St. Johnsbury Athenaeum facts for kids
Quick facts for kids St. Johnsbury Athenaeum |
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| Established | 1871 |
| Location | St. Johnsbury, Vermont |
| Website | http://www.stjathenaeum.org/ |
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St. Johnsbury Athenaeum
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The Athenaeum in 1906
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 Location in Vermont
Location in the United States
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| Location | St. Johnsbury, Vermont |
| Built | 1871 |
| Architect | John Davis Hatch III |
| Architectural style | Second Empire |
| NRHP reference No. | 96000970 |
| Significant dates | |
| Added to NRHP | July 18, 1996 |
| Designated NHL | July 18, 1996 |
The St. Johnsbury Athenaeum is a special place in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. It's both a library and an art gallery! The building itself is very old and beautiful. It's important because of how it was built.
The Athenaeum is famous for its amazing collection of American landscape paintings and many books. A man named Horace Fairbanks helped pay for it. He was known for making the world's first platform scale. The art collection has many paintings from the Hudson River School. The building still looks like it did in the 1800s. It has a strong Victorian style.
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A Look Back: The Athenaeum's History
The St. Johnsbury Athenaeum first opened its doors in 1871. When it started, it had about 8,000 books. A book expert named William Frederick Poole helped choose all these books.
The Amazing Art Gallery
In 1873, Horace Fairbanks added a small art gallery to the Athenaeum. This gallery is very special. It's one of the few places in the United States that still looks like a 19th-century Victorian art gallery.
The design is full of details. You can see fancy paint designs and detailed moldings. The room gets natural light from a big skylight in the ceiling. The walls and floor are made of dark wood called black walnut.
What Kind of Art Can You See?
The gallery has about 100 works of art on display. Many are original paintings by American artists. There are also copies of famous European artworks. Most of the collection is from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s.
You can see paintings by artists from the Hudson River School. These include Asher B. Durand, Jasper Francis Cropsey, and Sanford Gifford. Gifford was a Luminist painter, known for his light effects. James and William Hart painted peaceful scenes with cows.
Artists like Samuel Colman and Worthington Whittredge painted scenes of the American West. The biggest painting in the room is called Domes of Yosemite. It's ten by fifteen feet and was painted by Albert Bierstadt.
There are also original paintings by European artists. These include William-Adolphe Bouguereau (who painted "Raspberry Girl"), Félix Ziem (who painted "Venice"), and others like Charles Euphrasie Kuwasseg.
The Library Collection
The Athenaeum's library is part of a bigger system. It shares its catalog and borrowing system with over 50 other libraries in Vermont. This system is called the Vermont Organization of Koha Automated Libraries. This makes it easy for people to find and borrow books from many different places.
See also
