Exploring Richmond: The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

The VMFA is an educational institution that serves "to collect, preserve, exhibit, and interpret art, to encourage the study of the arts, and thus to enrich the lives of all," according to its site. Opened during the Great Depression on January 10, 1936, the VMFA was established as the state's flagship art museum and a symbol of Virginia's political and business leaders' belief in the value of art, with its foundation marking "the beginnings of an unusual partnership between private donors and state legislators."

One of its special exhibitions currently on display is Whistler to Cassatt: American Painters in France. This exhibit – which you can see snippets from throughout these photos – tells the story of "late 19th- and early 20th-century painters who left the United States as expatriates and returned to shape the course of American art." After training under the influence of Paris' École des Beaux-Arts and studying "old master" works at the Louvre, these American painters took traditional practices, modernism, and the growing French avant-garde philosophies and styles and blended them with American individualism, creating stunning works of art in the process.