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A Random Walk Through the Worcester Art Museum

The Worcester Art Museum (WAM) collections are vast with holdings from ancient cultures through modern and contemporary art, including many works rarely on view.

WAM's collection of nearly 38,000 objects contains superlative examples representing 51 centuries of creative spirit and cultural heritage, including some of the finest Roman mosaics in the U.S., world-renowned works of European and American art, and 3,500 Japanese prints documenting the entire history of printmaking in Japan. Since acquiring the Higgins Armory collection in 2013, WAM is now home to the second-largest collection of arms and armor in the Americas, next only to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. WAM was the first museum in the world to purchase a Monet painting of water lilies (1910) and a painting by Gauguin (1921). It was also one of the first American museums to exhibit photography as fine art (1904), as well as to install an entire work of architecture – a 12th-century Romanesque chapter house – as a permanent exhibit.

In this walkthrough you'll see a tiny faction of WAM's offerings touching on many but not all of the collections on display as well as a few items shown in the Concord Museum for a Paul Revere exhibition displayed concurrently with portions both at the Concord Museum and WAM in 2020.