History of the Collections

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The Museums at W&L advance learning through direct engagement with the collections and facilitate an interdisciplinary appreciation of art, history, and culture.

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  • The McCarthy Gallery in Holekamp Hall is open Monday – Friday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

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History of the Collections

Art Collection

Originating in 1875 from a bequest of six American paintings, W&L’s art collection has grown significantly for almost 150 years to include roughly 8,000 works of art from around the globe. This collection of paintings, works on paper, photographs and sculpture is used as an interdisciplinary teaching resource by various academic departments and supports the Cultural Heritage and Museums Studies Minor, providing student opportunities for hands-on experiences in gallery and museum settings. Integrated into the fabric of the campus, the art collection also enriches the university. At W&L, we bring people and art together in public spaces. Highlights include a collection of early American portraits by artists such as Charles Willson Peale and Gilbert Stuart, as well a growing collection of 20th- and 21st-century works by international artists, including Fernando Botero, William Christenberry, Sam Gilliam, Gonkar Gyatso, Sally Mann, Frank Stella, Rufino Tamayo, and Andy Warhol among others. We also have a growing collection of Asian art, including Chinese fan paintings, 20th-century Chinese brush paintings, and Japanese woodblock prints.

Reeves Collection of Ceramics

Founded in 1967 with a gift of ceramics from alumnus Euchlin Reeves and his wife, the painter Louise Herreshoff, the Reeves Collection contains ceramics made in Asia, Europe, and the Americas between 1500 and today. These fragile yet durable objects tell stories of design, technology, and trade, and illustrate how people drank, dined and decorated their homes over the past five centuries.

Access the Collection

The Museum collections include multiple mediums by a diverse set of artists that expand across centuries. To see more works, visit our online database. Records may, at times, be added or removed for editing.

Art Collection

This oil on panel portrait of George Washington, an Athenaeum version by Gilbert Stuart(1755–1828) executed late in the artist’s career (ca. 1810), was among the first six portraits bequeathed in 1875 to Washington and Lee University by Dr. William Newton
This oil on canvas by Philadelphia marine artist Thomas Birch (1779–1851) and titled Ulysses on the Isle of Calypso is one sixty-two paintings collected by Philadelphia lawyer Vincent L. Bradford and bequeathed to W&L in 1884.
In 1897, retiring university president Custis Lee, gave to W&L two family portraits by Charles Willson Peale, including The Marquis de Lafayette (1779), commissioned by George Washington to hang in Mount Vernon. The other portrait was of Washington himself.
German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) created over 100 self-portraits during her career as an on-going means of self-reflection. This 1927 crayon lithograph was acquired in 1963 by art professor Marion Junkin for the Art Department.
Utagawa Kunisada’s ca. 1847 woodblock print, Actor Ichikawa Danjūrō VIII in the role of Soga Gorō Tokimune, is one of a growing collection of Japanese ukiyo-e works. (Gift of the Estate of John P. Bowen)
For over a decade, African American artist Alvin C. Hollingsworth (1928–2000), a member of the 1960s Spiral Group, created a series of paintings, murals and prints, including this color lithograph Duo (191/250), that illustrated stories about Don Quixote
Artist Louise Herreshoff Eaton (1876–1967) studied in Providence, Rhode Island, and in France, where she exhibited A Girl in a Garden in the 1900 Paris Salon. After returning home in 1903, Herreshoff explored contemporary art movements, including impressi

Reeves Collection of Ceramics

Chinese porcelain has been in America since the start of European settlement. This plate, made in China around 1600, matches one that was broken and thrown away in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1610.
This plate, made in China in 1784, features the Insignia of the Society of the Cincinnati. Commissioned by the first American merchant to go to China, it belonged to George Washington and is possibly the most significant service of Chinese export porcelain.
The prized possession of Euchlin and Louise Herreshoff Reeves, this bowl, made in China around 1800, shows the hongs, or European and American trading headquarters, in the Chinese port of Guangzhou (also known as Canton).
Made of maiolica, the first fine ceramic made in Europe, this Italian-made vase from 1510-1540 combines portrait medallions of ancient Romans with Chinese blue and white floral decoration.
Europeans did not know how to make porcelain until 1708, when an alchemist re-invented the white, translucent ceramic the Chinese had developed 1,000 years earlier. This coffee pot, made at the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory, Germany, about 1724, features
The image of a kneeling enslaved man in chains imploring “am I not a man and a brother?” — seen on his anti-slavery medallion from 1787-1800 — was the first, most common, and most effective anti-slavery image created by the abolition movement.
Almost everything made in the United States before the Civil War was made at least in part by enslaved laborers, but David Drake, who made this pot in South Carolina in 1849, was one of just a handful who was literate and who signed their work.
Part of Newcomb College, a woman’s college founded by the same family who built Newcomb Hall at W&L, the pottery was intended to “provide a livelihood for that large number of women who have artistic tastes, and who do not find the schoolroom or the s