Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Cumberland County, United States | Museum of Fine Art

Welcome to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick. Maine, United States. The original collection of European paintings, Old Master drawings, and family portraits given by James Bowdoin III and his family in 1811 and 1826 was housed in a sequence of different campus locations until the Walker Art Building, Brunswick, Maine was completed in 1894. Included on the National Register of Historic Places, the handsome structure was given to the College by Harriet and Sophia Walker in honor of their uncle Theophilus Walker, a Boston entrepreneur and businessman. The Walker sisters were encyclopedic collectors and supporters of art education. They selected the renowned architect Charles Follen McKim, whose firm McKim, Mead and White also designed the Boston Public Library, The Morgan Library & Museum in New York, and the Brooklyn Museum, among many other important commissions. A landmark building in the history of museum architecture in the United States, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art is one of the few remaining structures in which the architectural and decorative ideals of the late nineteenth century are so fully realized.
The Museum?s façade is based on Renaissance prototypes with a grand stair leading to a dramatically shadowed loggia. On either side are bronze statues of Sophocles and Demosthenes, copies by Sabatino de Angelis, a nineteenth-century Neapolitan sculptor of ancient originals. Two large lions, taken from those at the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, stand guard on either side of the stair.