The trustees of the Parrish Art Museum have decided to split the institution. They had been negotiating with local officials for an expansion without coming to any agreement on this. The plan is to keep Samuel Parrish’s marble busts and Italian Renaissance paintings at the Job’s Lane building in the Village of Southampton. A new 80,000-square-foot museum building will be built three miles away, on the campus of Southampton College.

Susan Griffin, co-chair of Parrish’s Board of Trustees, stated: “We find this a win-win situation. When we were forced to critically look at that (village) site, we saw we might, with compromise, put our plan there, but we would have no room for future expansion."

The development of The Parrish Art Museum from a small village museum into an important regional art institution undoubtedly would have pleased its founder, the cultural and civic-minded benefactor Samuel Longstreth Parrish (1849-1932). Born into a family of prominent Philadelphia Quakers and educated at Harvard (where he first developed his taste for Italian painting), Samuel Parrish began collecting art seriously in the early 1880s, shortly after moving his successful law practice from Philadelphia to New York.

It was during these same years that Parrish began paying regular visits to his family’s home in Southampton. The village, then as now a popular summer resort, quickly caught his interest, and before long he became actively involved in its affairs.

While traveling in Italy in the fall of 1896, Parrish decided to build a museum in Southampton to house his rapidly growing collection of Italian Renaissance art. He purchased a small parcel of land adjacent to the library and commissioned a fellow Southampton summer resident, the architect Grosvenor Atterbury (1869-1956), to design a suitable structure.

The Museum was actually pieced together in several installments over a period of sixteen years. The first Art Museum at Southampton, as the Parrish was then known, was a single large exhibition hall. Constructed in wood and entered from Main Street, the hall was built during the summer of 1897. It was not until the following year that the Museum was incorporated and a catalogue of the collection, which included paintings, copies of classical and Renaissance sculpture was published. A few years later, a fireproof brick wing (designed by Atterbury and financed largely by Samuel Parrish’s brother, James Cresson Parrish) was attached to the north side of the building. The new exhibition hall, completed in 1902 soon became a popular site for concerts and art lectures.

As the collection continued to expand, a second wing soon became necessary. In 1913, Atterbury extended the Museum to the south, toward Job’s Lane. The new wing included a Renaissance-inspired arched loggia through which one entered the Museum,flanked by gates that permitted direct access to the gardens.

The collection and the building were bequeathed to the Village of Southampton when Samuel Parrish died in 1932. The founder’s death, coupled with the Depression and the war years that followed, brought developments at the Museum to a standstill for the next two decades.

In the 1950s, the new president of the Museum’s Board of Trustees, Mrs. Robert M. Littlejohn, brought new life to the Parrish. She launched a major campaign to strengthen the Museum’s holdings in American art. Paintings by Thomas Moran, Childe Hassam, Guy Pene du Bois, and Thomas Doughty were added to the collection.