Art Gallery

One reason James J. Hill built a new home on Summit Avenue was to showcase his impressive collection of French landscape paintings. The spacious, two-story, skylit room was considered a model of a modern gallery when the home was completed in 1891.

Grooves along the walls enabled paintings to be hung frame to frame, several tiers high, and the skylight flooded the room with natural light—with shade provided by the large canopy and 133 carbon filament light bulbs for evening viewing. Paintings by 19th century Romantic and Barbizon French masters such as Corot, Courbet, Millet, and Delacroix crowded the walls, bronze sculptures filled the floor space, and art books lined the shelves and tables.

A 1006-pipe mechanical action tracker organ stretched two stories tall on the west wall of the gallery. Installed in the house at the recommendation of the interior designers, the organ is still played most Saturdays and at many special events.

Current Exhibit

Hazel Thorson Stoick Stoeckeler: A Retrospective

Oct. 10, 2009 - Jan. 17, 2010

During her rich and varied career, Minneapolis-born Hazel Thorson Stoick Stoeckeler (b. 1918) has been an educator, designer, university professor and world traveler. Above all, one profession has remained constant over the last seven decades -- visual artist.

This retrospective exhibit examines the artist's career with over 40 works of art spanning more than 60 years. It begins with work from the Society's collection that date from the late 1930s and continues with prepatory sketches for a mural completed in 1945 for the University of Minnesota. The exhibit concludes with a series of watercolors that document Stoeckeler's trips around the globe. These small, exquisite images are featured in a book titled, "Porthole Views of the World."

Lenders to the exhibit include the Cook County Historical Society, Grand Marais, Minnesota; University of Minnesota Archives and Libraries; Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering, University of Minnesota and the artist.