Interior view of the academy’s museum.
The Victorian-Gothic building was built in 1876 by the Philadelphia firm of Frank Furness and George Hewitt.
Hewitt was a pupil of William Morris Hunt who introduced him to the aesthetics of the modern Gothic Revival. Both interior and exterior combine influences of the day’s leading designers including John Ruskin’s predilection for the richly colored designs of fourteenth-century Venice, Christopher Dresser’s Eastern-influenced ornament, and Viollet le Duc’s use of foliated decoration with cast-iron architecture.
Courtesy of Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
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