American Hustle | Worcester Art Museum — The Room Where a Rembrandt Is Explained Away

Irving Rosenfeld stands in front of a painting and tells Richie DiMaso that it is a forgery — and that the people lining up to see it do not care, because they have decided it is real. The scene was shot inside the Worcester Art Museum at 55 Salisbury Street, founded in 1898, and the production barely had to dress it.

The museum's Renaissance Court is floored with Antioch mosaics, hundreds of them, lifted from excavations between 1932 and 1939 and laid down here; the Worcester Hunt is underfoot. The surrounding galleries hang exactly the sort of dim, gold-framed European painting that makes the idea of a convincing fake feel obvious rather than clever. Since 2013 — the year the film opened — the museum has also held the John Woodman Higgins arms and armor collection, the second largest in the Americas.

Go on a weekday morning when the court is empty and the guards outnumber the visitors. The mosaic beneath your shoes is genuinely two thousand years old and genuinely taken from somewhere far away, which is a knottier fact than Rosenfeld's tidy speech about authenticity allows. His line lands harder when you are standing on it.