page_title: Princeton University Art Museum
section_title: Ernest DeWald (1946–60)
hierarchical_section_title: Princeton University Art Museum / History / Growth / Ernest DeWald (1946–60)
caption_attribution_description: "Oval with Points", Henry Moore, Installed 1971. Princeton University. Unsigned, no copyright notice. [1]
context_page_description: The Princeton University Art Museum is the Princeton University gallery of art, located in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1882, it now houses over 92,000 works of art that range from antiquity to the contemporary period. The Princeton University Art Museum dedicates itself to supporting and enhancing the University's goals of teaching, research, and service in fields of art and culture, as well as to serving regional communities and visitors from around the world. Its collections concentrate on the Mediterranean region, Western Europe, China, the United States, and Latin America.
  The museum has a large collection of Greek and Roman antiquities, including ceramics, marbles, bronzes, and Roman mosaics from Princeton University's excavations in Antioch. Medieval Europe is represented by sculpture, metalwork, and stained glass. The collection of Western European paintings includes examples from the early Renaissance through the nineteenth century, and there is a growing collection of twentieth-century and contemporary art. Photographic holdings are a particular strength, numbering over 27,000 works from the invention of daguerreotype in 1839 to the present.
context_section_description: Mather was succeeded by Ernest DeWald, a graduate school alumnus of the Class of 1946, one of the Monuments Men who had been charged with protecting the cultural heritage of Europe during the war.  A large number of Princetonians, both alumni and faculty, served with the Monuments program, leading the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna to loan the museum The Art of Painting by Johannes Vermeer as a sign of gratitude.  DeWald was noted for his conservation work, personally cleaning paintings in his office on the top floor the museum.  For the University's bicentennial in 1946, he refurbished the galleries, including displaying a new collection of Chinese scrolls donated by Dr. Dubois Schanck Morris, Class of 1893.  Under DeWald's tenure, the museum's collection of Asian art greatly increased, aided by the guidance of Professor Wen C. Fong, Class of 1951, who would go on to be the founding director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Asian department.  In 1949, Alfred Stieglitz's 1907 The Steerage was the first of the museum's now considerable collection of photographs.
caption: Henry Moore, Oval with Points, 1969-1970, part of the Putnam Collection, often called "Nixon's Nose" by students[10]
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