Review: Butler Institute of American Art a National Treasure, National Secret

In my swing a few weeks ago through western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio, I targeted high-profile museums but suspected that the secret sauce would be the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown. I was right. When it opened in 1919 in its McKim, Mead & White building, it was the only art museum in America focused solely on American art. A dozen or so followed, among them the Whitney, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Reynolda House in Winston-Salem, and the Addison Gallery at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.

I’ve written about all of these but never the Butler, whose collection was more myth to me than reality. I’d never been there. Yes, I knew Winslow Homer’s Snap the Whip was there as well as great Hudson River School landscapes and seascapes, a first-rate Sargent group portrait, and Norman Rockwell’s Lincoln the Railsplitter, famous in part because Ross Perot once owned it. The Butler’s heavy on pre–World War II American realist painting, I knew, but who, what, when, where, why and what else, I didn’t know.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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In my swing a few weeks ago through western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio, I targeted high-profile museums but suspected that the secret sauce would be the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown. I was right. When it opened in 1919 in its McKim, Mead & White building, it was the only art museum in America focused solely on American art. A dozen or so followed, among them the Whitney, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Reynolda House in Winston-Salem, and the Addison Gallery at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.

I’ve written about all of these but never the Butler, whose collection was more myth to me than reality. I’d never been there. Yes, I knew Winslow Homer’s Snap the Whip was there as well as great Hudson River School landscapes and seascapes, a first-rate Sargent group portrait, and Norman Rockwell’s Lincoln the Railsplitter, famous in part because Ross Perot once owned it. The Butler’s heavy on pre–World War II American realist painting, I knew, but who, what, when, where, why and what else, I didn’t know.