Ongoing Exhibitions
Selections from the Charles Knox Smith Collection
Always on View
Founder's and Parlor Gallery
FREE
Charles Knox Smith, founder of Woodmere Art Museum, believed that collecting art was a noble journey with a moral, spiritual, and patriotic dimension. Born in 1845, the defining political and social event of Smith's life was the Civil War, and his collection is grounded in the social context of post Civil War Philadelphia. Certain works of art tell stories that are directly tied to the war, like Sarah Fisher Ames' extraordinary marble bust, Abraham Lincoln (n.d.), which is among the greatest treasures of Smith's collection.
Other works of art tell stories of nobility and self sacrifice, such as Benjamin West's The Fatal Wounding Sir Philip Sydney (1806), and Edward Harrison May's Lady Jane Gray Going to Her Execution (1864). Smith was a devout and pious man, and he collected landscape paintings by such great American artists of the 19th century as Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper Cropsey, and Edwin Darch Lewis that expressed the cycles of day and night, life and death, and the spirituality of nature.
