The story
In 1865 the French painter Camille Corot finished a canvas about 2 metres tall showing Orpheus, the musician of Greek myth, raising his lyre to the dawn. It was painted for the Paris townhouse of the Russian collector Paul Demidoff and sold at auction three years later. In 1981 it came to Madison as a gift from the children of a University of Wisconsin graduate, and it now belongs to the Chazen Museum of Art, the university's art museum, where admission is free.
The museum opened in 1970 as the Elvehjem Art Center, named after Conrad Elvehjem, the biochemist who was then president of the university. Its concrete building by the Chicago architect Harry Weese was made for about 1,600 works the university had gathered. The name changed in 2005 after a gift from Jerome and Simona Chazen, both alumni, which helped pay for a second building by the Boston firm Machado Silvetti. It opened in 2011, linked to the first by a bridge, and roughly doubled the space.
The collection now runs past 20,000 objects, and it is the second-largest art museum in Wisconsin after Milwaukee's. The French 19th-century holdings include a view of the chalk cliffs at Étretat by Eugène Boudin, the Normandy coast painter. Elsewhere there are Japanese woodblock prints, Soviet-era paintings and glass by René Lalique.
