.When it first opened its doors to the public in 1894, the Leland Stanford Jr. Museum was unique, having been privately founded by a family with a general collection of world art on par with the major public museums at the time. For decades,
Leland Stanford and his wife
Jane Stanford had traveled extensively, collecting American and European
Old Master paintings, as well as a wide array of antiquities from Egypt, Greece, Rome, Asia, the Americas, and other parts of the world. By the turn of the century, the Stanford museum, with its large archeological and ethnological holdings as well as art, was the largest privately owned museum in the world. The
1906 San Francisco earthquake was an enormous disaster for the museum. The Roman, Egyptian and Asian galleries were destroyed, and three-quarters of the building was damaged beyond repair. The Oxford Assyriologist
Archibald Sayce, recalling a visit to Stanford in 1917, wrote that "the rooms of its spacious Museum were still a scene of wreckage. The magnificent collection of Greek vases it once contained had been hopelessly shattered; even the Egyptian mummies were torn and dismembered." The earthquake, along with the death of co-founder
Jane Stanford the previous year, sharply curtailed the budget of the museum, which had no endowment. Faculty and administration had little interest in restoring the museum, and the building and its collection fell into disrepair. Curatorial duties ceased. He reorganized the museum and began a regular series of exhibitions at both venues. But during this period the art collection was decimated by loss, sales, and gifts, and the poorly secured storage area became a quarry for local collectors and dealers. In 1945, after de Lemos' departure, the museum was officially closed in order to conduct an inventory of the art holdings. In 1953, the Committee for Art at Stanford was founded, with the intention of recruiting members and raising funds to reopen the museum, and in 1954, after nine years of stocktaking, the museum reopened. Sculpture Garden.In 2011, Stanford University announced the donation of 121 paintings and sculptures from
Harry W. Anderson and Mary Margaret Anderson, and their daughter, Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, of
Atherton, California. The collection, mostly of
post-WW2 American art, includes works by
Mark Rothko,
Richard Diebenkorn,
Manuel Neri,
Frank Lobdell and
Willem de Kooning, and
Jackson Pollock's
Lucifer ("probably the privately owned 20th century American artwork most coveted by museums nationwide"). To house and display this collection, a new museum, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, was built directly adjacent to the Cantor Arts Center. Designed by the same architect who designed the new wing of the Cantor, Richard Olcott of
Ennead Architects, the Anderson Collection opened in 2014. The building has 15,000 square feet of exhibition space. Like the Cantor, the Anderson Collection is free and open to the public. ==Collection==