Matthew Vassar

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"Matthew Vassar, [was] sixty-nine, with no previous experience as an educator, [when he] endowed and founded a private college for women. It was the most unexpected and controversial accomplishment of a feisty Poughkeepsie business and civic leader's career. In 1861, public education was not mandatory in the United States. There were very few high schools for either sex, and almost no real colleges for women. Yet that year Vassar, with no more formal education behind him than a meager two or three years of grammar school, out of the intellectual blue founded Vassar Female College, where women might experience the same serious educational challenge as their brother who went to Yale, Harvard, or Brown. Once he had decided to use much of his large, self-made fortune to achieve this end, he worked without stopping. His contributions to the education of American women constitute a unique achievement with national and international implications."
--from Elizabeth A. Daniels, Matthew Vassar 1792-1868: More than a Brewer,1992.

"An art gallery was included in the architectural plans from the outset. At the first meeting of the trustees in 1861, Matthew Vassar expressed the wish that the course of study should embrace "Aesthetics, as treating of the beautiful in Nature and Art ... to be illustrated by an extensive Gallery of Art ...." Although several colleges had museums or galleries before the founding of Vassar, Vassar is the first college known to me in which art and education were structurally integrated in a single building."
--from Pamela Askew's "The Department of Art at Vassar: 1865-1931" in The Early Years of Art History in the United States, edited by Craig Hugh Smythe and Peter M. Lukehart, 1993.

For more information about the history of Vassar College, see http://faculty.vassar.edu/~daniels/.