DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum

Don’t mistake the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum for an antiques boutique; everything in this space is for seeing, not buying. The museum showcases American and British furniture, metals, ceramics, glass, paintings, prints, firearms and textiles from the 17th through the 19th century. There are 15 separate galleries, and the site has a reputation for showing off the “finer things” in life. In particular, the museum holds the largest collection of furniture from the American south and one of the largest collections of British ceramics anywhere outside of England.

To complement the collections, the museum educates the public through lectures and musical events. There is also a Portrait Gallery on the premises, allowing visitors to put faces with the luxury of the lifestyles demonstrated by the collections. The museum opened in 1985 in historic Williamsburg, Virginia, and was named after DeWitt Wallace, a co-founder ofReader’s Digest magazine.