The story
The oldest living thing at the Cummer is outside. On the lawn above the St Johns River stands a live oak thought to be some 400 years old, its branches spreading about 138 feet. The gardens around it were laid out for the Cummer family's riverside homes, an English garden of 1910 by the Philadelphia firm Thomas Meehan and Sons, an Italian garden designed in 1931 by Ellen Biddle Shipman, and a third by the Olmsted Brothers, the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted's sons. In September 2017 Hurricane Irma pushed about four feet of river water across them, and they were restored from historic plans over the next two years.
The museum comes from Ninah Cummer, a collector married into a Jacksonville lumber family, who left her house, her art and most of her estate to found it when she died in 1958. The house was torn down and a gallery built on the site, which opened in 1961, with one panelled room of the old home, the Tudor Room, kept as it was.
Inside are some 5,000 works. Among them are an early Lamentation by Peter Paul Rubens, more than 700 pieces of early Meissen porcelain in the Wark Collection, and three paintings by the French academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, including Return from the Harvest of 1878.
