Worcester Art Museum

The Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts liked to move first. In 1910 it became the first American museum to buy a Monet water-lily painting, and it followed a decade later with an early Gauguin, backing both painters while the wider public was still unsure of them.

In the 1930s it helped fund the excavation of ancient Antioch, and in return received a share of the finds, so a huge Roman floor mosaic of a lion-and-antelope hunt now greets visitors in the lobby. The rest of the collection runs from Egypt and Rome through European and American painting.

In 2013 the museum absorbed the arms and armour of the nearby Higgins Armory when that museum closed, giving Worcester one of the largest collections of armour in the Americas, knights and gauntlets now sharing a roof with the Monets.