HARTFORD -- Even a casual tourist to Hartford is bound to bump up against several claims to first achievements, ranging from the prominent (the first statehouse, which was also Charles Bulfinch's first public building) to the obscure (the first church services where prayers were offered in sign language). The Wadsworth family is responsible for two: the first woolen mill in America (1788), one of many enterprises that made Jeremiah Wadsworth rich, and the first public art museum (1842), established by his son Daniel, who inherited a great deal of his father's wealth.
The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art reflects its founder's desire to create a civic center of learning and culture. The Gothic castle, complete with crenellated towers, that first housed Wadsworth's institution gave form to these high-flown ambitions.
The thing is, they took root. The museum continued to roll out "firsts" and "bests" long after Wadsworth's death. When he died, he donated his collection of American landscape and history paintings by his friends Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and John Trumbull. The works by Cole and his student Church seeded the museum's now famous collection of Hudson River School paintings, which the Wadsworth deems both the largest and finest of its kind.
Firsts piled up by the dozen under controversial museum director Everett "Chick" Austin, in the 1920s and '30s. Austin, a Boston native who cut his teeth at Harvard's Fogg Museum, began buying up work by the Modernists who were then shaking up the art world, the likes of de Chirico, Ernst, Picasso, Miró, and Dalí. Austin succeeded in shaking up the Wadsworth's conservative trustees as well, battling them and finagling acquisitions over their objections. Meanwhile he taught the first art history courses at Trinity College, another Hartford institution. Austin also got the Wadsworth to sponsor legendary choreographer George Balanchine's move from Russia to America, where Balanchine went on to found, with Lincoln Kirstein, what is now the New York City Ballet. He hung Edward Hopper's first solo museum show in 1928 and gave Milton Avery (a Hartford native) his first museum exhibition two years later.
Austin also kept his expert eye out for older masters. During his tenure, from 1927 to 1943, he bought Bernardo Strozzi's "Saint Catherine" (1610-1615), an important Piero di Cosimo of 1490, Greuze's " Indolence " (1756) , Degas' s "Double Portrait of the Painter's Cousins" (1865-68), and other works by Gauguin, Rubens, and Caravaggio. In 1934 alone Austin mounted Picasso's first American museum retrospective ("before MoMA's," the Wadsworth's website notes), and staged the first performance of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's opera "Four Saints in Three Acts," featuring an all-black cast. But Austin's flimsy financial management and thin scholarship didn't escape the notice of a constantly provoked board of directors. In 1943 he staged his rebellious coup de grace, John Ford's Jacobean tragedy " 'Tis Pity She's a Whore" (1627). Though old enough to be classic, the play dealt with subject matter -- incest and murder -- that was the last straw for trustees, who finally let Austin go. Today, the museum proudly touts his courageous contributions, which established it as a visionary leader in the art world. His legacy of innovation lives on in the Wadsworth's MATRIX program, which features changing exhibitions of work by emerging artists.
Over time its collections outgrew Wadsworth's castle building to occupy five connected buildings, forming a courtyard now anchored by a monumental orange metal sculpture of a stegosaurus (a very abstract one) by Alexander Calder. Inside, the holdings range from ancient Egyptian to contemporary art, with strengths in Italian and Spanish baroque paintings, Surrealist and modernist works, and the renowned collection of Hudson River School landscapes. The museum boasts that its Wallace Nutting Collection of early American furniture and decorative objects, "is the largest and finest of its kind." Also unique is the Amistad Foundation's African-American collection, which chronicles the history of African-American culture from slavery to the present. Still on a roll, the Wadsworth recently bought the former Hartford Times Building, adjacent to existing museum space on Prospect Street.
Of Daniel Wadsworth's father, Jeremiah, who helped plan and support the American Revolution, George Washington wrote, "I only wish his successor may feed the Army as well as he has done." Hartford's residents and visitors may feel the same way about Daniel, whose artistic and civic vision continues to feed his community.
If you go...
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
600 Main St., Hartford
860-278-2670
wadsworthatheneum.org
Adults $10, seniors (62 and up) $8, students (13 and up or with college ID) $5, children (12 and under) free. Wednesday-Friday 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Saturday-Sunday 10-5, closed Monday and Tuesday. All galleries are wheelchair accessible.
Directions from Boston: Take Interstate 84 west to exit 54 (left exit, Downtown Hartford). After crossing Founders Bridge, turn left at the first light (Columbus Boulevard) to Arch Street. Turn right onto Arch. Go one block to Prospect Street and turn right. Museum is one block up on the left. The museum parking lot is on the right, opposite the museum.
Jane Roy Brown can be reached at janeroybrown@verizon.net. 
