The Ayers Gallery

This splendid wood-paneled gallery is named for industrialist Edward Ayers, who, in 1936, founded the Zanesville Art Institute, now the Zanesville Museum of Art. After donating an array of artworks to form the core of the museum’s collection, Mr. Ayers continued for the rest of his life to search for new works that would foster a love for culture among the people of his home city.

When the institute commemorated its fifth anniversary, an impressive group of Mr. Ayers’s newest acquisitions were exhibited for the first time in the elegant setting you see here. Among these were David Teniers the Younger’s Monkeys at Play, which dates to 1645, and Peter Paul Rubens’s equestrian portrait of the Duke of Buckingham, which now hangs on the room’s east wall. Both paintings were acquired by Mr. Ayers in 1940 and were widely celebrated in local newspapers at the time.

In addition to providing a space worthy of these prized objects, this paneled room is a work of art in its own right. Its Norwegian spruce panels come from a house built around 1695 in the Hatton Garden section of London. When the house was demolished in the 1920s, publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst acquired the panels and stored them in New York, until Edward Ayers purchased them and brought them to Zanesville. The room was first installed in the ZMA’s original location at Maple and Adair Avenue. When the museum relocated in 1977, the room was dismantled, moved, and reassembled in its present configuration.

As the museum and its collection have grown, the Ayers Gallery has been home to fascinating artworks from across the world and across the centuries. One current highlight is Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema’s Portrait of Miss Alice Lewis. Miss Lewis was the daughter of Sir George Lewis, an English solicitor whose clients included Alma Tadema, James McNeill Whistler, Oscar Wilde, and even the Prince of Wales. By a quirk fate, Miss Lewis, born in 1865, grew up in the Hatton Garden area of London, the original location of this room’s wooden panels.

Eight decades after founding this museum, Edward Ayers’s legacy remains. The gallery that bears his name continues, as it has for generations.