Toledo Museum of Art

Toledo, Ohio called itself the Glass City, and by 1901 its factories were turning out bottles, windows, tableware and windshields for much of the country. Edward Drummond Libbey, who ran the Libbey Glass Company, and his wife Florence Scott Libbey founded the Toledo Museum of Art that year, and glass became its signature. In 1913 Libbey bought 53 Renaissance and Baroque glasses from a German estate, and the holdings grew into one of the finest surveys of glass anywhere.

That story has its own building. In 2006 the Tokyo firm SANAA wrapped a low pavilion in curving glass walls to hold the glass collection, with a working hot shop where artists blow glass in front of visitors. It sits across from the main museum, a neoclassical block opened in 1912 whose columned Peristyle still serves as a concert hall.

The paintings are strong too — El Greco, Rubens and Rembrandt among the old masters, and Thomas Cole's The Architect's Dream from 1840, in which a figure reclines atop a giant column above a fantasy landscape of Greek, Egyptian and Gothic buildings. General admission is free, as Libbey intended when he endowed the place.