Ackland Art Museum

William Hayes Ackland, a native of Tennessee and an amateur art collector, wanted to leave money in his will to establish an art museum at a Southern university. In a 1936 will, he initially narrowed his choices to Duke University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Rollins College in Florida, in that order, with UNC receiving the donation if Duke refused it. After a visit to Duke's campus and meetings with the then-eager administration, Ackland decided that only Duke should receive the $1.25 million bequest and removed UNC from his will, with Rollins receiving a much smaller donation. Ackland bequeathed Duke his entire fortune on the condition that he be buried within the newly built museum. ==Collection==

The permanent collection at the Ackland holds about 21,000 works, with its most notable regional holdings in Asian art as well as works of art on paper (i.e. prints, photographs, and drawings). The collection also has important holdings of European masterworks, twentieth-century and contemporary art, African art, and North Carolina pottery. Artists in the collection include Eugène Delacroix, Albrecht Dürer, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Käthe Kollwitz, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Max Weber. In 2024 the museum restituted the painting ''L'atelier du Maître / The Master's workshop'' to the heirs of Armand Dorville, a French Jewish art collector whose family was murdered in the Holocaust. File:Guercino - Assunzione Vergine - Ackland Art Museum.jpg|Guercino, Assumption of the Virgin File:Madame de Villeneuve-Flayosc.jpg|, portrait of Mélanie de Forbin-Gardanne, Marquise de Villeneuve-Flayosc (1759-1841) File:Damocles-WestallPC20080120-8842A.jpg|Richard Westall's Sword of Damocles (1812) File:Greene-PowersPC20080120-8783A.jpg|Hiram Powers, Duff Greene, marble sculpture (1834-1837) File:Cleopatra and the Peasant.jpeg|Eugène Delacroix, Cleopatra and the Peasant (1838) ==See also==