New Britain Museum of American Art

The museum traces its origins to 1903 and to a fund left for the purchase of American art, an unusual mandate for its day. Rather than chase European old masters, its founders committed to collecting the art of their own country, and that focus has given the museum an unusually coherent and complete story to tell.

The galleries move roughly in chronological order, opening with colonial and early American portraiture and the young nation's sense of itself, then moving into the 19th century's love of landscape, with luminous Hudson River School canvases of the American wilderness and, later, the softer light of the American Impressionists, many of whom worked in Connecticut's own art colonies.

From there the collection carries into the 20th and 21st centuries, with realist and Regionalist painting, modernism, illustration, and a growing body of contemporary art, so that a single visit spans more than three hundred years of how Americans have pictured themselves and their land.

The museum's signature work is The Arts of Life in America, a cycle of five murals painted by Thomas Hart Benton in the early 1930s. Benton, a leader of the Regionalist movement, filled the panels with vivid, restless scenes of everyday American life, music, dance, work, play, and the everyday people of the country's regions, rendered in his rippling, energetic style.

The murals were originally created for the library of the Whitney Museum in New York before coming to New Britain, where they are displayed together in their own gallery. Seeing them as a set, wrapping around the room, is one of the museum's defining experiences and a landmark encounter with American mural painting.

Benton's work here captures both the ambition and the tensions of its era, and the museum interprets the murals with attention to how they represent, and sometimes stereotype, the many peoples of America, prompting reflection as well as admiration.

New Britain was long a manufacturing city, nicknamed the Hardware City for its tools, locks, and hardware factories that drew waves of immigrant workers. The museum grew as a cultural anchor within that industrious community, beside the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed Walnut Hill Park.

Over the decades the museum outgrew its original home and expanded with modern gallery wings, giving its growing collection room to breathe and space for major traveling exhibitions, while keeping its welcoming, human scale.

Its setting in central Connecticut places it within easy reach of the state's other art institutions, from the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford to the university museums in New Haven, making it a natural stop on any tour of Connecticut art.

Spring pairs the galleries with the greening of neighboring Walnut Hill Park, a pleasant time for art indoors and a walk outdoors.

Summer brings major special exhibitions and a steady calendar of programs, a comfortable air-conditioned refuge on a hot afternoon.

Fall is a fine season to combine the museum with the surrounding park's autumn color and with wider leaf-season travel through central Connecticut.

Winter makes the museum an ideal cold-weather destination, with rotating shows and events offering a warm, unhurried few hours indoors.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.