The department of Fine Arts at Yale is perhaps better equipped and more extensive than those of any other of our universities. It offers facilities for technical instruction in design, drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, etching, etc., as well as the study of the philosophy, history and criticism of art. In 1832 the Trumbull Gallery was built to contain the Trumbull collection, and was used till 1866, when Mr. A. R. Street, of the class of 1812 at Yale, gave the present building, and the School of Fine Arts was established. This building cost $220.000, and was designed by P. W. Wright, the architect of the National Academy of design in New York.

Mrs. Street endowed the new school with $81,500 and other gifts. The galleries now contain, besides the Trumbull collection, "The Jarves Collection of Italian Art," consisting of 122 pictures of great historic interest as illustrating the rise of Christian art in Western Europe from the 11th to the 17th centuries; a collection of contemporaneous art, numbering 100 paintings, a collection of 150 casts and marbles, representative of the various periods of Greek and Renaissance Art; a collection of old Dutch and Flemish paintings; a valuable collection of Chinesse porcelains nad bronzes, and a series of very fine and rare Belgian wood carvings of the 16th century.