The story
One of the smallest pictures in this museum is a wooden panel about five inches tall, showing a barber's shopfront in Lyme Regis on the south coast of England. James McNeill Whistler, the American painter who spent his career in Europe, painted it there in the autumn of 1895, during a stay of some weeks when he made little studies of the town's shops.
It arrived with the gift that founded the museum. Alfred Holbrook had retired from a New York law practice at 70, and in 1945 he gave the University of Georgia 100 American paintings in memory of his first wife, Eva Underhill Holbrook. He became the first director when the museum opened in a campus basement in 1948, and he kept working there well past the age of 90, until his death in 1974 at 99. In 1946 he added more, among them Two Figures, a 1935 watercolor by Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian pioneer of abstraction, in which a soft, colored shape reaches toward a black gridded one.
Since 1982 this has also been the official state art museum of Georgia, and since 1996 it has stood on the university's East Campus, with more than 17,000 works. American painting is still the backbone of the galleries, among them Childe Hassam's Bridge at Old Lyme of 1908, painted at the Connecticut art colony where the American Impressionists spent their summers.
