Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design
224 Benefit Street
Providence, RI 02903
Phone: 401-454-6500
http://risdmuseum.org
Pendleton House is a part of the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design. It is a replica of a 1799 Federal-style house at 72 Waterman Street in Providence. That was the home of Charles L. Pendleton (1846–1904), who gave his extensive collection of American and European furniture, paintings, silver, and other decorative arts to the Rhode Island School of Design with the understanding that the collection would be displayed in an appropriate building.
The collection was acquired in 1904. Two years later the Pendleton House we see today was designed by the architectural firm of Stone, Carpenter, and Willson. It was the first museum wing anywhere devoted solely to American decorative arts. The first floor by and large replicates Pendleton’s home. The collection has exceptionally fine examples of eighteenth-century furniture from Newport, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The Newport collection includes six pieces of furniture made by the renowned cabinetmakers the Goddards and the Townsends. On the second floor of the house there are more American period rooms.
Pendleton House is contiguous with the rest of the RISD Museum, which arguably has the finest and most diverse art collection in America for a museum its size: art which is Ancient, Asian, European (medieval to contemporary), and American (colonial to the present). To name a few of the artists whose art is in the permanent collection, there are works by Tiepolo, Reynolds, Rodin, Monet, Picasso, Nevelson, Warhol, and RISD alumnus Chihuly.