The Driehaus Museum

About

The Driehaus Museum engages and inspires the global community through exploration and ongoing conversations in art, architecture, and design of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its permanent collection and temporary exhibitions are presented in an immersive experience within the restored Samuel Mayo Nickerson Mansion, completed in 1883, at the height of the Gilded Age, and the 1926 Murphy Auditorium. The Museum’s collection reflects and is inspired by the collecting interests, vision, and focus of its founder, the late Richard H. Driehaus. The Murphy Auditorium is designed by noted Chicago architects Benjamin Marshall and Charles E. Fox, who also designed the Blackstone and Drake Hotels. It originally served as a center for surgical research, education, and advancement and to develop programs for the standardization of hospitals. Erected as a monument to Dr. John B. Murphy (1857-1916), a founding member of the American College of Surgeons and considered one of the greatest clinical educators of his generation, the building’s iconic limestone exterior is Marshall’s interpretation of the Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Consolation (1900) in Paris. The building features a pair of cast bronze doors produced by Tiffany Studios at the front entrance, comprising six panels depicting prominent figures in medicine’s history. It also has a towering, multicolored stained-glass window inside the auditorium.