At 121 Barnard Street rises the Telfair Academy, a mansion the British architect William Jay built in 1818 and one of only a handful of his works left. Once the Telfair family's townhouse, it opened as a free art museum in 1886, making it one of the first ten art museums in America and the oldest public art museum in the South. Its first director, elected in 1883, was the artist Carl Ludwig Brandt, who wintered in Savannah.
Today it's one of three sites of the Telfair Museums.