A museum visit can be exhilarating, inspiring, but also, by turns, infuriating or just plain boring. This is particularly true when visiting one of the huge, all-encompassing institutions such as the Metropolitan or the Louvre. Smaller museums—such as the Frick or the Neue Galerie—demand less from us, intellectually and physically. The menu is more limited: the art on display often represents only one culture, one period, or even one medium. Indeed, who could deny the pleasure of a day spent at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel or the Clark Institute in Williamstown?

There are, however, museums created in yet another format: those that are of relatively limited size but are also encyclopedic in scope. Two of the best are about an hour’s train ride from Manhattan: the Princeton University Art Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery. Because they serve a primarily didactic purpose, their departments are equally as diverse and far-ranging as those of their much larger counterparts: from the Classical Antique to the Contemporary and from the African to the pre-Columbian, with plentiful detours in between. Didactic as well are the periodic special exhibitions that transform these smaller institutions into obligatory destinations for the dedicated scholar and connoisseur. One such was the memorable Olmec show at Princeton several years ago. “Time Will Tell: Ethics and Choices in Conservation,” recently on view at Yale, was mounted on a more modest scale, but was important nonetheless.

Organized by the gallery’s chief conservator Ian McClure and curators Laurence Kanter