Founded in 1876, the permanent collections of the Art Museum include more than 18,000 works of art, decorative art, and visual culture from around the world and through time. Particular strengths are ancient Mediterranean art and artifacts, paintings, sculpture, and decorative art from Europe and the United States, and modern and global contemporary art.
Categories of significant depth include photography, glass, ceramics, prints and drawings, and numismatics.
Notable are the 200 Japanese netsuke, and nearly 400 objects of European silver and Chinese snuff bottles.
The Art Museum's subsidiary, the Skinner Museum (see separate listing), is open May-October only. Housed in an historic building, the collection comprises nearly 7,000 objects, from minerals and fossils to artifacts from Oceanic cultures to glass and ceramics.