Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

A good deal of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was dug out of the ground. From 1905 the museum ran a joint archaeological expedition with Harvard in Egypt and Sudan, and over nearly 40 years it brought back more than 40,000 objects — statues, jewellery, and whole tomb reliefs from the age of the pyramids. Its Old Kingdom Egyptian holdings are among the finest anywhere outside Cairo.

That is one department of many. The museum opened on 4 July 1876, the 100th anniversary of American independence, and grew into an encyclopedic collection of nearly half a million works. Its Asian galleries, built up by New Englanders like the doctor William Bigelow who lived in Japan, hold tens of thousands of Japanese prints, paintings and Buddhist sculptures. Its American rooms have John Singleton Copley's colonial portraits and Gilbert Stuart's unfinished portrait of George Washington, the face printed on the dollar bill.

The MFA also has the largest group of Monet paintings outside France, gathered early by Boston collectors who bought Impressionism while it was still fresh and cheap. One of them, a grainstack canvas from the series Monet painted in the fields near his home at Giverny, entered the museum in the 1890s, while the artist was still alive and working on the rest of the set.