Exterior view of the Morgan Memorial Building of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT

The Wadsworth Atheneum is comprised of five connected buildings. In 1907, Hartford-born J. Pierpont “J.P.” Morgan, a Gilded Age banking tycoon, proposed building the Junius Spencer Morgan Memorial in his father’s honor. The Beaux-Arts Morgan Memorial of 1910–15 was designed by Benjamin Wistar Morris. The Morgan Memorial served as a prototype for the Pierpont Morgan wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1917 J. P. Morgan Jr. presented the Atheneum with more than 1,300 objects from his father’s collection of Greek and Roman antiquities and European decorative arts.