Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

This guide to the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. opens on a champagne-soaked party bank owner William Wilson Corcoran threw in his private picture gallery on Pennsylvania Avenue in February 1871, with President Grant among two thousand guests dancing under caged canaries. It traces the decade Corcoran spent building this Second Empire palace, interrupted when the Civil War turned it into an Army quartermaster's warehouse for seven years. Stand in the grand salon beneath its forty-foot ceiling, where that party once ran until dawn.