Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, or VMFA, is an art museum in Richmond, Virginia, in the United States, which opened in 1936. The museum is owned and operated by the Commonwealth of Virginia, while private donations, endowments, and funds are used for the support of specific programs and all acquisition of artwork, as well as additional general support. Admission itself is free. It is one of the first museums in the American South to be operated by state funds. It is also one of the largest art museums in North America. VMFA ranks as one of the top ten comprehensive art museums in the United States. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, together with the adjacent Virginia Historical Society, anchors the eponymous Museum District of Richmond. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has its origins in a 1919 donation of 50 paintings to the Commonwealth of Virginia by Judge and prominent Virginian John Barton Payne. Payne, in collaboration with Virginia Governor John Garland Pollard and the Federal Works Projects Administration, secured federal funding to augment state funding for the museum in 1932. Eventually, a site was chosen on Richmond's Boulevard. The site was toward the corner of a contiguous six-block tract of land which was then being used as an American Civil War veterans' home, with additional services for their wives and daughters. The main building was designed by Peebles and Ferguson Architects of Norfolk, and has been alternately described as Georgian Revival and English Renaissance, deliberately taking cues from Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren. Construction began in 1934. Two wings were originally planned, yet only the central portion was actually built. The museum opened on January 16, 1936. In 1947, the VMFA was given the Lillian Thomas Pratt Collection of some 150 jeweled objects by Peter Carl Faberge and other Russian workshops, including the largest public collection of Faberge eggs outside of Russia. The Museum also received in 1947 the T. Catesby Jones Collection of Modern Art. Further donations in the 1950s came from Adolph D. Williams and Wilkins C. Williams and from Arthur and Margaret Glasgow, in particular, the museum's oldest funds used for art acquisitions. Leslie Cheek Jr., whose father built Cheekwood, became director of the museum in 1948. His tenure was noted as having had a significant impact on the course of the institution; his obituary in the New York Times noted that he transformed from a small local gallery to a nationally known cultural center. Cheek's innovations included, in 1953, the world's first Artmobile, a mobile tractor-trailer that housed exhibits with the purpose of reaching rural areas; and in 1960, in order to be accessible to a broader public, the introduction of the first night hours at an art museum. Cheek cultivated a degree of theatrical showmanship in the exhibits during this time, such as velvet drapery for the installation of the Faberge collection, the tomb-like setting of the museum's Egyptian exhibit, and using music to set the mood in the galleries. It was also during his time as director that the museum's first addition was built in 1954 by Merrill C. Lee, Architects, of Richmond. The wing, funded in part by Paul Mellon, included a theater, with the intent of combining the performing arts and visual arts in a single facility. The Leslie Cheek Theater, the 500-seat proscenium theater constructed in 1955 within VMFA, known originally as the Virginia Museum Theater, has seen several transitions in its 60-year history. It was designed under the supervision of director Cheek, who was a Harvard/Yale-educated architect and who consulted with Yale Drama theater engineers Donald Oenslager and George Izenour to have a state-of-the-art facility. Cheek envisioned a central role for a theater arts division in the museum. The theater brought the arts of drama, acting, design, music, and dance alongside the static arts of the galleries. From its beginnings through the 1960s, the Virginia Museum Theater was the home for a VMFA sponsored volunteer or community theater company, under the direction of Robert Telford. The company presented subscription seasons of live drama to thousands annually, with talented local players and occasional guest professionals offering many popular musical comedies, spectacular dramas, and classics. VMT also served annual programs for patrons of the Virginia Music Society, Virginia Dance Society, and Virginia Film Society. Cheek retired from the museum in 1968 but served to advise the VMFA trustees on the appointment in 1969 of Keith Fowler as the new head of the museum's theater arts division and artistic director of VMT.