American Painting & Sculpture
The collection of American art comprises important paintings and sculpture from the 18th century to the early 20th century. The American galleries in the Audrey Jones Beck Building showcase the collection in an installation that draws particular attention to broader stories of class, gender, and race, to reveal both connections and conflicts between artists and styles in an effort to offer a more complete and nuanced picture of American art.
Browse the American Painting & Sculpture CollectionCollecting Areas
The collection of 18th-century paintings, represented in the American galleries and housed primarily at Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, features a stunning array of works from the Colonial and Federal periods. The collection comprises works by America’s great early artists, including John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Sully, and Benjamin West.
A particular strength of the American collection is the small but choice group of 19th-century landscape paintings in the Hudson River School tradition, with major works by Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Robert S. Duncanson. Art of mid-19th-century America is represented, with genre and still-life paintings by artists such as Charles Deas, Eastman Johnson, and Severin Roesen. Key works of the late 19th century by Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, Frederic Remington, John Singer Sargent, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and others, show the range and vitality of American art as it continued to grow in stature on the world stage.
The early 20th-century holdings feature important paintings by George Bellows and Robert Henri as well as Taos Society Artists, such as E. Martin Hennings and Walter Ufer. Among the highlights of the Alfred Stieglitz circle are works by Elsie Driggs, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Helen Torr.
The collection of American sculpture complements the paintings. Highlights include 19th-century classical marbles by Hiram Powers and William Henry Rinehart; Beaux Arts bronzes by Frederick William MacMonnies; and limestone sculpture by self-taught artist William Edmondson.
Special Collections
The Hogg Brothers Collection
In the 1920s, Texas philanthropists William C. and Michael Hogg assembled a collection of artworks by Frederic S. Remington that their sister, Ima Hogg, gave to the MFAH in 1943. Their early campaign to collect Remington’s work helped revive national interest in the artist, and today the Museum’s collection is internationally recognized.
Wintermann Collection of American Art
In 1985, Mr. and Mrs. David R. Wintermann gave the MFAH more than 50 American paintings that date from 1880 to 1920, helping to fill important gaps in the Museum’s collection at the time.
The Nancy Hart Glanville Collection
In 2021, the late Nancy Hart Glanville gifted the MFAH important pieces from her exemplary collection of 19th-cenury American art. Her extraordinary gift provided the Museum with its first major works by Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper.
Exhibitions
Publications
- American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World
- American Art and Philanthropy: Twenty Years of Collecting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
- Frederic Remington: The Hogg Brothers Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
- John Singleton Copley in England
- Masterpieces from the Fayez S. Sarofim Collection: From Antiquity to Abstraction
- The Modern West: American Landscapes: 1890–1950
- Two Centuries of American Still-Life Painting: The Frank and Michelle Hevrdejs Collection
Patron Group
Members of Friends of American Arts visit local private collections and are invited to exclusive lectures and programs related to the permanent collection of American art across various MFAH departments. This patron group is also invited to exclusive, behind-the-scenes tours of major exhibitions of American art at the MFAH led by specialists in the field.