The Bennington Museum Celebrating Vermont’s Art and History

offers eleven galleries of permanent and changing exhibits and features the
largest public collection of Grandma Moses paintings & Bennington Pottery
in the world, fine and decorative arts, military artifacts,
the 1924 Martin-Wasp touring car, and the Bennington Flag, one of the earliest
‘stars and stripes’ in existence.

Military Gallery

This gallery focuses on the Revolutionary War battle named after the town of Bennington. Through maps, fine art, and rare artifacts, the display explains the battle and its outcomes, as well as placing it in a broader context of our Colonial past. This gallery also includes a fine exhibition of Vermont-made firearms from 1760 to 1900. Learn about the art and science of gun-smithing in the Green Mountain State.

 

Bennington Pottery Gallery & Study Center

Traces the hsitory of pottery which has been made in Bennington since 1785 when Captain John Norton began to produce utilitarian earthenware and stoneware. The Norton pottery grew throughout the 19th century and gained fame for its brilliantly decorated stoneware featuring flowers, birds, and animals.

Regular pottery production ceased in 1894, though the company operated as a wholesaler until 1911. The United States Pottery company (1847 - 1858) produced ornamental objects including yellow ware with Rockingham and flint enamel glazes, agate and granite wares, porcelain and parian. Technically innovative, the United States Pottery Company gained national prominence when its wares were featured in the 1853 Crystal Palace Exhibition in New York City. Today visitors can learn how these various types of ceramics were made by each company and used in Victorian homes.

A study center features an encyclopedic display of production work, along with copies of primary source documents concerning the companies.

The Bennington Pottery Gallery and Study Center was funded in part with grants from the Henry Luce Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Vermont Community Foundation.

 

Fine Art Gallery

Visitors delight in our collection of Fine Art. For example, Erastus Salisbury Field's Luman Preston Norton or such pieces as Ralph Earl's important 1798 "Townscape of Bennington" . Featured are early folk artists such as Ammi Philips and Oliver Tarbell Eddy, 19th-century artists such as William Morris Hunt and Frederick MacMonnies, and artists of the modern era such as Norman Rockwell and Simon Moselsio.

 

Grandma Moses Gallery

On view year round is a selection of works by Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860 - 1961), who became known to the world as Grandma Moses, one of America's most noted folk artists.

Moses began painting in her seventies and by the time of her death in 1961, she had created over 1500 works of art.

The Bennington Museum holds the largest public collection of Moses' paintings in the country, as well as "Yarn paintings", art supplies, and the 18th century tilt-top table Moses painted with rustic scenes and used as her easel.

 

Wasp Gallery

The Martin Wasp automobile was designed and built by Karl Martin in Bennington between 1920 and 1925. Spectacular in appearance and constructed of the finest materials, the Wasp in the Bennington Museum is one of fewer than twenty ever produced, and is the only one in existence.