Smith College Museum of Art

In its early years a women's college in Northampton, Massachusetts began buying the art of living American painters, and one of its first purchases was a small canvas by Thomas Eakins, then a working Philadelphia artist far from famous. Smith College became one of the first institutions anywhere to collect Americans like Eakins, Albert Pinkham Ryder and George Inness while they were still active.

Today the Smith College Museum of Art holds more than 27,000 works, and its strength is nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting on both sides of the Atlantic. In a few rooms you can move from Corot and Courbet to a Degas, a Monet and a Seurat, then to the American pictures the museum backed before the wider market did.

It stays a teaching collection, built for students who study real works at close range, so its labels dwell as much on how a picture was made as on the name in the corner.