Cincinnati Art Museum

When it opened in 1886 on a hilltop in Eden Park, boosters called the Cincinnati Art Museum the Art Palace of the West, and they meant it as a claim: a city better known for pork-packing and river trade would have a museum to rival the coasts. It had been founded five years earlier, in 1881, one of the first purpose-built art museums in the country.

The collection they filled it with is genuinely encyclopedic, roughly 6,000 years deep, from Egyptian and Nabataean stonework to Old Masters and a strong showing of American painting. Cincinnati was also a ceramics town, so the decorative arts run deep here, including Rookwood pottery made a few streets away.

Admission to the permanent collection is free, a policy the museum has kept for years.