Opened in 2018, the Study Gallery in the DAR Museum is not your typical museum gallery. It is more like an open storage area, allowing visitors a greater degree of access to the collection. This makes it an ideal place to exhibit objects that would get “lost” in the period rooms: miniature paintings, jewelry, and other tiny things that you wouldn’t be able to see from the doorway. In this gallery you can now examine them up close and personal!
Opening drawers in the DAR Museum study gallery will reveal many wonderful and interesting objects. The objects are carefully stored in drawers and the curators have selected a wide variety of objects, ranging from the exceptional to the everyday. This method allows us to have a sampling of everything in the collection, including those sensitive objects which cannot remain on display for long. For example, textiles are easily subject to damage from light. The drawers allow the objects to stay out of the light except for those few minutes when someone is looking at the object.