Before there was even an art museum on the campus, there was a print collection. The first extensive gift of art to Cornell came from William P. Chapman, Jr., in the 1940s. Since his graduation in 1895, Chapman had amassed an impressive collection of European, American, and Japanese (ukiyo-e) prints as well as a small group of works by the pictorialist photographers. His interests were wide and varied, ranging from master prints by Dürer, Rembrandt, and his personal favorite, Whistler, to Van Dyck, Meryon, Hiroshige and Hokusai, Stieglitz and Alvin Langdon Coburn, and prints by some of his own contemporaries, the Provincetown color woodcut artists. The initial gift, 52 etchings and 15 lithographs by Whistler, arrived in 1942 followed the next year by an additional 772 prints. Chapman’s final bequest came in 1947 after his death and totaled 2,339 works, and it was this impressive donation that became the impetus for President Malott to establish the A. D. White Museum in 1953. Shortly after the museum opened, President Malott wrote to Chapman’s niece, “The very existence of your uncle’s collection here was perhaps the single factor prompting me to work for and finally establish this important facility.”

Over the subsequent six decades, the works on paper collection has grown incrementally and now totals approximately 16,000 prints and drawings with an additional 6,000 works in the photography collection. Through this collection we teach the history of the print medium in the west (the ukiyo-e prints are housed in our Asian collection), from the fifteenth century to the present, with fine examples by Goya, the Impressionists and the German Expressionists, Matisse, Picasso, Arthur Dove (an alumnus), Edward Hopper, Jacob Lawrence, and numerous others.