Fenimore Art Museum
The Fenimore Art Museum building, seen in July 2014
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| Established | 1899 |
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| Location | Cooperstown, New York |
| Coordinates | 42°42′56.4″N 074°55′37″W / 42.715667°N 74.92694°W |
| Type | Art museum |
| President | Dr. Paul D'Ambrosio |
| Website | www |
The Fenimore Art Museum (formerly known as Fenimore House Museum) is a museum located in Cooperstown, New York. It presents changing and permanent exhibitions of American Folk Art, North American Indian art and artifacts, Hudson River School and 19th-century genre paintings, and American photography.
The Museum was moved to its present location — Cooperstown, New York overlooking Lake Otsego — in 1939 due to a gift from Stephen Carlton Clark. Much of the American Fine Art Collection was donated by Clark, a generous art connoisseur.
The museum also has a great deal of material associated with James Fenimore Cooper, Cooperstown's most famous native son, and his family. This includes furniture, portraits and paintings, personal effects and books owned by Cooper, as well as manuscripts and first editions of his writings.
The Fenimore Art Museum is closely associated with The Farmers' Museum, also in Cooperstown.
Fenimore Art Museum, then known as the New York State Historical Association, was founded in 1899 by five New Yorkers interested in promoting a greater knowledge of the early history of the state. They hoped to encourage original research, to educate general audiences by means of lectures and publications, to mark places of historic interest, and to establish a library and museum to hold manuscripts, paintings, and objects associated with New York State. From 1926 until 1939, the Association’s headquarters was in Ticonderoga, New York in a facsimile of John Hancock’s house in Boston.
In 1939, Stephen Carlton Clark offered the Association a new home in the village of Cooperstown. Clark took an active interest in expanding the holdings and turned over Fenimore House, one of his family’s properties as a new headquarters and museum. The collections and programs continued to expand and a separate library building was constructed in 1968. In 1995, an 18,000-square-foot (1,700 m2) wing was added to Fenimore House to hold the Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection, one of the nation’s premier collections of American Indian art.
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