
The story
If you drive out to the edge of Indianapolis expecting a city art museum, what you find instead is a 152-acre estate. The galleries sit on grounds that once belonged to the Lilly family, the pharmaceutical dynasty, whose 22-room mansion, Oldfields, still stands among the gardens.
Inside, the collection springs a genuine surprise for a Midwestern city. It holds one of the richest groups of Neo-Impressionist paintings in North America, and more work by the English landscape painter J.M.W. Turner than you will find anywhere outside Britain. Georges Seurat, El Greco, and the sunlit dot-by-dot canvases of the Pointillists all hang here.
On the second floor stands the original of Robert Indiana's LOVE, the stacked red letters with the tilted O, made in 1970 by the Indiana-born artist and on show here since 1975. In 2017 the whole place took the name Newfields, folding the art museum, the historic house, and a hundred wooded acres of outdoor sculpture into one campus you walk rather than tour.
Collection
31 works
Félix Colón de LarriáteguiFrancisco Goya, 1794
Portrait of a ManTitian, 1509
The SeamstressÉdouard Vuillard, 1893
Bouquet in a VasePierre-Auguste Renoir, 1878
Cascade in a Rocky LandscapeGustave Courbet, 1872
East Cowes Castle, the Seat of J. Nash, Esq., the Regatta Beating to WindwardJ. M. W. Turner, 1828