American Experience celebrates the gifts of Marion Eddy Wheeler (Class of 1924), who with her husband Leeds Wheeler, collected 19th-century American landscape paintings in the 1960s, before it became a fashionable collecting area. Nine of these paintings were donated to the Davis Museum between 1974 and 2007, and they include some of the treasures of the museum’s holdings of American landscape painting. Several additional paintings that were part of the Wheelers’ collection have been borrowed for American Experience, highlighting the intensity and intimacy of their relatively brief, but passionate encounter with collecting.

Camille Dorange
2007 Liliane Pingoud Soriano Curatorial Fellow

Elizabeth Wyckoff
Former Curator of Prints and Drawings