Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, opened in 1844 and has run continuously ever since, which makes it the oldest public art museum in the United States. Its founder, Daniel Wadsworth, built it as a castellated Gothic Revival pile, turrets and all, in the middle of a New England town.

Its liveliest chapter came in the 1930s under a young director, A. Everett Austin, who bought a Caravaggio and Old Masters while throwing the doors open to the new: he mounted the first Surrealist exhibition in America and, in 1934, hosted the world premiere of the Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts.

The collection today spans that Caravaggio, the Hudson River School landscapes, and modern art, including a Dalí bought new during the Austin years.