Derby Museum and Art Gallery

Derby's museum holds the world's largest collection of its greatest painter, Joseph Wright of Derby, the 18th-century artist who made high drama out of the new age of science. His candlelit scenes, faces lit from within the surrounding dark, are the reason many people come, and the one they seek out is A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, a lesson on the solar system in which a lamp stands in for the sun. Its famous companion, the experiment with a bird in an air pump, hangs in the National Gallery in London.

The city's other trade is here too, in cases of Royal Crown Derby porcelain, painted and gilded to a shine. And in one room the museum keeps a reconstruction of the chamber where Bonnie Prince Charlie held his council of war in 1745, at Derby, the furthest south his Jacobite army ever marched before turning back.

Natural history and world art fill out a museum that opened its doors in 1879.