Delaware Art Museum

The Delaware Art Museum began in 1912 as a memorial. The illustrator Howard Pyle, the Wilmington-born father of American illustration who taught N. C. Wyeth and a generation of others, had just died, and the city gathered his pictures to keep his work at home.

Its other great strength arrived by a stranger route. Samuel Bancroft, a Quaker textile mill owner in Wilmington, fell hard for the English Pre-Raphaelites in the 1880s and spent years buying their paintings and drawings, and his family gave the collection to the museum in 1935. The result is the finest group of Pre-Raphaelite art anywhere outside Britain, and the largest holding of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the United States, dreamy red-haired women and medieval scenes hanging improbably in a small Delaware city.