Fogg Museum

The Fogg is Harvard's oldest art museum, and it was built to teach. From its start in the 1890s it treated paintings as things students should study closely, and it trained generations of American curators and conservators; the country's first art-conservation laboratory grew up inside it.

Today the Fogg is the public face of the Harvard Art Museums, three collections gathered under one roof in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A 2014 rebuilding by the architect Renzo Piano set a glass roof over the old Italian-style courtyard and joined the three museums together. The holdings lean toward things a teacher can line up for comparison, Italian early Renaissance panels, a strong group of works by Ingres, and one of the deepest collections of works on paper in the country, kept in study rooms where students still handle them.