The Hyde Collection
Encyclopedia
The Hyde Collection is an art museum in the city of Glens Falls
Glens Falls, New York
Glens Falls is a city in Warren County, New York, United States. Glens Falls Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 14,700 at the 2010 census...

 in Upstate New York
Upstate New York
Upstate New York is the region of the U.S. state of New York that is located north of the core of the New York metropolitan area.-Definition:There is no clear or official boundary between Upstate New York and Downstate New York...

. The collections were endowed by the Hyde family. The museum is housed in a historic refurbished early twentieth-century residence, the Hyde House, located at 161 Warren Street in Glens Falls, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

, a building that is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...

.

Founded by Louis and Charlotte Hyde, the collection contains historic furniture, books, paintings, sculptures and pottery. Now expanded with many modern additions, the museum, while relatively small and "off the beaten track" contains an impressive and broad collection including Italian Renaissance and eighteenth-century French antiques, and works by Botticelli, El Greco
El Greco
El Greco was a painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. "El Greco" was a nickname, a reference to his ethnic Greek origin, and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος .El Greco was born on Crete, which was at...

, van Dyck, Ingres
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest...

, Raphael
Raphael
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...

, Rembrandt, Rubens, Tintoretto
Tintoretto
Tintoretto , real name Jacopo Comin, was a Venetian painter and a notable exponent of the Renaissance school. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed Il Furioso...

, Cézanne, Degas, Matisse, Picasso, Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to...

, and van Gogh. In addition, works by important American artists including Eakins
Thomas Eakins
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator...

, Childe Hassam
Childe Hassam
Frederick Childe Hassam was a prolific American Impressionist painter, noted for his urban and coastal scenes. Along with Mary Cassatt and John Henry Twachtman, Hassam was instrumental in promulgating Impressionism to American collectors, dealers, and museums...

, Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th century America and a preeminent figure in American art....

, Ryder
Ryder
Ryder System, Inc. , or Ryder, is an American-based provider of transportation and supply chain management products, and is especially known for its fleet of rental trucks. Ryder specializes in fleet management, supply chain management and dedicated contracted carriage. Ryder operates in North...

, and Whistler
James McNeill Whistler
James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American-born, British-based artist. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger...

 are also present.

History

Charlotte Pruyn Hyde established a trust in 1952 that dedicated her home and her extensive art collection to the community. The Trust Agreement also set forth the future mission of the Museum. Charlotte Hyde’s vision, as stated in the Trust, was for the trustees "to establish and maintain a museum for the exhibition of art objects...and to promote and cultivate the study and improvement of the fine arts, for the education and benefit of the residents of Glens Falls and vicinity and the general public." The Hyde art collection is a product of the golden age of the private art collector (c. 1890 to 1940).

Mrs. Hyde (1867-1963) was born in Glens Falls, New York
Glens Falls, New York
Glens Falls is a city in Warren County, New York, United States. Glens Falls Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 14,700 at the 2010 census...

 into one of the leading industrialist families of the Adirondack
Adirondack Mountains
The Adirondack Mountains are a mountain range located in the northeastern part of New York, that runs through Clinton, Essex, Franklin, Fulton, Hamilton, Herkimer, Lewis, Saint Lawrence, Saratoga, Warren, and Washington counties....

 region. Her father, Samuel Pruyn, co-founded Finch, Pruyn & Company, Inc. in 1865. Pruyn soon became the sole owner of the paper manufacturer, and thus established the foundation of the family’s wealth.

Samuel’s oldest daughter Charlotte met the young Harvard law student Louis Hyde (1866-1934) while attending finishing school in Boston. They married in 1901 and in 1906 Charlotte’s father encouraged his son-in-law to leave his practice in Massachusetts and join the family business. Consequently, the couple returned to Charlotte’s hometown and Louis became vice president of the paper mill.

Between 1904 and 1912 Charlotte and her sisters, Nell Cunningham and Mary Hoopes, built homes on adjoining property overlooking the Hudson River
Hudson River
The Hudson is a river that flows from north to south through eastern New York. The highest official source is at Lake Tear of the Clouds, on the slopes of Mount Marcy in the Adirondack Mountains. The river itself officially begins in Henderson Lake in Newcomb, New York...

 (the Cunningham House and Hoopes House). Boston architect Henry Forbes Bigelow
Henry Forbes Bigelow
Henry Forbes Bigelow was a Boston, Massachusetts architect in the firm Bigelow and Wadsworth. He became a partner in the firm in 1898.-Biography:...

 was commissioned to design all three residences. All three houses were built by well-known architect and structural engineer Robert Rheinlander
Robert Rheinlander
Robert H. Rheinlander was an American architect, contractor and structural engineer from Glens Falls, New York.CareerRobert Rheinlander was based in Glens Falls, New York and designed and or built many well known and large buildings in the northern New York State area...

. Each embraced the American Renaissance
American Renaissance
In the history of American architecture and the arts, the American Renaissance was the period in 1835-1880 characterized by renewed national self-confidence and a feeling that the United States was the heir to Greek democracy, Roman law, and Renaissance humanism...

 propensity to adapt European architectural traditions to American taste. Hyde House, however, completed in 1912 in the style of a Florentine Renaissance palazzo
Palazzo
Palazzo, an Italian word meaning a large building , may refer to:-Buildings:*Palazzo, an Italian type of building**Palazzo style architecture, imitative of Italian palazzi...

, stands as the most impressive and significant example of this practice.

With Hyde House complete, the couple began to acquire the furnishings and art works that best suited the scale and environment of their new home. Throughout the decades that followed, they thoughtfully continued to acquire pieces during summer sojourns to Europe, and more often, from their favorite New York City dealers.

By 1930, their collection was widely recognized. When Mr. Hyde died in 1934, approximately one-third of the core collection had been assembled. During the next thirty years, Mrs. Hyde continued to expand its scope, ultimately including representative objects from the span of western art history. They were aided in the collecting by the noted buyer for renaissance art, Bernard Berenson
Bernard Berenson
Bernard Berenson was an American art historian specializing in the Renaissance. He was a major figure in pioneering art attribution and therefore establishing the market for paintings by the "Old Masters".-Personal life:...

.

Three months after Mrs. Hyde died in 1963, the Hyde Collection opened to the general public. In 1984 Hyde House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...

. In 1989, an expansion designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes
Edward Larrabee Barnes
Edward Larrabee Barnes was a American architect.Barnes was born in Chicago, Illinois into a family he described as "incense-swinging High Episcopalians", consisting of Cecil Barnes, a lawyer, and Margaret Helen Ayer, recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for the novel Year of Grace...

 connected Hyde House and the recently acquired Cunningham House. Overnight, this addition of four galleries, an auditorium, art storage, classrooms and a museum shop, consciously broadened the Museum’s scope of purpose.

Today this expansion supports an ambitious schedule of special exhibitions that embraces a diversity of styles, periods, and media. From monographic shows of artists like Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th century America and a preeminent figure in American art....

 and Auguste Rodin
Auguste Rodin
François-Auguste-René Rodin , known as Auguste Rodin , was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past...

, to more broadly defined projects, each is intended to serve as an important complement to the semi-permanent installation within Hyde House.

In May 2004, The Hyde completed an expansion and renovation. The complete restoration of historic Hyde House unfolded, with the stucco exterior completely replaced and restored, while inside, the implementation of a historic furnishing plan effectively captured a once fading past and returned a heightened degree of integrity to the visitor’s experience. In April 2010, Finch Paper announced its purchase of the Glens Falls Armory, adjacent to the Hyde Collection, for possible expansion of the museum and its programs.

External links

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