Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Listen for a moment. Traffic hums along the boulevard behind you, and somewhere a fountain splashes onto stone. Ahead, pale walls rise from wide steps and clipped lawns. The air smells of cut grass and warm pavement. You are standing at the front door of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in the heart of Richmond's Museum District. Before we go inside, take a breath, and let the quiet of the grounds settle around you.

This museum opened in 1936, in the middle of the Great Depression. That timing surprises many visitors. Money was scarce across America, and banks had failed in towns all over the South. Yet Virginia chose to build a public art museum. It began as a state institution, and it still is. That means it belongs, in a very real sense, to the people of Virginia. Its galleries were meant for farmers and factory workers as much as for collectors.

Look at the building itself as you approach. The museum is not one structure but several, joined over many decades. The original wing carries the restrained, classical lines of the 1930s. Later additions stretch outward in different styles. The newest large wing, opened in 2010, uses glass and pale stone to pull daylight deep into the interior. Walk the length of the museum and you can read the changing tastes of almost a century in its walls.

Now, before you head indoors, turn toward the main entrance on Arthur Ashe Boulevard. There you will find a towering bronze horse and rider. The work is called Rumors of War, by the American artist Kehinde Wiley. It was installed here in 2019. At first glance it looks like a traditional equestrian statue. Then you notice the rider. He is a young Black man in a hooded sweatshirt, ripped jeans, and high-top sneakers, his hair in long locs.

That contrast is the whole point. For more than a century, nearby Monument Avenue held large bronze statues of Confederate leaders on horseback. Wiley borrowed their heroic pose and gave it to a figure those monuments never honoured. The sculpture asks a quiet question: who gets to be remembered in bronze? Many of the old Confederate statues have since been removed. This one still stands, and people often pause beneath it in silence, or take photographs with friends.

There is another layer to this ground, and most visitors walk past it. In the late nineteenth century, this land held a home for aging Confederate veterans. The museum later grew across that site. A small chapel from the old soldiers' home still stands on the grounds today. So within a short walk, you can see a relic of the Lost Cause and a direct artistic answer to it. Few places in America hold that conversation so close together.

Step inside, and the temperature drops. The noise of the street falls away. The collection here is wide, covering thousands of years and almost every continent. You will find ancient Egyptian objects, Roman marble, Asian ceramics and sculpture, African masks, and American paintings. You will also find a strong body of modern and contemporary work. It is easy to try to see everything. A better plan is to choose two or three galleries and give them real time.

If you remember one name today, make it Fabergé. The museum holds one of the largest collections of Fabergé objects outside Russia. Much of it came from a Richmond collector named Lillian Thomas Pratt. The highlight is a group of imperial Easter eggs, made for the Russian royal family before the revolution of 1917. Lean close to the glass. Look at the enamel, the gold, the tiny gemstones. Each egg hides a surprise, from a miniature portrait to a small mechanical model.

Here is a detail that often catches people off guard. These eggs were gifts between family members, a tsar to his wife or his mother at Easter. They were personal objects, not public treasures. After the revolution, many were sold off abroad, and some travelled a long way from Saint Petersburg. That is how a handful of them ended up in a museum in Virginia. Standing here, you are looking at private family gifts from a lost empire.

The museum also owes a great deal to Paul Mellon and his wife Rachel, known as Bunny. The couple had deep ties to Virginia. Over the years, they gave the museum many works, including French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, and a large group of British sporting art. That second category means paintings of horses, hunts, and races, with grassy English fields under wide grey skies. It suits Virginia, a state with its own long tradition of horse country.

Another gift reshaped the museum's twentieth century holdings. Sydney and Frances Lewis, Richmond collectors, gave a large collection of decorative arts. It includes Art Nouveau and Art Deco furniture, glass, and lamps. Art Nouveau, from around 1900, loves curling lines drawn from plants and flowers. Art Deco, from the 1920s and 1930s, prefers bold geometry and gleaming surfaces. Seeing them side by side helps you feel how quickly style changed in a single lifetime.

When your eyes grow tired, go back outside to the sculpture garden. Here the museum spreads across terraces, lawns, and water. Large modern sculptures stand among trees and paths. On warm days, families spread out on the grass, and students sketch on benches. Notice how the light shifts across bronze and stone as clouds pass overhead. This garden is part of the museum's original promise: art is not locked away, but placed where people already gather.

Before you leave, stand still for one more moment. Look back at the long front of the building, the old wing and the new glass joined together. Listen again to the fountain and the traffic on the boulevard. This museum was born in hard times and has kept changing ever since. As you walk away down the steps, notice the horse and rider one last time, holding his pose against the Richmond sky.