Wadsworth Atheneum

Stand on Main Street for a moment and look up. Grey granite rises in front of you, cut into turrets and narrow pointed windows. It looks more like a small castle than a museum. Traffic hums behind you, and the stone feels cool even on a warm afternoon. This is the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and its doors have been open to the public for longer than almost any other art museum in the United States.

The story begins with one man. Daniel Wadsworth came from one of Hartford's wealthiest families. He was a merchant's son, an amateur painter, and a keen traveller in the American wilderness. In 1842 he set out to build a public gallery for his city. The museum opened in 1844. At that time, most fine art in America hung in private homes. Wadsworth wanted ordinary people to walk in and see it.

The building you see from the street was designed by Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis. They were two of the leading architects of their day. They chose the Gothic Revival style, a nineteenth-century fashion that borrowed the pointed arches and towers of medieval Europe. The castle-like front was meant to signal something serious and permanent. It still works. Even today, the building looks a little out of place among the offices of downtown Hartford — and that is part of its charm.

The ground under this building carries its own story. The museum stands on land once owned by the Wadsworth family. Local legend connects the family to the Charter Oak, Connecticut's most famous tree. According to the popular tale, a man named Joseph Wadsworth hid the colony's royal charter inside a hollow oak in 1687, to keep it from a governor sent by the English king. Historians debate the details. But in Connecticut, the story is part of local identity.

Now, a detail many visitors miss. Daniel Wadsworth was a friend and patron of the painter Thomas Cole. Cole was a founder of the Hudson River School, a group of American painters who showed the wild landscapes of the northeast in dramatic light. Another Hartford native, Frederic Edwin Church, studied with Cole as a young man. So the museum holds more than these paintings. It sits close to the place where the movement took root.

As you walk inside, notice how the building changes around you. The Atheneum is not one structure but several, joined over many decades. Later wings were added in the early twentieth century and in the 1930s. Each one carries the taste of its own time. You move from Gothic stone to classical marble to clean modern lines, sometimes within a few steps. It is a little like walking through the history of American architecture in a single afternoon.

One of those wings is named for Junius Spencer Morgan, a banker from this region. His son was John Pierpont Morgan, the famous financier, who was born in Hartford. The younger Morgan paid for the memorial building in honour of his father. He also gave many objects to the museum. Morgan collected on a huge scale, and his gifts helped turn a local gallery into a serious institution with collections from many centuries.

The most surprising chapter came in the 1930s. A young director named Arthur Everett Austin Junior, known to everyone as Chick, took charge. He was energetic and theatrical, and he loved the newest art. Under Austin, the museum held one of the first exhibitions of Surrealism in America — Surrealism being the movement of dreamlike, strange images led by artists such as Salvador Dalí. In 1934 the Atheneum also presented a major Picasso exhibition, among the first in the country.

That same year, the new Avery Memorial wing opened. Its interior was strikingly modern for an American museum at that time, with smooth surfaces and open light. Inside its theatre, the museum hosted the premiere of an opera called Four Saints in Three Acts. The words came from the writer Gertrude Stein and the music from the composer Virgil Thomson. Critics and society guests came up from New York. For a short time, quiet Hartford stood at the centre of the modern art world.

Austin also bought boldly for the permanent collection. One of his best-known purchases is a painting by Caravaggio, the Italian master of dramatic light and shadow. It shows Saint Francis of Assisi in a moment of religious ecstasy, held by an angel in the dark. Caravaggio's works are rare outside Europe. Seeing one here, in a mid-sized New England city, surprises many visitors. Look at how the light falls on the saint's face while everything else fades into shadow.

The collections reach well beyond paintings. The museum holds early American furniture, much of it gathered by the collector Wallace Nutting. There are also objects connected to Samuel Colt, the Hartford gun maker whose factory once made this city famous. His widow, Elizabeth Colt, left a large gift to the museum. These rooms remind you that Hartford was an industrial city. Its money came from insurance, firearms, and manufacturing — and some of that money ended up on these walls.

Over the years the buildings aged, and the museum went through a long renovation. It finished in the mid-2010s. Galleries were reopened, and many rooms were rehung so that older and newer works sit in conversation. When you walk through, pay attention to the windows and skylights. Natural light still plays a large role here. On a grey Connecticut day, the rooms feel calm and soft. On a bright day, the stone corridors seem almost to glow.

When you step back outside, look across to the small park beside the museum. A tall red steel sculpture rises there, with sharp, plate-like shapes. It is called Stegosaurus, by the American sculptor Alexander Calder. Children often stand under it and look straight up. It makes a good final contrast — Gothic granite on one side, bright modern steel on the other. Together, they tell you a lot about how this museum has always looked both backward and forward.

So take one more look at the grey turrets before you go. More than 180 years ago, a man decided his city deserved a place where anyone could stand in front of a painting. The stone is a little darker now, and the city has grown tall around it. But the idea is the same. As you walk down Main Street, notice how the old castle shrinks behind you... and how quiet it keeps, in the middle of everything.