The museum is also noted for its Asian art gallery, which includes a wide collection of Chinese calligraphy, painting, ancient bronze works, jade carvings as well as porcelain selections.

The two paintings were destroyed during the 1777 Battle of Princeton and further objects were lost in the 1802 Nassau Hall fire, but the college continued its commitment to collecting and teaching from works of art and historical note.

By 1882, McCosh charged William Cowper Prime, a Princeton alumnus and founding trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and George B. McClellan, the Civil War general and then governor of New Jersey, with creating a curriculum in the subject.

He was a collector of Medieval and Renaissance art but also led the university to large holdings of paintings and prints, including the 1933 bequest of several thousand objects by Junius Spencer Morgan II, of the Princeton Class of 1888.

The collection is the result of an anonymous million dollar 1968 donation in honor of Lieutenant John B. Putnam Jr., of the Princeton Class of 1945, who lost his life in a plane crash during World War II.

[17] In addition to the museum galleries, the building will incorporate a home for the university's department of art and archaeology and a triple-height grand hall, numerous classroom spaces, seminar rooms, creativity labs and a rooftop café.

That collection was accumulated before 1923 in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and includes a distinctively shaped Kuba box and a rare double caryatid headrest from the Chokwe people.

New acquisitions, enabled by dedicated endowed funds, are focused on areas where the collection has been less strong, notably still life, genre painting, works by native makers, and African American art.

The great diversity of artifacts also covers the various eras of ancient Egypt, from pottery to stone reliefs, amulets, wall paintings, bronze statuettes, and mummies.

It spans the broad range of artistic work, from Archaic bronze statuettes to terracotta figurines, jewelry to funerary reliefs, pottery from Rhodes, Cyprus, and Corinth.

The university's heritage of archaeological work in Roman Syria has left a legacy of basalt sculptures from Hauran, funerary reliefs from Palmyra, and a renowned collection of Antioch mosaics.

Byzantine and Islamic art are an equally esteemed focus of the collection, with icons and jewelry from Constantinople sharing a gallery with pottery, metalwork, and glazed tiles from Egypt, Syria, and Iran.

The late 1950s brought significant additions of Chinese ritual bronzes and archaeological artifacts from J. Lionberger Davis, Class of 1900, as well as acquisitions from the Chester Dale and Dolly Carter Collection.

The primary strengths of the museum's collection are in Chinese and Japanese art, including Neolithic jade and pottery, ritual bronze vesslels, lacquerware, ceramics, sculpture and metalware, and woodblock prints.

The museum's collection of calligraphy and painting is among the finest outside of Asia, including rare masterpieces from the Song and Yuan dynasties such as Huang Tingjian's Scroll for Zhang Datong.

Themes represented include the rise of Landscape painting, the human figure, the collecting of small sculpture, and the successive cultural and stylistic waves—revival styles, Orientalism, Impressionism, and the Arts and Crafts movement.

[47] Twentieth-century modernism is represented by a small but stellar group of works by artists including Odilon Redon, Vasily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Emil Nolde, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Yves Tanguy, and Jean Arp.

Other artists represented in the strong collection of postwar art include Romare Bearden, Lee Bontecou, Dan Flavin, Yayoi Kusama, Sol LeWitt, Morris Louis, Ad Reinhardt, Martha Rosler, David Smith, Robert Smithson, Frank Stella, and Hannah Wilke, among others.

The museum renewed its commitment to contemporary art in 2008, with priority given to works that make significant contributions to the field and exemplify the pressing cultural, social, and philosophical issues of their day.

Recent acquisitions include artwork by Doug Aitken, Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Polly Apfelbaum, Sanford Biggers, Ellen Gallagher, Wade Guyton, Matthew Day Jackson, Wangechi Mutu, and Javier Téllez.

McAlpin was a friend and patron to two generations of American photographers, donating significant representations of the work of Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, and Eliot Porter, among others.

McAlpin also established a fund which has enabled, over time, the purchase of some 400 photographs, including work by Hill & Adamson, László Moholy-Nagy and William Henry Fox Talbot.

[51][52] Media related to Photographs in the Princeton University Art Museum at Wikimedia Commons The collection of Prints and Drawings includes 15,000 works on paper as well as a small number of Illuminated manuscripts, by artists from the fourteenth century to the present.

The print collection began with the large bequest of Junius Spencer Morgan, Class of 1888, in 1932, which included old master engravings and etchings, primarily by the notable seventeenth-century printmakers Hendrik Goltzius, Jacques Callot, and Stefano della Bella.

In 1938, another bequest, by Dan Fellows Platt, Class of 1895, laid the foundation of the collection of drawings, with works from the sixteenth to early twentieth centuries, including notable groups by Guercino, Salvator Rosa, Giovanni Battista and Domenico Tiepolo, and George Romney.

Frank Jewett Mather Jr., the museum's second director, made numerous purchases in the 1940s, including Italian Renaissance drawings, works on paper by Samuel Palmer, and watercolors by John Marin, and Paul Cézanne.

Professor Felton Gibbons, following Hall's example, endowed a fund for acquiring works on paper that has allowed gaps in the collection to be filled, including Northern and Central European drawings, and to add to other areas of significance, such as German Expressionism.

The modern and contemporary holdings continue to grow, with an emphasis on artists such as Glenn Ligon, Martin Puryear, Robert Rauschenberg, and Kiki Smith, who are a vital part of the teaching curriculum of the university.

Pearlman had made his fortune through founding the Eastern Cold Storage Insulation Corporation in 1919 and knew little of Soutine or contemporary art at the time he started collecting.

[70] Media related to the Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection at Wikimedia Commons On March 22 2023, the Office of the Manhattan District Attorney was authorized to seize from the museum eleven items suspected of having been stolen and smuggled before the university acquired them.