The story
At the top of the slope above Cayuga Lake, on the edge of the Cornell campus in Ithaca, stands a concrete building that one architecture critic likened to a gigantic throne. The architect I. M. Pei designed it, it opened in 1973, and its top floor reaches out over an open-air sculpture court, with views across the lake. It is named for Herbert Fisk Johnson Jr., head of the household-products firm S.C. Johnson and a Cornell graduate of 1922, who paid for most of it.
This is Cornell's art museum, its permanent collection runs to more than 40,000 objects, and admission is free. Asian art is its great strength, built around the collection of George and Mary Rockwell. Among the European pictures is William-Adolphe Bouguereau's The Goose Girl of 1891, a life-size barefoot peasant girl on a dirt road among her geese. The collection also holds a Whistler from July 1896, painted in the church of Saint Catherine at Honfleur in Normandy, showing the parish priest's little class of children.
