Sussex is the far northwest corner of New Jersey, a county of ridges and farmland where the state runs out and the Delaware begins. It has fewer art institutions than its crowded neighbours, and one of them is among the most important in the country.

Union County has quietly become one of the most interesting places to look at art in New Jersey. Rahway, a small city west of Staten Island, built an arts district around a restored 1928 movie palace and was named by USA Today the second best small-town arts scene in the country.

Morris County keeps its art in unusually good rooms. Morristown, where Washington's army wintered twice, has turned a 1937 movie palace into one of the busiest theatres in the state, and a hilltop mansion into a museum whose collection of mechanical musical instruments and automata is among the finest anywhere.

If New Jersey has a cultural capital, it is Essex. Newark holds the largest museum in the state and one of the largest performing arts centres in the country, and its Broad Street concert hall was the house where the New Jersey Symphony, the State Opera and the Ballet all once lived.

Hudson is the smallest county in New Jersey and the most crowded, a strip of waterfront facing Manhattan that has spent two centuries receiving the world. Jersey City is among the most ethnically diverse cities in America, and its art scene has grown to match: each year the Jersey City Art and Studio Tour opens the doors of some one hundred and fifty art spaces in a single weekend.

Passaic County was built around a waterfall. Alexander Hamilton looked at the seventy-seven foot drop of the Great Falls and imagined the young republic's first planned industrial city, and Paterson became exactly that, a place of silk mills and locomotive works whose immigrant workforce turned it into one of the most creatively restless cities in America.