A museum expansion in the Midwest.

The Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati is highly regarded for its small but excellent collection of English and European paintings. Its holdings are installed in the Baum-Longworth-Taft House, which was built in 1820 for Martin Baum. Nicholas Longworth, the next owner, was noted for his abolitionist beliefs, and between the late 1840s and 1852 he engaged the black artist Robert Scott Duncanson to paint a series of landscape murals in the hallway. David Sinton purchased the house from Longworth, and it was his daughter, Anna, and her husband, Charles Phelps Taft, who bequeathed the house and collection of some seven hundred works to the people of Cincinnati in 1927. Following an extended renovation to convert the residence into a museum, the Taft Museum opened to the public in 1932.

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Remarkably, in little more than a decade the Tafts had assembled their collection from dealers in London, Paris, and New York. Two trips to New York City in April and October 1902 yielded works by Thomas Gainsborough, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, John Constable, and Constant Troyon as well as a selection of European decorative arts (with an emphasis on Limoges enamels) and Chinese porcelains. The latter has turned out to include some rare and important examples. By 1904, eighty-three of these porcelains were published in a catalogue written by John Getz. The Tafts' taste in art demonstrated a preference for landscapes and portraits, and quite early on it became clear that they were collecting with the intention of forming a museum.

Today the museum contains examples of Italian, French, Dutch, Flemish, English, and Spanish paintings executed between the early Renaissance and the early twentieth century. While the Tafts ...