The First University Art Gallery and School

  Yale School of the Fine Arts building from Chapel Street, circa 1866-1874

The union of Harriet Trumbull and Benjamin Silliman, Sr., brought science and art to Yale in the nineteenth century. Harriet, daughter of Governor Jonathan Trumbull II, was the niece of John Trumbull the artist. Silliman, the first professor of modern science in America, advocated female education, affirming in his 1795 college diary entry: “I believe that the difference in the appearance of the sexes (as to their minds) is owing entirely to neglect of the education of females, which is a shame to man, and ought to be remedied.” In 1808 he taught the first “course of popular chemistry for ladies and gentlemen,” in the Yale Laboratory. Harriet enrolled in the class, and they were married in 1809.

In the Silliman family photograph below, a portrait of Harriet Trumbull Silliman (1783–1850) can be seen behind her widowed husband, Benjamin Silliman, Sr. (center, 1779-1864), who is surrounded by their children. Standing in the back row are Benjamin Silliman, Jr. (1816-1885), father of Alice and Susan Silliman, the first art school students, and Faith (1812-1887). Sitting, from left to right, are Julia (1826-1892), Maria (1810-1880), and Henrietta (1823-1907).

Silliman Family, circa 1861

Constructed between 1864 and 1866, the High Victorian-style brownstone Art Building, named Street Hall in 1928, was designed by Peter B. Wight.

Harriet and Benjamin Silliman, Sr. lived on Hillhouse Avenue at the corner of Trumbull Street, where John Trumbull lived with them in later years. Through this connection Yale acquired his paintings, opening the Trumbull Gallery in 1832, the first university art gallery in America. Its fame sparked an interest in professional art instruction leading to the founding of the Yale School of the Fine Arts. The first two students to register in 1869 were Harriet’s granddaughters Alice and Susan, the daughters of Benjamin Silliman, Jr., documented at the top of the registration page below.

Yale School of Fine Arts register page during the inaugural year of the school, 1869

Caroline Leffingwell Street (1790-1877), circa 1869

The Art Building (Street Hall) and an endowment for the school were gifts of Augustus and Caroline Leffingwell Street, the first woman to be recognized as a donor of a building. After the death in 1866 of her husband, Augustus Street, B.A. 1812, Mrs. Street urged Yale to open the school quickly. She selected the first dean, John Ferguson Weir, and named the first two professorships after her husband and her father, William Leffingwell, B.A. 1786. The Streets’ seven daughters, all of whom died young, are thought to have been a factor in their decision to found at Yale “a school for practical instruction, open to both sexes, for such as propose to follow art as a profession.”

Yale granted its first Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1891, to Josephine Miles Lewis.

A painting class at the School of the Fine Arts, circa 1900.