The Arthur Gideon Carleton Museum

The Arthur Gideon Carleton Museum is a museum and research library located at 225
Madison Avenue at East 36th Street in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, New
York City. It was founded in 1896 to house the private library of financier and philanthropist
(and some say, robber baron) Arthur Gideon Carleton. This peerless collection included
manuscripts and printed books, some of them in rare bindings, as well as his collection of
prints and drawings.

The library was designed by Charles McKim of the firm of McKim, Mead and White and cost
$1.2 million. It was made a public institution in 1904 in accordance with Carletons will.

The library is a complex of buildings which serve as a museum and scholarly research center.
The scope of the collection was shaped in its early years as a private collection by Rutherford
Hafner, Carletons personal librarian.

The most internationally significant part of the collection is its relatively small but very select
collection of illuminated manuscripts, and medieval artworks such as the Stavelot Triptych
and the metalwork covers of the Lindau Gospels.

Among the more famous manuscripts are the Carleton Bible, Carleton Beatus, Hours of
Catherine of Cleves, Farnese Hours, Carleton Black Hours, and Codex Glazier. The manuscript
collection also includes authors' original manuscripts, including some by Sir Walter Scott and
Honor de Balzac.
It also contains a large collection of incunabula, prints, and drawings of European artists
Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Gainsborough, Drer, and Picasso;
early printed Bibles, among them three Gutenberg Bibles; and many examples of fine
bookbinding.

Other holdings include material from ancient Egypt and medieval liturgical objects (including
Coptic literature examples), mile Zola, William Blake's original drawings for his edition of
the Book of Job; concept drawings for The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupry; a Percy
Bysshe Shelley notebook; originals of poems by Robert Burns; a unique Charles Dickens
manuscript of A Christmas Carol with handwritten edits and markup from the author; a
journal by Henry David Thoreau; an extraordinary collection of autographed and annotated
libretti and scores from Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Mahler and Verdi, and Mozart's Haffner
Symphony in D Major; and manuscripts of George Sand, William Makepeace Thackeray, Lord
Byron, Charlotte Bront and nine of Sir Walter Scott's novels, including Ivanhoe.

The collection includes a few Old Master paintings collected by Carleton (works by Hans
Memling, Perugino, and Cima da Conegliano), but this has never been the collection's focus.
Other notable artists include Jean de Brunhoff, Paul Czanne, Vincent van Gogh, John Leech,
Gaston Phoebus, Rembrandt van Rijn, John Ruskin, and Ghirlandaio's masterpiece Portrait of
Giovanna Tornabuoni.

The Carleton has one of the world's greatest collections of ancient Near Eastern cylinder
seals, small stone cylinders finely engraved with images for transfer to clay by rolling. It also
contains many music manuscripts and a considerable collection of Victoriana, including one
of the most important collections of Gilbert and Sullivan manuscripts and related artifacts.

Of interest is a copy of the letter written by Andrea Corsali from India in 1516. This letter, one
of five in existence, contains the first description of the Southern Cross which is also
illustrated by Corsali in this letter and which was also named "croce" by him.

The Carleton was designed in the Classical Revival style by Charles Follen McKim of the
noted firm of McKim, Mead & White in 1893. McKim took his inspiration from the Villa Giulia
and its Nymphaeum.

The building has a facade of Tennessee marble and a Palladian arch entrance which features
two lionesses sculpted by Edward Clark Potter, who would later create the two lions that
guard the New York Public Library's main building. Also in the entrance are roundels and
panels by Andrew O'Connor and Adolph Weinman.

The museums interior is richly decorated, with a polychrome rotunda leading to three public
rooms. The rotunda has a domed ceiling with murals and plasterwork inspired by Raphael,
created by H. Siddons Mowbray. The West Library has been called "one of the greatest
achievements of American interior decoration," while the East Library features triple-tiers of
bookcases.
The Arthur Gideon Carleton Museum Board of Trustees
Mrs. Honoria Carleton van Vliet
Miss Fredericka Delano Carleton
Mrs. Dorothea Carleton Haverford
(Arthur Carleton Haverford)

Museum Staff
Museum Director: Dr. Edward Hagedorn
Associate Director: Mr. Charles Gaffney
Chief Curator: Dr. Albert Schermerhorn
Chief of Maintenance: Mr. Absalom Polk

Departments
Antiquities (Curator: Dr. Montague Braithwaite)
Manuscripts (Curator: Prof. Harcourt Smiff)
Fine Arts (Curator: Mrs. Leticia Grenville)
Decorative Arts (Curator: Mr. Paul Leicester)
Oriental and Far East Studies (Curator: Mr. Huizhong Sin)
Near East Studies (Curator: Dr. Hugo Plimpton-Vyse)
Indigenous and Mesoamerican Art (Curator: Mr. Wellington Finch)
Entomology (Curator: Mr. Albert Willard)
Restoration and Repairs (Mr. Angus Fenimore)
Security (Captain Leonidas Stockwell)
Hoffman Collection (Curator: Dr. Augustus Dobbins)
Van Tassel Collection (Curator: Dr. Malachi Clement)