The story
The strangest thing in this college museum is an entire English room. The Rotherwas Room is a Jacobean parlour lined with walnut panelling around a carved oak chimneypiece, made for Sir Roger Bodenham's Herefordshire manor and finished in 1611. It was taken apart, shipped across the Atlantic and installed in the Long Island house of Herbert Lee Pratt, an Amherst graduate, who left it to the college in 1944. Its stained glass was a bequest of his brother George to the Metropolitan Museum, which lent it to Amherst until it was given to the Mead outright in 2018.
The Mead is the art museum of Amherst College, opened in 1949, and around that transplanted room it holds American and European painting, with particular strength in 19th-century American work and a notable group of Russian art.
