The Lunder Collection

In 2013, Peter and Paula Lunder gave the Colby Museum more than five hundred works of American art dating from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. An additional gift of more than one thousand works was made in 2017, and the Lunder Collection continues to grow, today numbering more than 1,800 objects. 

The collection includes significant holdings of American paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs by figures such as Ansel Adams, Mary Cassatt, Elizabeth Catlett, Frederic Edwin Church, Winslow Homer, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Maya Lin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John Singer Sargent, Walter Ufer, and Kay WalkingStick. The Lunder Collection also contains one of the world’s foremost collections of artwork by James McNeill Whistler, with more than three hundred objects representing a comprehensive survey of Whistler’s career across mediums, and nearly 150 rare books, journals, photographs, and archival materials composing the museum’s Whistler reference collection. The Colby Museum actively contributes to Whistler studies on an ongoing basis; between 2010 and 2024 it led the Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies.

These holdings of American art are complemented by selected works by key international figures such as Ai Weiwei, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gustave Courbet, Otto Dix, Francisco Goya, Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. The museum is also proud to own the Lunder-Colville Chinese Art Collection, consisting of forty-five exceptional works of ritual and mortuary art dating from the prehistoric period to the Jin dynasty (1115–1234). It is an important resource for the study of early Chinese art and culture in the state of Maine.