Founder's Collection
Woodmere's founder, Charles Knox Smith (1845–1916), assembled a collection that attests both the tumultuous history of his era and his abiding belief in art as a vehicle for spiritual and patriotic uplift.
Spotlights
Purview
Charles Knox Smith (1845–1916), Woodmere's founder, believed that collecting art was a noble pursuit with moral, spiritual, and patriotic dimensions. Born in 1845, the Civil War was the defining event of his life, and his collection is deeply rooted in the social context of post-Civil War Philadelphia. Some works speak directly to the war, among them Sarah Fisher Ames' extraordinary marble bust Abraham Lincoln (date unknown), one of the greatest treasures in the collection. Others explore themes of nobility and self-sacrifice, such as Benjamin West's The Fatal Wounding of Sir Philip Sydney (1806) and Edward Harrison May's Lady Jane Gray Going to Her Execution (1864). A devout and pious man, Smith also collected landscape paintings by such celebrated American artists as Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper Cropsey, and Edwin Darch Lewis--works that evoke the cycles of day and night, life and death, and the spiritual charge of nature.
