The story
Behind a white Federal-style facade of 1820, one of the oldest houses in Cincinnati still standing, the Taft Museum keeps the collection Charles and Anna Taft gave to the public in 1927 along with the house itself.
The Tafts hung old masters at home the way a European family might, and those walls now hold a Rembrandt, a Frans Hals, Turner and Gainsborough, plus Chinese porcelains and enamels. It is a house museum, so the pictures still sit in domestic rooms rather than white galleries.
The surprise is in the entrance hall. Painted directly onto the walls in the early 1850s are large landscape murals by Robert Duncanson, an African American artist working in Cincinnati before the Civil War, hidden for years under later wallpaper and uncovered only when the house became a museum.
