Museums
This fine, dignified Georgian mansion, built in the 1800s, was long a centerpiece of Georgetown society. Local lore has it that Dolley Madison watched the White House burn during the War of 1812 from this hilltop home. It is now a showplace of graceful early 19th Century architecture, elegant period furnishings and lovely gardens. The mansion is the headquarters of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America. The house is now a museum dedicated to the Federal Period.
The museum, located in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, opened in 1895 as an outgrowth of the California Midwinter International Exposition of 1894.
The de Young’s American galleries include fine and deocorative art in the following areas: Native American and Spanish Colonial; Anglo-Colonial; Federal era art and Neoclassical; Victorian genre and realism; trompe l’oeil still life; the Hudson River School, Barbizon, and Tonalism; Impressionism and the Ashcan School; Arts and Crafts; Modernism; Social Realism and American Scene; Surrealism and Abstraction; Beat, Pop; and Contemporary.
The DIA has been a beacon of culture for the Detroit area for well over a century. Founded in 1885, the museum was originally located on Jefferson Avenue, but, due to its rapidly expanding collection, moved to a larger site on Woodward Avenue in 1927. The new Beaux-Arts building, designed by Paul Cret, was immediately referred to as the "temple of art." Two wings were added in the 1960s and 1970s, and a major renovation and expansion that began in 1999 was completed in 2007.
