Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

In a domed gallery in Richmond sit five of the jeweled Easter eggs that the firm of Carl Fabergé made for the last Russian tsars, each opening to reveal a tiny surprise inside. They reached Virginia through Lillian Thomas Pratt, a Fredericksburg woman who bought Russian treasures on installment through the 1930s and left more than four hundred of them to the state museum in 1947. It is the largest public Fabergé collection outside Russia.

The museum around them is one of the country's larger encyclopedic collections, reaching from ancient art to strong American and modern holdings. It also keeps its doors open every day of the year with free general admission, an unusual thing for a museum of its size.