Author Description

Atlanta's High Museum of Art came into being through Mrs. Joseph M. High's 1926 gift to the city of her Peachtree Street home. In 1949 J. J. Haverty's daughter Mary E. Haverty bequeathed to the museum the Haverty collection of paintings, which included many outstanding American works of the early twentieth century. Today the museum's fine collection of American art includes nearly two hundred paintings and watercolors, ranging from a 1753 portrait by Jeremiah Theus to the 1929-30 Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by Henry Ossawa Tanner, an African-American protege of Thomas Eakins.