The Hortulus Farm Museum,  situated at the heart of Hortulus Farm Gardens, was founded in 2005 as a public showplace for the owners’ exceptional collection of Bucks County Impressionist paintings, as well as other notable artifacts and collections.

The New Hope Impressionists were characterized as America's "first truly national expression" by the artist and critic Guy Péne du Bois in 1915. Painting from the turn of the 20th Century to well into the Century’s second half, the New Hope Circle was founded in 1898 when artists Edward Redfield and William Lathrop settled at Phillips Mill, PA, quickly attracting a sympathetic group of like-minded artists. Eschewing the urban and industrial subjects of the popular Ashcan School, this group of Impressionist artists chose instead to focus on the beauty of the Delaware River Valley farmland and historic architecture that surrounded them, most of them painting en plein air. Edward Redfield, with his vigorously realistic, unsentimental brand of Impressionism, was the generally acknowledged stylistic leader of the New Hope Circle. However, what most characterized them was not a single, unified style but rather the emergence of many mature, distinctive voices.

The Museum, originally a dairy barn, was one of two added to the farmstead, along with other outbuildings, in about 1820. The Museum Collection was begun in 1985 with the purchase of a Charles Rosen canvas. The collection now totals 38 paintings and works on paper  by such celebrated local artists as Edward Willis Redfield, George W. Sotter, Kenneth R. Nunamaker, William Langston Lathrop, Ben Badura, Clarence Johnson, Walter Elmer Schofield, Fern Isabel Coppedge, George Folinsbee, and Daniel Garber, and will revolve through The Museum as space allows and a pleasing mixture dictates.

Also notable are the owners’ horticultural library of almost 900 garden books, many of them 19th and early 20th Century, as well as collections of antique garden tools, dog statuary, flower frogs, and garden letters, particularly those of British gardening legends Gertrude Jeckyll and Rosemary Verey, which are viewable on the north wall of The Museum. The zinc statue of Mercury is 19th Century and the 8 botanical photographic studies over the bar are from the 1929 “Art Form In Nature” series by renowned German photographer Karl Blossfeldt.

Hortulus Farm
60 Thompson Mill Road
Wrightstown, PA, 18940

The Museum, is open to groups of 8 or more by appointment and may be added to your garden tour.

Admission is $8.00 per person.

Phone: 215.598.0550  
Fax: 215.598.8076