Portrait Hall

The Portrait Hall is a special space in that it is focused on a major theme in art history, rather than the geographical and cultural designations used to organize most of the Museum’s galleries. The Portrait Hall is the second-floor hallway overlooking the Great Hall, a central throughway of the Marcia and John Price Museum Building. Many UMFA visitors transition through this hallway from the first floor to the second floor via the elevator from the lobby and will now be greeted by some of the most beloved paintings and sculptures in the UMFA’s collection.

The new use of this long gallery for the UMFA’s Portrait Hall parallels the European tradition of presenting portraits of family in great hallways in their residences. For the aristocracy, recording the family lineage was significant for the passage of titles and the associated rights and wealth that came with those titles. To a lesser extent, Americans continued this tradition of displaying family portraits, although the message of entitlement was less pronounced than in the European context and was supplanted with sentiments of familial endearment and pride.