Museums in Hartford, Connecticut

Halfway between the array of fine museums in both Boston and New York, the city of Hartford, Connecticut has several outstanding museums of its own. Here is a sampling of some of the best museums in Hartford.

Wadsworth Atheneum - 600 Main Street

In 1842, a wealthy Hartford businessman named Daniel Wadsworth opened his collection of paintings, fine arts and ancient artifacts to the general public. The Atheneum, as he called it, remains America's oldest public art museum. Through the ensuing decades, the Wadsworth Atheneum continued to break new ground in the art world. It was the first American museum to display works by Dali, Caravaggio, Mondrian, Miró and more. In the 1930s, Hartford residents were treated to the first Picasso retrospective in America and the country's first Surrealism exhibition.

Today, the Wadsworth Atheneum is perhaps best known for its collection of landscapes from the Hudson River School of American artists. The "Last of the Mohicans" by Thomas Cole, whose patron was Wadsworth himself, is among the museum's holdings. And the Atheneum also was the first museum in America to display the works of Frederic Edwin Church, whose "Coast Scene, Mount Desert (Sunrise off the Maine Coast)" can be seen there today.

But the museum is also home to an impressive 5000-piece collection of European art, including Caravaggio's magnificent "Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy," along with works by Monet, Van Gogh, Degas, Cézanne, Manet and Renoir.

Mark Twain House - 351 Farmington Avenue

While most of us associate author Mark Twain with his boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri, it was Hartford, Connecticut where he wrote his most beloved an influential works, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and, of course, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Today, not far from downtown Hartford, you can visit the house that Samuel Clemens wrote the books that made him famous around the world.

Twain's 19-room house looks very much like the Mississippi River riverboats of his youth. The exterior trim uniquely carved details of butterflies, flowers and squirrels - all designed to connect the house with its rural surroundings. The distinctly asymmetrical look of the house is in keeping with Twain's own offbeat personality. The interior, designed and decorated by Louis Comfort Tiffany and craftsmen of Associated Artists, is just as impressive.

But of all the rooms in the house, the most historic is the third-floor billiards room where, at a small table that facing directly into a wall of bookshelves, Twain wrote some of the most-acclaimed books in American literature.

Harriet Beecher Stowe Center - 77 Forest Street

Mark Twain's home was located in a neighborhood of Hartford known as Nook Farm, which was a widely-known intellectual and literary community. But he was not the only world-famous author living there in the late 1800s. In a brick Victorian Gothic cottage-style house right next door lived Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the classic Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe's sister, the noted women's rights activist Isabella Beecher Hooker, also lived in the Nook Farm neighborhood. It was a time and place that Twain himself described best by the title of his book The Gilded Age.

This museum now established in the home where the author lived for the last 20 years of her life includes many of the family's original belongings. The furniture was purchased and placed in the rooms by Stowe herself. Much of the artwork that she acquired on her frequent trips to Europe is on display in the home, as well as some paintings done by the author herself.

The neighboring Katherine Seymour Day house is the site of the Stowe Center's library. The 12,000-volume collection, begun with Stowe's own books and expanded over the years through Day's efforts, includes first-edition books by Harriet Beecher Stowe and members of her famous family. The collection also includes Stowe's personal correspondence with historic figures such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.