Woodmere Art Museum, Art museum in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, United States.
Woodmere Art Museum is an art museum in Chestnut Hill, a neighborhood in Northwest Philadelphia, housed in a Victorian stone mansion set within large wooded grounds. The interior rooms display paintings, prints, and sculptures, while additional works are placed outside among the trees and garden paths.
Charles Knox Smith, a Philadelphia businessman, donated his home and personal art collection to the public in 1940, which is how the museum came into being. Over the following decades, the collection grew through gifts and purchases while the house kept its original character.
The collection focuses on artists from the Philadelphia area, with paintings, prints, and sculptures displayed throughout the rooms of the old house. Visitors moving from room to room get a sense of how local art has changed over generations, from 19th-century landscapes to more recent works.
The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, so visitors have several days to choose from when planning a trip. Those who want to see the outdoor sculptures should come on a dry day, since the garden paths are exposed to the weather.
Even though the building was turned into a museum, the interior was never fully converted into standard gallery rooms, so many works still hang in the original layout of the house. This gives the visit a feeling closer to walking through a lived-in home than through a conventional exhibition space.
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