“Built largely through gifts, it is in many ways a collection of collections, telling the stories of the passion and experience of numerous collectors and their commitment to providing Smith students with the opportunity to study and learn directly from original works of art.”

– Jessica Nicole, “Introduction: a century of collecting Art of Asia”, in Collecting art of Asia: highlights of the Asian collection of the Smith College Museum of Art, edited by Linda Muehlig (Northampton, MA: Smith College Museum of Art, 2013),10-28.

Smith College Museum of Art was historically and recently offered significant works of Asian art. These artworks not only are valuable for their teaching and research purposes but also help illustrate the various stages and means of collecting Asian art in the west. In this section, I have selected four case studies of Asian art collections offered to Smith College: the Hart Collection that was originally a study collection formed in Europe during the 1930s -1940s, the Todd Collection that was assembled in China by Major Todd himself from the 1920s -1930s, the Reid Collection and the Told Collection that were both assembled during late 1990s and the early 21st century but through many different ways.