The Brooklyn Museum looks like it could have been at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s a Beaux-Arts building from about that period – bright white, domed, columned in front, complete with a pedimental triangle filled with statuary  — designed by McKim, Mead and White, who also did one of the important buildings at the fair (the Agricultural Building), though not one that survived. Anyway, it looks like an art palace. And that’s what it is, coming in at 560,000 square feet and holding a collection of 1.5 million works.

In a lot of other places, it would be a top-dog art museum in town. As it is, the Brooklyn Museum competes for attention with the likes of the Met and MoMA. For casual visitors, that’s an advantage. The museum wasn’t nearly as crowded as those big boxes in Manhattan and, for that matter, not as expensive to get in. The art’s also just as interesting.

I’m not very methodical when it comes to large museums. Or small ones either. I go in, wander around, maybe consult a map, or recall what I’ve heard about the place, and look at whatever strikes me as worth looking at. That’s usually a lot of things. So I took a two-and-a-half-hour whack at the Brooklyn Museum on October 11.

Of course all you’ll get that way is a small sample. The museum has collections of American, European, African, Islamic, Pacific Island, Asian, contemporary, and decorative art; a large collection of Egyptian, Classical, and Near Eastern works; photography; the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art; The Steinberg Family Sculpture Garden; and special exhibits, such as the one when I visited on the art of the high-heel shoe (I missed it). I spent the bulk of my time in the European collection and the Egyptian rooms, though I passed through a fair number of other galleries.

It’s good to wander a sizable museum sometimes, just to be reminded that the human urge to create art is strong, and just about universal. Besides, even a small sample – if the museum is any good – offers a lot.

Such as two enormous, arresting canvasses by Vasily Vereshchagrin (1842-1904), “Resting Place of Prisoners” and “Road of the War Prisoners,” which hang on a third floor wall within sight of that floor’s elegant dome room, along with other Russian works. One depicts prisoners grouped together in the middle of a blizzard; the other, a road littered with the frozen dead.

The museum describes the latter this way: “In the winter of 1877, while working as a war correspondent, [Vereshchagrin] witnessed thousands of Turkish prisoners freezing to death while being marched to Russian war camps…The openly antiwar “The Road of the War Prisoners” was rejected for the czar’s collection, but Vereshchagin finally sold both canvases displayed here in 1891 to collectors in New York still reeling from the horrors of the American Civil War.”

Not far away, and less grim, was a fine portrait, “Old Trombola” by Boris Gregoriev (1886-1939). “In Old Trombola, Grigoriev heightens his sitter’s emotional state by emphasizing his intense gaze and exaggerating the sculptural qualities of his weathered hands and face,” the museum notes. “Grigoriev later wrote, ‘I have been watching and studying the Russian people for many years … and these paintings are the fruits of my observations.’ ”

Besides the Russians, the European collection had plenty else, such as a self-portrait by Gerrit Dou (1613-1675) that, according to the museum, has only recently been identified as genuinely his. In storage since 1945, it was returned to display in 2014.

Naturally, I spent a good chunk of the visit in the mostly Egyptian wing. Not my favorite part of Antiquity, but always worth a look. It’s billed as one of the largest collections of ancient Egyptian art in the U.S., and I believe it: room after room of statues and other sculptures, friezes, papyri, pots, jewelry, tools, and of course sarcophagi and mummies. My favorite name among the items I saw – so delightful I wrote it down – was the Cartonnage of Nespanetjerenpere, which besides having a good name, was a handsome work.

The museum’s been at Egyptology for more than a century now. “The Brooklyn Museum’s collection of ancient Egyptian art, one of the largest and finest in the United States, is renowned throughout the world,” it asserts. “The Museum began acquiring Egyptian antiquities at the beginning of the twentieth century, both through purchases—such as a group of Egyptian objects collected by Armand de Potter in the 1880s—and through archaeological excavation. [Back when the getting was good, in other words.] Between 1906 and 1908, the Museum sponsored an expedition that dug at very early sites in southern Egypt and brought back numerous objects of historical and artistic value.

“Between 1916 and 1947, the Brooklyn Museum acquired the important collection formed by the pioneer American Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour (1833–1896), which included many types of Egyptian antiquities, from fine works of statuary and relief to unique documents written on papyrus. In addition to his collection of objects, Wilbour’s heirs also donated his professional library to the Museum and established a financial endowment in his memory. The Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund made possible the establishment of both the Wilbour Library of Egyptology, one of the finest Egyptological libraries of its kind anywhere in the world, and a curatorial department for ancient Egyptian art.”

Wow, an Egyptological library right here in the USA. Egypt might not be my favorite, but how cool is that?