Sole heir to wealthy financier George T. (1816–1901) and Jeanette Dwight Bliss (1852–1924), Susan Dwight Bliss was a New York collector and philanthropist. She inherited a sizeable collection of ancient Mediterranean and historic European art from her parents, prominent collectors of the Gilded Age, and continued to collect rare books, manuscripts, and historic art and artifacts herself. Bliss maintained a summer home in Bar Harbor and visited Bowdoin and the Walker Art Museum regularly during her travels through Maine. Beginning in the 1950s, she donated to Bowdoin many of her rare books, manuscripts, and the interior and furnishings of the library of her Upper Eastside mansion, installed today as the Susan Dwight Bliss Room in Bowdoin’s Hubbard Hall. From 1954–56, she also donated a major collection of almost one thousand prints to the Museum, including many neoclassical works and a small but notable group of Egyptian antiquities.
Susan Dwight Bliss
- Active
- 1954–1956
- Collecting
- Drawings, prints, and Egyptian antiquities