The Davis Museum holds approximately 11,000 objects of art from around the globe, including paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative objects, from antiquity to the present day.
The Museum collection dates back to 1875, when Wellesley College founder Henry Fowle Durant began a campaign to acquire original paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs, as well as plaster casts of classical sculpture, in service of a liberal arts education for women. Drawing and painting were integral to the first curriculum at the College; when Wellesley introduced the teaching of art history in 1885, it distinguished itself as one of the first American colleges to offer the subject.
The Davis Museum closes for the summer.