The story
The collection now in the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art goes back to 1875, when the University of Notre Dame in Indiana opened a Bishops Gallery of 60 portraits by Luigi Gregori, an Italian painter who had worked at the Vatican, along with a small museum of Native American antiquities. From 1980 the university showed its art in the Snite Museum of Art. That museum closed at the end of 2023, and the collection moved into a new building.
The Raclin Murphy opened on 1 December 2023, in a classical-style building by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, a New York firm, set in a nine-acre sculpture park. It is named for its lead donors, Ernestine Raclin and her daughter and son-in-law, Carmen and Chris Murphy. For the opening, Jenny Holzer, Maya Lin, Jaume Plensa and Kiki Smith made works for the site.
The holdings run to more than 30,000 objects, from Olmec and other Mesoamerican art to photography and contemporary work. In the European galleries, French painting of the 18th and 19th centuries is a strength. A 1786 portrait by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, the portraitist of Marie Antoinette, shows the Marquise de Puységur, and Camille Corot, the French landscape painter, is represented by small views such as a fishing shed near Gournay-en-Bray.
