Smithsonian American Art Museum

The oldest federal art collection in the country hangs in one of Washington's oldest public buildings, the Greek Revival Patent Office begun in the 1830s to display models of American inventions. During the Civil War its long halls became a hospital, and Walt Whitman came to tend the wounded among the glass cases. In 1865 Abraham Lincoln held his second inaugural ball in the same rooms.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum tells the story of American art from colonial portraits onward, through the enormous western landscapes of the Hudson River School and the folk and self-taught art the mainstream long ignored.

Its most unexpected object was made by a janitor. James Hampton, who cleaned buildings in Washington, spent 14 years secretly building a glittering religious throne out of old furniture wrapped in gold and silver foil, found in a rented garage after his death in 1964. It fills a room, and nobody fully knows what it means.