The story
In 1936, in the middle of the Depression, the University of Nebraska bought a four-year-old painting by Edward Hopper, the New York realist, with money from a trust left by Frank and Anna Hall of Lincoln. Room in New York shows a couple in a lit apartment at night, the man bent over his newspaper, the woman idly touching a piano key. The buyers predicted that Hopper would one day count among America's leading artists. The picture has been on view in Lincoln ever since, apart from loans to more than 50 exhibitions.
The museum building came a generation later. Mary Frances Sheldon and her brother Adams Bromley Sheldon left their estates for a gallery, and the university chose Philip Johnson, the New York architect, over Marcel Breuer and Richard Neutra. Opened in 1963, it is clad in Italian travertine that was cut and numbered in Italy, with tapered piers and arches outside and a tall great hall with a grand central staircase inside.
Today the Sheldon holds more than 12,000 works, mostly American art of the 19th and 20th centuries. Among them is Arnold Comes of Age, a 1930 portrait by Grant Wood, the Iowa painter of American Gothic, showing his young assistant Arnold Pyle on his 21st birthday. It entered the Nebraska collection in 1931, the year after it was painted.
