Cosimo Rosselli, Madonna and Child Enthroned, c. 1475-80

With one of the oldest and most distinguished collections in Florida, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum can boast of more than 5,000 objects from antiquity to the contemporary.  More than a century ago, the collection was born with the Baker Museum, which housed an assortment of natural history objects and fragments. 

After a fire destroyed the building, the Smithsonian Institution granted a request for objects and artifacts to replace some of what was lost. The College had also begun to receive contributions of oil portraits of college notables, engraved prints, and other objects from forward-thinking alumni.

From Native American artifacts to major paintings and decorative objects gifted to Rollins under Hamilton Holt, president of the College from 1925 to 1949, Rollins acquired a collection reflecting the expansive view of the world that Holt encouraged at the school.  Furnishings, bronze sculptures, Middle Eastern artifacts, religious iconography, and fine paintings established a worldly ambience on campus. Although it received its first paintings in 1896, Rollins officially began collecting fine art in 1937 when the Samuel H. Kress Foundation donated two early Italian Renaissance paintings.  The quality and diversity of these holdings had now achieved critical mass and captured the attention of benefactors whose gifts would expand the breadth and depth of the collection, ultimately building fine early American and European collections.