Campus Collections

Picturing Brown: The First Views of the College

The world outside Providence grew to know Brown University during its first hundred years through a succession of printed views of the campus.

Published in popular magazines and journals, these engravings and lithographs of Brown were the first pictorial representations of the campus. They served the school in two ways. First, they helped raise public awareness of the nascent college, presenting it to friends and interested students as an attractive and modern institution. Second, these images were visual evidence that this new school had achieved a standing among the old established colleges as an established and substantial place.