Home to the country's oldest art gallery still in its original form, the athenaeum was initially founded as a library by Horace Fairbanks in 1871. Comprising some 9000 finely bound books of classic world literature, the library was soon complemented by the gallery, built around its crown jewel, Albert Bierstadt's 10ft-by-15ft painting, Domes of the Yosemite . The collection also includes other large-scale dramatic landscapes by Bierstadt's fellow Hudson River School artists such as Asher B Durand, Worthington Whittredge and Jasper Crospey.
