Beverley R. Robinson Collection

The Beverley R. Robinson Collection of the U.S. Naval Academy Museum is exceptional in scope and quality.  Its 6,000 prints reflect the naval history of Europe and the New World from 1514 through World War II.  High-quality woodcuts, etchings, line engravings, mezzotints, aquatints, and lithographs are represented.

These stunning works of art are the culmination of a lifetime of collecting by Mr. Beverley Randolph Robinson (1876-1951).  A graduate of Harvard College and Columbia Law School, Mr. Robinson was a distinguished New York attorney who scoured the galleries of the United States and Western Europe in search of prints that encapsulated the nature of naval warfare, principally in the age of fighting sail from the 1600s through the early 1800s.

In 1933, Mr. Robinson offered to loan his collected works to the U.S.
Naval Academy and indicated that he planned to bequeath them to the Academy's museum.  He began sending prints in 1938, to coincide with the opening of a new repository: Preble Hall, the museum's current site.  From that time until his death in 1951 he continued to add historically important prints to the collection.  In 1973, in accordance with Mr. Robinson's will, a substantial trust fund was established to perpetuate the care, maintenance and enlargement of the collection.

Proceeds from the Robinson fund permitted the publication of "Naval
Prints from the Beverley R. Robinson Collection, Volume I, 1514-1791", an illustrated catalog.  A total of 268 prints are reproduced and discussed in this volume, which is indexed by subject, ship, artist, and print publishers and sellers.  Four representative illustrations from Volume I are included here for the viewer to scroll through, in addition to other images from this unique collection.