About the Museum Collections

The Fine Art Collection contains approximately 400 paintings and several thousand prints, drawings and other works on paper ranging from the 17th through 20th centuries. Many of the oil paintings are hung on walls throughout the building in thematic groupings such as “Portraits of Prominent New Yorkers” on our third floor and “Historical Views of and from Brooklyn” in our first floor tile lobby. Notable works in the collection include paintings by Francis Guy, John Wesley Jarvis, John Mackie Falconer, the Bard Brothers, and 17th century drawings by Dutch traveler Jaspar Danckaerts, etchings by Joseph Pennell, and architectural studies by Francis Hopkinson Smith. The collection has been photographed and cataloged into an in-house database available for searching at the library.

The BHS Fine Arts Initiative has been made possible by a very generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.

Artifact Collection
The Brooklyn Historical Society holds hundreds of artifacts relating the history of Brooklyn. Unfortunately, this collection is not available at this time as it is stored off-site. Future plans are being developed for bringing items back to the BHS building and making them available to researchers.

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