Philadelphia Museum of Art history

In 1877, the museum opened their doors.

Starting in 1882, Clara Jessup Moore donated a remarkable collection of antique furniture, enamels, carved ivory, jewelry, metalwork, glass, ceramics, books, textiles and paintings.

In 1892 Anna H. Wilstach bequeathed a large painting collection, including many American paintings, and an endowment of half a million dollars for additional purchases.

The institution’s first curatorial departments were established in 1893: textiles, lace and embroidery, numismatics, and pottery.

The Countess de Brazza's lace collection was acquired in 1894 forming the nucleus of the lace collection.

Works by James Abbott McNeill Whistler and George Inness were purchased within a few years and Henry Ossawa Tanner's The Annunciation was bought in 1899.

The building itself, opened on January 1, 1901, is one of the city’s great monuments and is the largest example of French Second Empire architecture in the United States.

In 1902, Abele had become the first African-American student to be graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Architecture, which is presently known as Penn's School of Design.

In 1903 it became the first museum to issue a museum bulletin, a quarterly publication (though it became less frequent in time) of professional and scholarly interest.

Construction of the main building began in 1919, when Mayor Thomas B. Smith laid the cornerstone in a Masonic ceremony.

In 1925 architect and architectural historian Fiske Kimball was appointed director of the museum, a position he held for 30 years.

Once the building's exterior was completed, twenty second-floor galleries containing English and American art opened to the public on March 26, 1928, though a large amount of interior work was incomplete.

Other contributions by Kimball included the chronological installation of the museum’s works of art and the establishment of the education department in 1929.

In 1938 the museum officially changed its name to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Also nearby is the National Constitution Center, which was opened on July 4, 2003, to promote the better understanding of the United States Constitution.

The Perelman Building, which opened in 2007, houses more than 150,000 prints, drawings and photographs, along with 30,000 costume and textile pieces, and over 1,000 modern and contemporary design objects including furniture, ceramics and glasswork.

In 2011, writers of the comedy TV series 30 Rock predicted as much.