The American Museum and Gardens (formerly American Museum in Britain) is a museum of American art and culture based at Claverton, near Bath, England. Its collections of American furniture, quilts and folk art are displayed in a Grade I listed 19th-century house, surrounded by gardens overlooking the valley of the River Avon.
Claverton Manor
The country house was designed for John Vivian, a barrister who had purchased the manor in 1816, by Jeffry Wyatville in 1819–20. It stands on the steep west slope of the Avon valley, above the Claverton village, and is about east of the centre of Bath.
The house has three storeys and is built in ashlar. Its east elevation, overlooking the river valley, has full-height bows flanking three central bays with a projecting square porch, above it two Ionic columns in antis. The south elevation has five bays, the central three embellished with Ionic pilasters under a pediment bearing the Vivian arms. A tall screen wall to the south has urns on pedestals, and a six-bay north wing containing service rooms has similar decoration. The building and walls were designated as Grade I listed in 1956. A two-storey coach house and stables were built to the south of the house, also in ashlar, around 1820.
Earlier owners of the estate include Sir Edward Hungerford (d.1607), whose son William (d.1656) and grandson William (d.1693) were also MPs. In 1758 it was bought by Ralph Allen, owner of Bath stone quarries, and in 1816 by John Vivian, who replaced the earlier manor house (near Claverton church) with the present house on its elevated site. Vivian's second son George, an artist and traveller, developed the gardens and added the screen walls.
The estate had a succession of owners after it was sold by the Vivian family in 1869, and during the ownership of the Skrine family the gardens were in 1897 the venue for the first public speech by Winston Churchill. The house was the headquarters of an RAF barrage balloon group during the Second World War. an American psychiatrist from New York and heir to a substantial Standard Oil fortune; and his lifelong partner John Judkyn (1913 – 1963), The museum was opened to the public for the first time on July 1, 1961, and remains the only museum devoted to American decorative arts outside the boundaries of the United States.
Richard Wendorf, an American literary scholar and librarian, was Director of the Museum between 2010 and 2021.
Collection and exhibitions
The museum collection is displayed in the manor house and includes a variety of American cultural artefacts, decorative arts and antiques, as well as a series of Period Rooms covering a historical period from circa 1690 to 1860. These rooms are reconstructions of those from a variety of historic American interiors, including a late seventeenth-century Puritan home, an eighteenth-century tavern, and a sumptuous New Orleans bedroom dating from around the eve of the American Civil War in 1860.
The museum also hosts a different exhibition every year exploring more recent American history. Recent temporary exhibitions have included The Colourful World of Kaffe Fassett, Shooting Stars: Britain and America in the 1970s (featuring the photography of Carinthia West), and Kith and Kin: The Quilts of Gee's Bend. These exhibitions are situated in the museum's exhibition gallery, located in a separate building to the manor house. The museum's gift shop is also located in this building.
Garden
The grounds of the museum are set within the wider landscape of the valley of the River Avon and has fine views over the valley towards the village of Limpley Stoke and the Kennet and Avon Canal. Garden features include a small grotto with a water spout.
The museum gardens include extensive renovated areas representing trends in both English landscape and American garden design. The American Museum originally employed Lanning Roper to design a mixed border, but since the museum opened in 1961, the 30 acres around the house have been developed to include a replica of George Washington’s garden at Mount Vernon, as well as a Lewis and Clark trail, and an arboretum that includes a collection of American trees.
The Mount Vernon Garden, which is a re-creation of a part of George Washington's garden at Mount Vernon, is situated away from the house on the site of a former Italianate garden and was opened on June 26, 1962. It was established by a trust deed in 1959, registered as a charity in 1968 and re-registered in 2004.