Qualla: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The VMFA is one of the only museums in the world where you can walk in for free, find yourself two galleries deep in front of a Fabergé Imperial Easter Egg made for the last Tsar of Russia, and then keep walking until you stand before a Goya portrait, a Henri Rousseau jungle scene, a Frank Lloyd Wright chair, and a 27-ton late-Mughal marble pavilion shipped piece by piece from Rajasthan. The museum opened on January 16, 1936 — among the first art museums in the American South to be operated with state funds — and has been free to the public ever since, except for special exhibitions. By gallery square footage, it ranks among the largest art museums in North America. The collection holds five of the surviving Fabergé Imperial Easter Eggs, the largest such concentration outside of Russia.

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: A Depression-Era Birth

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The museum exists because Judge John Barton Payne could not bear to keep his paintings to himself. In 1919, he donated fifty paintings to the Commonwealth of Virginia in memory of his late second wife Jennie Byrd Bryan Payne and his mother Elizabeth Barton Payne. The state had no...

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: The Cheek Years

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Leslie Cheek Jr. arrived as director in 1948 and stayed until 1968. The New York Times obituary credited him with transforming the VMFA "from a small local gallery to a nationally known cultural center." His innovations were practical and theatrical at once. In 1953 he invented t...

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: Mellon, Pratt, Lewis

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Three families shaped the collection. Lillian Pratt — wife of John Lee Pratt of Fredericksburg — donated the Pratt Fabergé collection, the largest holding of Fabergé outside Russia. It includes five Imperial Easter Eggs: Rock Crystal (1896), Pelican (1898), Peter the Great (1903)...

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: Rumors of War

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2019, the museum installed a monumental Kehinde Wiley bronze sculpture on its front lawn facing Arthur Ashe Boulevard. The work, called Rumors of War, depicts a young Black man in dreadlocks, ripped jeans, and a hoodie astride a powerfully muscled horse — a direct response to ...

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: Walking the Collection

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The encyclopedic collection covers African, American, Ancient, Art Nouveau and Art Deco, English silver, European, Fabergé, Modern and Contemporary, South Asian, and East Asian art. The African collection has grown from 250 objects in the mid-1990s to roughly 500 today, with stre...