The facade remains intact thanks to a covered gallery built onto the back.
So how did a gallery built to educate the East End become a leading centre of contemporary art?
Fedora Filippi, a veteran archaeologist lately put in charge, pointed out where the roof gave way in what is actually an adjacent gallery built under Trajan, after Nero.
South of the river, Dulwich Picture Gallery in Dulwich College is England's oldest public art gallery, built for collections of 17th- and 18th-century masterpieces, including works by Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, Thomas Gainsborough, and Nicolas Poussin.
An ornate wrought-iron staircase then leads to the main floor, where the original gallery, built by John Nash, has been joined by two new galleries as well as education and lecture rooms.
While some union leaders have a vision limited to whether they can get a 3percentt or 3.5percentt wage increase, Mr. Foner insisted on having an art gallery built at 1199's headquarters at 310 West 43rd Street in Clinton.
Rice's 59 exhibits arrived at the vast gallery, built by philanthropic Victorian forebears of the Queen Mother, by a similar quirk to the RA's loss of a planned Egyptian exhibition, leaving a gap which Lord Llofferedber offered to fill.
Many paintings in the exhibition once hung in Turner's own grand picture gallery, built in imitation of the aristocratic ones he visited, at his home off Harley Street in London.
There have been just a handful of these unusual treasure houses in the history of New York, and the last to survive appears to be Henry Clay Frick's magnificent personal gallery, built in 1914 to his own taste, and opened to the public 75 years ago.
An exhibition coming to London in January will attempt to recreate the impact of the Spanish pavilion of 1937, a little gallery built as cheaply as possible at the Paris International Exposition by Spain's republican government at the height of the civil war.
