Mixed Messages at the Princeton University Art Museum

Princeton, N.J.

Princeton University possesses one of the oldest and most esteemed art collections in America. Its earliest acquisition—New Jersey colonial governor Jonathan Belcher’s gift, in 1755, of “my own Picture at full length in a gilt Frame”—was soon joined by a portrait of England’s King George II and, later, Charles Willson Peale’s “George Washington at the Battle of Princeton” (1783-84). Owing to that battle and two devastating fires, however, little from those early years remains in the Princeton University Art Museum, which, formally established in 1882, first opened in 1874 with fewer than 3,000 objects—and could only be seen by unanticipated visitors if they applied to a janitor for the key.

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