Qualla: Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery

Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hi540, CC BY-SA 4.0. It is a strange place to find a Botticelli. The Museum and Gallery on the Bob Jones University campus in Greenville, South Carolina, holds works by Tintoretto, Rubens, van Dyck, Cranach the Elder, Murillo, and Veronese. Seven Benjamin West paintings from the Progress of Revealed Religion series, originally commissioned by King George III, hang here. The collection is genuinely world-class. It is also impossible to talk about honestly without talking about the university that owns it, an institution that enforced racial segregation until 1971, that banned interracial dating until 2000, and that lost its federal tax exemption in 1983 because of those very policies.

Image: Hi540 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery: What Bob Jones Jr. Bought

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Francisco Herrera the Elder, Public domain. Bob Jones Jr., son of the university's founder, started collecting religious paintings in 1948. Three years later, on Thanksgiving Day 1951, the first 25 paintings went on display in two galleries next to a collection of antiquities. Even at the start, the holdings included works...

Image: Francisco Herrera the Elder | Public domain

Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery: The Other Record

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Asheville Post Card Co., Asheville (publisher), Public domain. Bob Jones University was founded in 1927 by Bob Jones Sr., an evangelist who built the school on a Christian fundamentalist platform that rejected racial integration as forcefully as it rejected theological modernism. African American students were not admitted until 1971, and on...

Image: Asheville Post Card Co., Asheville (publisher) | Public domain

Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery: The Move That Did Not Happen

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2008, the museum opened a second location in downtown Greenville at Heritage Green, with the idea of reaching audiences that might not otherwise visit the university campus. It did not draw the crowds the trustees had hoped for. In 2017 the downtown satellite closed, and the m...

Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery: What You Can See When It Is Open

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lucas Cranach the Elder, Public domain. When the museum is open, the highlights include Botticelli's Madonna and Child with an Angel from around 1490, a small panel with the unmistakable Florentine lyricism of his Madonnas. Tintoretto's Visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon is a swirling dark Venetian canvas full of a...

Image: Lucas Cranach the Elder | Public domain