The estate’s gardens, designed and refined over the following decades, were integral to the family’s aesthetic vision. They drew from the European garden tradition — particularly the formal symmetry of Italian Renaissance landscapes and the romantic informality of English country gardens. The Cummers commissioned prominent landscape architects to shape their riverside property, ensuring that the views of the St. Johns River became part of the design.
This attention to natural beauty and artistic form foreshadowed the future museum’s character: an interplay between built structure and living landscape.
Ninah Cummer’s Passion for Art and Education
At the heart of the Cummer Museum’s origin is Ninah Cummer herself — a woman of refined intellect, taste, and civic-mindedness. Born in 1875, Ninah was educated and widely traveled, developing an appreciation for European art and culture.
She believed profoundly that art should be accessible and that education through beauty could uplift society. Over the years she and her husband collected more than sixty works of fine art, including pieces by Old Masters and modern American painters. Ninah viewed the collection not as private treasure but as a future public resource. Her diaries and letters reveal her conviction that the arts could build community and inspire moral development.
This sense of duty would later lead her to create a lasting legacy — a museum that would outlive her and enrich generations to come shutdown123