Harvard Art Museums

Stand in the central courtyard for a moment and look up. Light falls from a glass roof high above. It lands softly on old stone arches, on worn brick, on the faces of people crossing the floor. The air is quiet, the kind of quiet a library has. Voices carry, but gently. You are in the Harvard Art Museums, and this courtyard is the heart of three museums that now share one roof.

Those three museums each have their own story. The Fogg Museum is the oldest, and it focuses largely on Western art, from the Middle Ages to today. The Busch-Reisinger Museum collects art from German-speaking countries and from central and northern Europe. The Arthur M. Sackler Museum holds Asian art, ancient art, and art from the Islamic world and India. For decades they lived apart. Today you can walk between their galleries in minutes.

The Fogg opened in the late nineteenth century. It later moved into the brick building on Quincy Street that still forms the core of this complex. That building was designed as a teaching museum. This idea matters. Harvard did not collect art only to display it. It collected art so that students could study it closely, handle questions about it, and learn how museums work. Many people who later ran major museums across the United States trained here.

Now turn your attention back to the arcade around you. These arches are not original to Cambridge in spirit. The designers modelled them on a sixteenth-century building in Montepulciano, a hill town in Tuscany, in central Italy. So you are standing inside a copy of an Italian Renaissance facade, set indoors, in New England. It is a small surprise that many visitors miss. They walk through the courtyard without realising the walls quote a real place across the ocean.

The glass roof above you is newer. A major renovation, led by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, brought the three museums together. The complex reopened in 2014. Piano kept the historic courtyard but lifted the roof and filled the space with daylight. Above the courtyard, the upper floors step inward beneath the glass. From here you can see people moving on the levels above, like figures on balconies around a piazza.

That glass roof does more than look good. Look up toward the top floors and you may notice rooms behind glass walls. Some of these are working spaces. Conservators and researchers work there, close to the light. The museum wanted visitors to see that art is not only hung on walls. It is examined, cleaned, repaired and studied, every day. The building shows that work instead of hiding it.

One of those upper spaces holds something remarkable. The Forbes Pigment Collection is a library of colour. It holds thousands of pigment samples in glass jars, gathered over many decades. Edward Forbes, an early director of the Fogg, began it to help scholars understand what painters actually used. Among the jars are rare and strange materials. One famous example is a brown pigment once made from ground Egyptian mummies. Painters really did use it.

Let us walk into the galleries. In the Fogg collection, one painting draws people again and again. It is a self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh, painted in 1888 and dedicated to his friend Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh painted himself with a shaved head and a pale green background. He wanted to look like a simple monk. Stand close and you can see the thick, directed strokes of paint. Then step back and watch the face settle.

In the Busch-Reisinger galleries, the mood shifts. This collection is strong in German Expressionism, and in the art of the Bauhaus, the influential German design school of the early twentieth century. One well-known painting here is Max Beckmann's self-portrait in a tuxedo, from 1927. He stands in black and white, cigarette in hand, looking straight at you. It feels confident. It also feels guarded. Germany was only a few years away from political catastrophe.

The Sackler collections take you much further back, and much further east. Here you can find Chinese bronzes and ceramics, Japanese prints, Korean objects, Islamic manuscripts, and Greek and Roman sculpture. The galleries are often calmer than the busy rooms of famous European paintings. Take your time. Small objects reward close looking. A tiny jade carving or a page of calligraphy can hold your attention for longer than a large canvas.

Here is another detail many visitors never learn. Only a small part of the collection is on display at any time. The museums hold a very large number of objects, far more than the galleries can show. Much of it is stored for study. The Art Study Center, on an upper floor, lets visitors and students ask to see works that are not on display. It is a rare kind of access, and it follows the old teaching mission of the Fogg.

The building also connects you to the campus outside. The historic brick front faces Quincy Street, close to Harvard Yard. On the other side, the newer wing has a quieter, timber-clad face toward the residential streets. Walk around the outside after your visit and you will see both. One side looks back to the past. The other side fits into the wooden houses of Cambridge. The museum sits between the university and the neighbourhood.

Before you leave, come back to the courtyard. Sit on one of the benches if you can. Listen to the soft footsteps on the stone floor. Watch the light move across the arches as clouds pass over the glass. Around you, students sketch, friends talk quietly, and someone always looks up at the roof. When you step out onto Quincy Street, notice how loud the city sounds again — and how long the quiet stays with you.