus Gallery of Contemporary Art and the Snowiss Gallery of American Art on the museum’s second floor. Particularly significant are the collection of Bay Area figurative painters, including Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, and Elmer Bischoff, and works by American Realist painters Philip Pearlstein, Jack Levine, and Jerome Witkin. Abstract art is represented by a major canvas by Jules Olitski, several works by Robert Goodnough, and important works by Lawrence Calcagno and Henry Pearson. Sculptural constructions by Richard Stankiewicz, Betye Saar, and Abe Ajay, a mobile by Alexander Calder, a large glass piece by Dale Chihuly, and several large-scale metal pieces by Seymour Lipton—some of which are currently on view in the Hamer Sculpture Garden—round out the museum’s collection of post-war sculpture.

The museum’s holdings in post-war art were significantly strengthened in 1999 with a generous gift from Joe and Janet Shein of ten works from the 1980s and 1990s, including major works by Roy DeForest, Jerry Kearns, Ed Paschke, Red Grooms, and Marisol. These pieces join works by Ann Hamilton, Whitfield Lovell, Julie Heffernan, Beverly Pepper, and Gilbert & George, bolstering the museum’s pursuit to create a lively environment for teaching and learning.

The museum’s collection of post-war works on paper contains a comprehensive survey of 1960s artists who worked in prints and drawings, from minimalism (Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, and Sol LeWitt) to pop art (Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist) to op art (Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley). The collection also includes several drawings and prints produced by artists better known as sculptors: Henry Moore, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Louise Nevelson, and a significant group of preparatory studies by Seymour Lipton. Notable recent acquisitions include works on paper by John Biggers, Faith Ringgold, Alison Saar, Yvonne Jacquette, May Stevens, Kay Walkingstick, Willie Cole, Michael Ray Charles, and Glenn Ligon.

Pennsylvania Print Collection
One of several major collections to be added to the Palmer Museum of Art was the O'Connor/Yeager Collection of Pennsylvania Prints. Through a combination of donation and purchase from the collectors John C. O'Connor and Ralph M. Yeager, this collection of 330 prints came to the museum in 1986. It includes lithographs, engravings, aquatints, photogravures, and woodcuts created by artists of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. These prints, depicting Pennsylvania town views, portraits, and historical scenes, offer a unique glimpse into Pennsylvania's past.

The late John O'Connor and Ralph Yeager, original owners of The Tavern Restaurant in State College, began collecting prints in the 1950s, displaying selections from their collection in the restaurant for many years. The first major exhibition of the collection was held at the museum in 1980. Click here for the University Libraries Print Collection Web site.

EUROPEAN ART

Though strongest in its holdings of American art, the Palmer has built an impressive collection of European prints, drawings, and paintings from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries.

Old Master Painting
A major strength of the museum lies in its collection of paintings by European artists from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The Renaissance is represented by later Florentine artists Michele Tosini and Maso da San Friano, and works by Giovanni Battista Vanni, Pietro Vecchia, Giovanni Battista Boncori, and Master Jacomo exemplify the museum’s Baroque holdings.

Nineteenth-Century European Painting
The museum owns several late nineteenth-century paintings, such as a portrait by Emile Bernard and Vuillard's garden scene that reflect avant-garde tastes near the end of the century. Most of the works from this era in the museum’s collection, however, represent the more conservative aspects of the academic tradition. The latter group includes paintings by French artists Ary Scheffer, Georges Michel, and Jean-Louis Hamon, the Austrians Joseph Feid and Max Friedlander, and the Dutch landscape specialist, Remy van Haanen.

European Works on Paper
The museum collects the entire art-historical range of European works on paper, from medieval manuscripts to contemporary drawings and serigraphs. The major interest, however, has been in amplifying and contextualizing the museum’s European and American paintings with prints produced between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries.

NON-WESTERN ART

The Palmer Museum of Art is dedicated to presenting the art of non-European cultures to its visitors. The collection includes art from Africa, China, India, Japan, Korea, Australia, Mexico, and Peru—in all, more than sixty nationalities or cultures are represented.

Japanese Woodblock prints
One outstanding aspect of the museum’s holdings of works on paper is its collection of Ukiyo-e prints—Japanese woodblock prints produced during the Edo period (1603-1867). The collection features examples by masters such as Suzuki Harunobu (c. 1725-1770), Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806), Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), and Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858).

Jades
Exquisite jade sculptures and various objects of everyday use carved in nineteenth-century China are another significant portion of the Asian collection. Valued for its durability and sensuousness, jade was thought to embody the virtues of Confucianism. Stone sculptures from Hindu temples in India and a Buddhist temple built during the Khmer period in Thailand represent two of the major sculptural traditions of South and Southeast Asia.

African Sculpture
The arts of sub-Sahara Africa are represented by wood sculptures of ancestral figures and deities, ritual masks, textiles, and the Mattil collection of cast copper alloy weights used to counterweigh gold dust during the height of the gold trade on the west coast of Africa.

CERAMICS

The Palmer’s collection of ceramics is varied and impressive, encompassing both ancient and contemporary styles and both western and non-western traditions.

Ancient Peruvian Ceramics
As part of its impressive ceramics collection, the Palmer Museum of Art houses an extensive array of Peruvian pottery ranging from the early centuries B.C.E. up to the sixteenth century. The museum owns examples from all cultural areas of Peru, including the Inca, who achieved a level of political, social, and economic organization that greatly impressed Spanish explorers upon their arrival in the region. As with many ancient civilizations, Peruvian societies left no written records, making ceramics—which often depict mythical gods, heroic figures, and complex rituals, often revolving around the dead—vital to our understanding of their structure.

Asian Ceramics
Ceramics are the strength of the museum’s collection of Asian art. Ranging in date from the third century B.C.E. to the nineteenth century, the collection includes representative pots, dishes, and sculpture made in China, Japan, Korea, and Cambodia. Also included in the Asian ceramic collection are cooking vessels, vases, and other utilitarian wares, as well as sculpture of Daoist immortals, all made for domestic use. Of exceptional historical interest are animal and figural sculptures excavated from tombs constructed in China during the Tang period (618–907).

Contemporary Ceramics
The Palmer Museum houses an important collection of contemporary ceramics, which ranges from traditional vessels created by St. Ives potter Bernard Leach, Mashiko artist Shoji Hamada, and a host of Japanese mingei ceramists, to the more avant-garde creations by British pot makers Dame Lucy Rie and Hans Coper, and Danish ceramists Inger Thing, Alev Siesbye, and Richard Manz.