‘Nothing must be changed’: Rush Hawkins’ lost memorial museum

ABSTRACT In the last years of his life, eccentric art collector and New York politician Rush Hawkins laboured over the creation of a memorial museum to honour his late wife, a descendant of the Brown family of Rhode Island, and house the collection of art and incunabula that he spent a lifetime acquiring. Hawkins created an eclectic museum organised according to his personal collecting, with the graves of his wife and himself intended to anchor the collection in perpetuity. After his death, the Memorial became an out-dated relic of the past, poorly funded and without effective leadership. Absorbed by Brown University in the 1940s, parts of the Memorial’s collections have been dispersed to other university units and the building adapted for other uses.