The story
In 1913 a Rochester woman named Emily Sibley Watson opened this gallery in memory of her son, James Averell, an architect who had died young. She gave it to the University of Rochester, and it has been an unusual hybrid ever since, a teaching museum for the university that also serves as the city's public art museum.
The Italian Renaissance building she paid for opened that October with almost nothing to hang in it. The gallery had no money set aside to buy art, so for its first decades it grew by an odd mechanism, collectors lending work to an exhibition and then donating what they had bought so it would stay. The very first object into the permanent collection was a piece of lace.
A century of that patient accumulation left a collection running from ancient antiquities through Rembrandt, Monet, Cézanne and the American painter Winslow Homer, more than 12,000 objects across some 5,000 years. Among them is a rare 17th-century Italian Baroque organ, still played in a gallery hung with old master paintings.
