Where might you look to find William Hogarth's fine and recently restored portraits of William and Elizabeth James, or a foyer-filling Roman flooring-mosaic from Antioch that depicts a lively lion and antelope hunt? Or Otto Dix'southward painting of a meaning adult female, which has its own visitors book nearby, and then that people can tape their commonly extreme reactions to information technology? And which collection may have unearthed a newly identified Leonardo? If I gave you a inkling and said information technology was in the Boston area you might guess at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), but you'd be wrong. They all vest to the Worcester Art Museum, which is an hour's train ride abroad from the MFA, and whose exceptional encyclopaedic collection is being systematically rethought by Matthias Waschek, its director since 2011.

'Worcester Hunt Floor Mosaic', 6th century AD, Roman, excavation of Antioch and vicinity, Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts

'Worcester Chase Floor Mosaic', 6th century Advertizement, Roman, excavation of Antioch and vicinity. Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts

'We aren't function of Boston, only nosotros are,' says the fast-talking Waschek, with barely a trace of his native German emphasis. The Worcester Art Museum stands alone – it is a 90-minute bulldoze from the other major museum in the area, the Wadsworth Atheneum. But it will soon be tantalisingly shut to New York, when daily flights to Worcester begin this May. 'The big trouble we have is that the drove is outsizing its city,' Waschek says. The museum has 37,000 objects and an annual operating budget of $10 meg, just petty local financial support and no city funding. Waschek points to the Saint Louis Art Museum which receives threescore per cent of its operating budget from the urban center (and which he saw upward shut in his previous job as director of the St Louis-based Pulitzer Arts Foundation). 'Worcester is a manufacturing town whose industry has almost melted away. We must transform from a museum created for a stand up-alone metropolis fuelled by industrial merchants into one with a regional draw.' Key to achieving this is to lure involvement and philanthropy from Boston. 'Malcolm is leading this for united states,' Waschek says referring to Malcolm Rogers, the sometime manager of the MFA Boston, who is on Worcester's lath of trustees. Waschek is patently confident that the task will go washed.

Worcester's riches were gathered piecemeal throughout the 20th century. Opened in 1898 to be a cultural hub and inspiration for the burgeoning city, it benefited from a mix of funding, bequests, and remarkable directors. Its master founder, Stephen Salisbury III, gave the museum $3 million as well as his collection of American paintings. John Chandler Bancroft, a Bostonian with family unit roots in Worcester, donated more iii,000 Japanese prints in 1901. Philip J. Gentner, the museum's kickoff director (1909–17), shopped aggressively for the Goodspeed Drove of American prints, drawings and photographs, and for paintings by Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent. He blazed a trail for Worcester in acquiring British (Hogarth, Gainsborough) and gimmicky American (Homer, Sargent) artists; in 1910 Worcester was the commencement United states of america museum to buy a water lilies painting by Monet.

Lizzie B. Dewey (Mrs. Francis Henshaw Dewey II), 1890, John Singer Sargent, Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts

Lizzie B. Dewey (Mrs. Francis Henshaw Dewey Ii) (1890), John Singer Sargent Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts

Worcester enjoyed a string of other star arrivals. In 1927 it was the first U.s. museum to purchase a whole building – a 12th- century Romanesque affiliate firm from Le Bas-Nueil in France – and install it as a permanent showroom, an idea that spread through the country. Under Francis Henry Taylor, director from 1931–39 and again in 1955–57 (he spent the hiatus as manager of the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art), the museum supported the excavations in Antioch in the 1930s, as a outcome of which Worcester has one of the land's finest collections of Roman mosaics. In 1940, Mary Ellis, wife of local newspaper owner Theodore T. Ellis, donated the couple'southward spectacular collection of European and American paintings that spanned Carlo Crivelli to J.M.W. Turner. It included a pocket-size panel depicting A Miracle of Saint Donatus of Arezzo (c. 1479), then attributed to Lorenzo di Credi, and at present to be the focus of an exhibition suggesting it should be reattributed to Leonardo.

View of the Chapter House of the Benedictine Priory of Saint John at Le Bas-Nueil, 1150–90, France, Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts

View of the Chapter House of the Benedictine Priory of Saint John at Le Bas-Nueil, 1150–90, France. Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts

In 1981, James A. Welu, then primary curator, attributed a painting of St John the Baptist in a local church to Andrea del Sarto, a painter rarely represented in the US. Locals raised funds for the museum to buy it. Welu went on to exist director for 25 difficult years, from 1986–2011. 'Jim saved the museum twice,' Waschek says. He built on Worcester'due south education programme to create the showtime Art All-State Plan for high-school artists, which continues today, and the museum now has academic programmes at a dozen colleges and universities. Welu's near of import exhibition focused on the Dutch Golden Age master Judith Leyster, held at Worcester and the Frans Halsmuseum in Haarlem in 1993; Leyster'south A Game of Tric-Trac (c. 1631) had been donated to the museum a decade before.

More recently, nether Waschek's directorship, the arrival of the 2,000-slice John Woodman Higgins collection of Renaissance arms and armour, after the Higgins Arsenal Museum closed in 2013, has been transformative: Worcester now has the 2d most important collection of its kind in the US, after the Met. Well-nigh 150 pieces will go on view in 2019 in the repurposed library building; the rest will go into open storage. Some items are already scattered through the galleries, positioned to complement historic paintings – i of its 24 total suits of armour now stands next to Jan Brueghel the Elder's Venus at the Forge of Vulcan (1606–23). In 2017 the Henry Luce Foundation awarded one of its largest grants ever – $825,000 – to support the museum's American art collection in a three-year programme that includes cataloguing and displaying the Goodspeed Collection, and exhibiting stained drinking glass by John La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany, made for Boston'due south Mount Vernon Congregational Church building and non seen for xl years.

A Game of Tric-Trac (c. 1631), Judith Leyster. Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts

'We need to be a regional museum and to have a presence in Boston,' Waschek says. 'To attain this, nosotros need to be distinct from the MFA, not a mini-version of it. We have the Roman mosaics, we have the Higgins collection. To a higher place all, we take the intimacy of the galleries, then visitors can feel a narrative of cultures, moving hands from Roman to Renaissance, at that place's more than connection.' He also believes that if a smaller museum has a good drove, visitors recall it and are not overwhelmed.

Indeed, there is an appealing intimacy to the modest galleries of the museum's core neoclassical edifice, designed past Stephen C. Earle. It was here Waschek practical his imagination when he first arrived. 'In that location was no money in the kitty and thus no exhibition agenda,' he says. But he needed to make his marking. Commencement, he reopened the main entrance, merely as Rogers had done at the MFA Boston: 'Both of united states of america are Europeans, nosotros think about public spaces. The message is now clear, information technology's a welcome.' Then he looked inside the building. 'I had some information: visitors spend one infinitesimal in a gallery, that's three minutes in three galleries. The museum was a highway!' To slow people downward, Waschek was inspired by Dulwich Picture Gallery for wall colours, and by stately homes, specially in French republic, where the pictures are hung tilted forwards 'so they come into your space'. He also admired how Lambert Krahe, director of the Düsseldorf Academy in the tardily 18th century, bankrupt with the bizarre tradition of hanging pictures frame to frame and gave each painting infinite, preserving their identity and encouraging viewers to discuss and draw comparisons. Waschek took this approach in the European galleries, adding licks of paint, taking down wall labels, tilting pictures, and installing armchairs that face not the paintings, just the corners of the rooms. 'People stop and gaze, talk to each other, walk about all over a gallery, and sit down looking to left and right comparing pictures. Now they spend seven minutes in a gallery!' he says.

The museum's holdings of Asian fine art are specially rich and broad because Worcester was office of an intellectual and social circle spanning Newport, Boston, and Worcester that became obsessed by Asian fine art and civilisation at the turn of the 20th century. The Bancroft Collection was an outright gift (the first such souvenir of Japanese prints to a US public collection). Ananda Coomaraswamy, a historian of Indian art and the commencement curator of the Indian collection at the MFA Boston, from 1917 to 1947, would lecture at Worcester and propose on acquisitions. Today, Vivian Li, curator of Asian art, is rethinking and reinstalling the galleries to concenter the area's Indian, Vietnamese, and Cambodian communities (the last being the largest outside of Cambodia). She is putting objects in context by adding videos of temples in use, so visitors encounter how a ritual object in the collection is used in daily life. 'People are coming to see their own stories, which surprises them, they did non expect a museum to have familiar objects. Asian art is relevant today, a living continuity. Medieval is unlike, it is past history,' she says. Likewise as having a team of trained docents, Li is adding new art to her reinstallations. She has commissioned a jhoola (swing) from a design studio in Ahmedabad in India, which she hopes visitors apply to finish, to await and think. She's hoping to larn Indian artist Bharti Kheer's take on the traditional golu dolls made for the Hindu Navratri festival, 'looking at how we imbue meaning into objects of devotion'. David Roxburgh, professor of Islamic art history at Harvard is curating a testify later this year. 'Nosotros want to use the whole collection to open up upwards dialogue, to create an open zone to talk over all aspects of fine art and culture – codes of conduct, diverse ways of thinking, ideas beyond this life.'

Saint John the Baptist (c. 1517), Andrea del Sarto, Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts

Saint John the Baptist (c. 1517), Andrea del Sarto. Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts

Encouraging more visitors to the medieval galleries demanded, as Li suggests, a different approach. 'At Worcester, we look at what each subject needs in a gallery to communicate with our audiences,' says Jon Seydl, manager of curatorial diplomacy from 2014 until recently (he took upwardly the directorship of Krannert Art Museum in February this year). Over again, it's about slowing downwardly the visitor. 'Here, we experimented with how to deliver data. We emphasise looking and lingering with comfy seating, books to read, and we worked with our conservation squad to explain techniques such as enamelling.' Seydl contrasts how Worcester chose to display some acquisitions made in 2016 in other galleries. Beginning, he takes Otto Dix'south Pregnant Woman (1931) – a controversial conquering, which won through when i member of the Collections Committee remarked it was 'just ugly, why would nosotros desire to buy information technology?' and was trumped past another maxim that the Worcester population may non all empathize art, but they do all understand pregnancy. The painting dominates its pocket-sized gallery setting and challenges its viewer. A substantial wall panel sets information technology in its historical and cultural interwar context, and people's reactions in the well-used visitors volume record both deep thoughts and instant outrage. Seydl explains the different function of the Belgian creative person Philippe-Jacques van Bree's The Studio of the Flower Painter Van Daël at the Sorbonne (1816). 'It's his masterpiece,' Seydl says. 'It led the states to conserve an 18th-century floral still life we had in the basement, attributed to three Dutch and Flemish painters.' Both paintings play a cardinal role in Worcester's annual flower festival, which makes company numbers spike by 4,000, with many visitors coming for the outset time.

The museum is now in a very different position from when Waschek arrived. Temporary exhibitions are back. A recent show, 'Coming Away: Winslow Homer and England', was crowded every day. It included about 10 of the museum's own Homer works, among them The Gale (1883–93), which set a record for an American painting when Worcester bought it in 1916. And conservation work plays an increasingly vigorous role at the museum. At its belittling lab, established with assistance from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, staff are at the forefront of developing Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), which advances the ability to examine and document surface topographies of artworks. Information technology was RTI, together with other assay methods, that Worcester applied to its two Hogarth paintings, cheers to a grant from TEFAF, returning them to their original glory.

A Miracle of Saint Donatus of Arezzo, (c. 1479), attributed to Lorenzo di Credi and Leonardo da Vinci, Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts

A Miracle of Saint Donatus of Arezzo (c. 1479), attributed to Lorenzo di Credi and Leonardo da Vinci. Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts

The new exhibition, 'The Mystery of Worcester'south Leonardo' (10 March–3 June), is the effect of ii decades of study by chief conservator Rita Albertson. The highly focused, single-gallery testify brings together the museum's picayune A Miracle of Saint Donatus at Arezzo and the Louvre's Annunciation, both parts of the predella of an altarpiece fabricated for Pistoia'south cathedral around 1479–85. Extensive and collaborative research by Albertson, Laurence Kanter of Yale Academy Art Gallery, and Bruno Mottin of the C2RMF in Paris presents scientific and connoisseurial study to set up out the complexity of attribution and to propose new thoughts on the young Leonardo's activities and Renaissance workshop practices.

The show argues that both panels, commonly attributed to Lorenzo di Credi, were mainly painted by Leonardo – both painters worked in Verrocchio's workshop. Information technology will be controversial, of course. Simply Albertson has her inquiry gear up out, and Kanter's catalogue for his own Leonardo exhibition at Yale (29 June–seven October) will be published during the Worcester show. 'It had a 19th-century frame with drinking glass, and a key to open it,' Albertson explains. 'Nearly twenty years ago Larry (Laurence Kanter) comes walking through, takes a close look and says "Gee, I wonder if Leonardo could take done this?" We took information technology off the wall and downstairs. I've been working on it ever since.' Information technology'south been a marathon. For years no art historians would come and await, they recycled the Lorenzo di Credi theories. Now the Worcester panel has jumped from relative obscurity into the global Leonardo limelight.

'No one doubts its authenticity,' Albertson continues. 'It's the only altarpiece painting from Verrocchio's workshop that has matching documents. The two paintings conspicuously vest to each other physically – the forest, the size. But Verrocchio's studio all used egg tempera; our Worcester flick is oil. Leonardo was an early on adopter of oil, liked it, was good at it. Verrocchio never painted in oil.' 10-rays have revealed several easily including, Albertson believes, those of Lorenzo di Credi and Leonardo. Her intense study of information technology ways she knows information technology 'so well I know the things that are correct, the things that are incorrect, the depiction of light, a fold of yellow drapery, attending to an eyeball.' She points to new ideas – 'the organic trees in the mural', 'aureate highlights like van der Goes and Northern painters used' and 'modelling done in a new way that cannot be washed with egg tempera. Leonardo was obsessed with experimentation, Credi was not.' To this, Kanter adds that what has most amazed him nearly the Worcester panel is how art historians will 'read and read before they expect'.

The exhibition plays fully into Waschek'south ambition for Worcester: 'We leverage our small-scale size. The question is: how exercise we make our drove a better and ameliorate experience? How do nosotros encourage visitors to linger, wait and find?'

From the March upshot of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.