Search the Collection

One-word searches work best.
Use AND to require multiple terms:

  • ceramics AND vase
 More
Close Overlay

Keyword Search Information

For best results, use one word:

  • Yoruba
  • Baroque
  • Rembrandt

Use AND for combinations:

  • American AND ceramics AND vase
  • Birch AND bark AND container
  • Picasso AND photograph

Use quotes for phrases and full names:

  • "Bark Painting"
  • "English Sheraton Barometer"
  • "Tuning Fork Mallet"

If your search includes 3 or more words, you may use a mix of quotes and AND:

  • "birch bark" AND container

FROM MASTODON TO MOSAIC: MOMENTS FROM A COLLECTION'S HISTORY

  • An old image of museum storage of fossils and other zoological specimens

    LEFT From 1871 to 1896, the museum in Culver Hall held around 18,000 specimens, including minerals, fossils, zoological specimens, antiquities, insects, and an herbarium. Photo from the Dartmouth College Photographic Files, Folder 0601, photographer unknown.

  • An old image of a storage room full of paintings that would become part of the Hood Museum's collection.

    LEFT Wilson Hall housed the museum from 1928 to 1985, a period that saw the most concentrated growth of the collection pre–Hood Museum. This undated photograph shows objects from the collection set up on the upper level of the building—do you recognize any of the artworks? Photo from the Dartmouth College Photographic Files, Folder 1995, photographer unknown.

  • An old image of a Dartmouth professor teaching a group of young men in a museum storage facility.

    LEFT A Dartmouth professor holds a class in an exhibition in Wilson Hall. The sculpted Maya head in his hands is included in From Mastodon to Mosaic. Photo from the Dartmouth College Photographic Files, Folder 1310, photographer unknown.

  • A museum conservator fills a crack in one of the Hood Museum's Assyrian Reliefs.

    LEFT The Assyrian reliefs occupied at least three different spaces at Dartmouth before they were installed in the new Hood Museum of Art in 1985. In this photograph, conservator Richard Newman fills a crack from the initial transportation of the reliefs to Dartmouth before overpainting it to blend in with the stone surface. Photo from the Dartmouth College Photographic Files, Folder 1061, photographer Jeffrey Nintzel.

  • rt handlers carry Joseph Steward's large portrait of Eleazar Wheelock down the stairs in Parkhurst Hall.

    LEFT Art handlers carry Joseph Steward’s portrait of Eleazar Wheelock down the stairs in Parkhurst Hall, transferring it from the administrative building to the new Hood Museum of Art. The painting has been at Dartmouth since 1793. Photo from the Dartmouth College Photographic Files, Folder 1980, photographer Stuart Bratesman.

ASHLEY OFFILL, Curator of Collections
Hood Quarterly, summer 2025

As we celebrate four decades of the Hood Museum of Art, I am taking a step even further back in time to explore the shifting nature of collecting at Dartmouth, from fossils, taxidermy, and minerals to portraits and public art. In the course of preparing for the exhibition From Mastodon to Mosaic: Building an Academic Art Collection at Dartmouth, I journeyed deep into textual, photographic, and digital archives to uncover stories both big and small about the 253-year history of collecting at Dartmouth College. This timeline highlights interesting anecdotes focused primarily on lesser-known people, places, and objects.

1791 A mastodon molar from Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, once gifted to Eleazar Wheelock, joins objects described as "philosophical apparatus" and "a number of valuable foreign curiosities" on the upper floor of Dartmouth Hall in what could be considered the first museum on campus.

1802 Dartmouth trustees create the first dedicated staff position, the inspector of the museum. This individual is charged "to admit company into the Museum two hours in each week in term time and also on public days—and [is] under no obligation to admit company at any other time." This is very different from the Hood Museum today!

1811 A fire supposedly caused by students firing a cannon inside Dartmouth Hall could have been the end of the collection. Instead, that cannon is now (potentially) part of the Hood Museum collection; the provenance record for a cannon with the object number 13.149.17340 reads: "Source unknown (thought to have been the cannon with which students wrecked the walls of Dartmouth Hall in 1811)."

1820 One of the early inventories of the collection demonstrates its scientific focus. Of the 383 objects listed as part of the collection in 1820, 101 were anthropological, ninety-nine were geological, seventy-one were zoological, and only three were identified as historical. The Dartmouth Gallery of Paintings, primarily the portraits then housed in Thornton Hall, was completely separate from the museum at this time.

1856 On December 12, College Librarian Oliver P. Hubbard writes: "Yesterday was a bright day with us, as I . . . had the great satisfaction of opening most of the boxes containing the Nineveh slabs which I finished to-day. Most of them are in good condition—some perfect—a few are considerably broken but having seen how perfectly those at New Haven are set up, which were badly broken, I anticipate the same good result. They are now lying in the N.E. lower room of Reed Hall which we last year fitted up as a Picture Gallery."

1904 Dartmouth did not have a dedicated fund for the purchase of artwork until 1904, when the Guernsey Center Moore Fund for Collections of Art was established by Dartmouth Trustee Henry Lynn Moore, Class of 1877, in honor of his son Guernsey Center Moore. To date, over 450 objects, primarily works on paper, have been purchased with the support of the fund. One of the earliest acquisitions was William Sartain's print of Lincoln and his family (PR.919.6) in 1919, while one of the most recent was Walter Henry Williams's Girl with Butterflies #2 (2022.10) in 2022.

1922 Mildred Morse was hired as the curator of the Department of Art and managed the College's Print Room, which at the time held 25,000 lantern slides as well as 15,000 photographs and color reproductions. She remained in this position until 1965 and was one of the first women to hold faculty status at Dartmouth.

1940s The collection, now housed at Wilson Hall, began to grow exponentially (over 40,000 new objects between 1935 and 1946) as faculty began to see how a museum that facilitated both special exhibitions and spaces to study objects would benefit students across a range of disciplines.

1985 The Hood Museum of Art opens its doors.

2025 The collection is bigger than ever, numbering 68,831 objects.

In addition to archival research, this essay relies on "A Pioneer Museum in the Wilderness" by W. Wedgwood Bowen (1958) and "The Story of Art at Dartmouth" by Churchill P. Lathrop (1951).


Tags: Quarterly

Written June 09, 2025