The Museum was founded in 1904, when the Reading School District board authorized the purchase of exhibits from the Saint Louis World's Fair . These new purchases were added to the private natural history collections of Dr. Levi W. Mengel.^[1] The Museum opened its doors to the general public in 1913; that same year, The Museum started collecting works of art. Levi Mengel was The Museum's first director and was its founding father. Christopher Shearer, a well-known landscape artist was The Museum's first curator of art. Ground was broken at its current location in 1925, and by 1928, the Museum was open to the public in its new Beaux-Art style structure that was designed by William Forbes Smith.^[2] In 1998, architect Der Scutt was commissioned to add an atrium entrance to the existing structure. The Arboretum was planned in the late-1920s by renowned American landscape architect John Nolen.^[3] Since 1991, The Museum has been operated by The Foundation for the Reading Public Museum.

The Museum's art collection contains works from many cultures but the strengths of the collection include American works of art. Its fine art collection includes more than seven hundred oil paintings by American and international artists. Paintings by Benjamin West, Raphaelle Peale, Thomas Birch, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Sully, Peter Rothermel, Jacob Eichholtz, Paul Weber, Hermann Herzog, Worthington Whittredge, Frederic Church, Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase, John Singer Sargent, John Henry Twachtman, N. C. Wyeth, Edward Redfield, John Fulton Folinsbee, Fern Coppedge, Paulette van Roekens, Walter Elmer Schofield, George Sotter, Daniel Garber, George Bellows, John French Sloan, Frank Weston Benson, William Paxton, Colin Campbell Cooper, Guy Carleton Wiggins, Abbott Handerson Thayer, Elihu Vedder, Joseph Stella, Frederick Judd Waugh, Aldro Hibbard, Alfred Henry Maurer, Arthur B. Davies, and Leon Dabo form the core of the historic American art collection. American modernist works in the permanent collection include those by Milton Avery, Alexander Calder, Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Helen Frankenthaler, Jules Olitski, and Louise Nevelson.

These join a group of European paintings by Edgar Degas, Charles Francois Daubigny, Julien Dupre, Albert Lebourg, Marià Fortuny, Martin Rico y Ortega, Fritz Thaulow, Oswald Aachenbach, and Anton Mauve, among others, which are in The Museum's holdings. Sculptures by Aguste Rodin, Edward McCartan, Harriett Whitney Frishmuth, Cyrus Dallin, James Earl Fraser, Henry Moore, Harry Bertoia, George Segal, Nancy Graves, Frank Stella, and Deborah Butterfield are also part of the permanent collection at RPM. More than 12,000 works on paper from illuminated manuscripts, works by Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Francisco Goya, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, through the prints of Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Chuck Close, and Keith Haring are also housed in the collection. Photographs by Edweard Muybridge, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, Berenice Abbott, and Dorthea Lange are represented in the collection.

The Museum's collection includes Nefrina, a mummy from the Ptolemaic period in ancient Egypt.^[4] The ancient collection also includes a notable collection of Greek vases (including the Herakles Vase attributed to the Alkmene Painter), and Greek and Roman marbles.^[5] The Arms and Armor gallery features European examples from the sixteenth^[6] and seventeenth centuries--including a Maximilian suit of armor-- as well as examples from Japan, the Islamic world, Africa, and the South Pacific.

Hundreds of historic North American Indian artworks from the Lenape, Montagnais, Inuit, Blackfoot, Acoma, Hopi, Sioux, Crow, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Chippewa, Cochiti, and Mandan peoples are housed at The Reading Public Museum. The Museum also includes Asian collections with artwork from China, Japan, India, and Thailand.

The Museum also houses a large collection of Pennsylvania German objects that include fraktur, painted furniture--including one of the finest examples of a dower chest by the Black Unicorn Artist,^[7] glazed earthenware, and paintings.^[8] The Museum also has galleries dedicated to American Art, Modern and Contemporary Art, European Art, the arts of North American Indians, Ancient Civilizations, Arts of the Ancient Americas,^[9] and Natural History, among others.

The Museum's natural history collections include thousands of specimens of moths and butterflies (many of them collected by Levi W. S. Mengel), as well as other insects, birds, nests, bird eggs, mammals, fossils, minerals, botanical specimens, and animal skins.

• List of botanical gardens in the United States

• Official website
• Reading Public Museum within Google Arts & Culture
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