Taft Museum of Art
European paintings, Chinese porcelain, enamels, furniture, and Robert Duncanson’s landscape murals remain inside the 1820 house where the Tafts assembled and bequeathed them.
Artwork inspired by Frank Duveneck
The Taft is valuable because collection and domestic setting have not been separated. Paintings attributed to Rembrandt’s circle, Hals, Goya, Turner, and Whistler share rooms with Chinese porcelain, Limoges enamels, sculpture, furniture, and the architectural decisions of several prominent Cincinnati families. Eight landscape murals painted by Robert S. Duncanson for Nicholas Longworth in 1850–52 make the building itself one of the collection’s most important works.
Move room by room rather than masterpiece by masterpiece. Ask how scale, mantel placement, daylight, upholstery, ceramics, and sightlines shaped private viewing before the house became a museum. The collection is compact enough for close comparison, and the garden provides a useful pause before temporary exhibitions in the newer wing. Sundays and Mondays remove the general-admission charge, but the limited garage can still fill.
- Historic house
- Built about 1820
- Duncanson commission
- Eight landscape murals
- Free admission
- Sunday and Monday
Quick guide
- Move by room
- Let domestic placement guide the route instead of hunting only famous names.
- Look beyond frames
- Porcelain, enamel, furniture, and mural painting reveal how the collection was lived with.
How to read art in a furnished house
- Keep the room intact
- Consider pictures, porcelain, furniture, light, and architecture as one designed environment.
- Find all eight murals
- Follow Duncanson’s landscapes around their architectural setting rather than treating them as framed canvases.
- Compare scale
- Notice which objects were made for intimate handling and which command a formal sightline.
- Pause in the garden
- Reset before entering temporary galleries, where the museum’s pace and display logic change.
Good to know
The historic house is not just a container for the collection: Duncanson’s murals are painted into its architecture. Visitors who head directly to temporary exhibitions can miss the museum’s most site-specific work.
Notice these
- Duncanson foyer murals
- European paintings in furnished rooms
- Chinese porcelain collection