Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum
The Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum – formerly The Smith Institute – has played a very special part in the history of Stirling since its foundation in 1874. Established by the bequest of artist Thomas Stuart Smith (1815–1869) on land supplied by the Burgh of Stirling, it is an historic public-private partnership which has continued to the present day. It was founded as a gallery of mainly contemporary art, with museum and library reading room ‘for the benefit of the inhabitants of Stirling, Dunblane and Kinbuck’.
Stephen Carlton Clark
Clark's brothers Sterling and Ambrose also were art collectors—Sterling owned 39 Renoirs and founded the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts; "Brose" collected equestrian art—but the family feud ended the possibility of consolidating all three collections in a single museum at Cooperstown. In 2006, the Clark Art Institute mounted an exhibition that provided a glimpse of what might have been. "The Clark Brothers Collect: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings" featured masterpieces from Sterling's collection hanging alongside masterpieces once owned by Stephen C. Clark. The exhibition traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007.