DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum

A major collection of British and American decorative arts from 1600–1830, attached to Colonial Williamsburg

The DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum is the fine arts anchor of Colonial Williamsburg, housed in a modern building largely concealed below ground adjacent to the reconstructed Public Hospital. The collection covers British and American decorative arts from roughly 1600 to 1830 — ceramics, furniture, silver, paintings, textiles, and metalwork — with holdings strong enough to constitute a major museum in its own right.

The collection is particularly notable for its Virginia-made furniture and silver, which reflects the material ambitions of the colonial planter class. The museum is connected to the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, which holds the largest collection of American folk art in the country, through a shared admission. Together the two museums provide an art history companion to the living history experience of Colonial Williamsburg itself.

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The DeWitt Wallace Museum is named after the founder of Reader's Digest, who donated $10 million to establish it in the 1980s. The collection includes more than 8,000 objects and is one of the most important repositories of early American furniture and decorative arts in the country. The building is mostly underground — built beneath the reconstructed Public Hospital — to avoid disrupting the colonial streetscape above.