The story
David Kreeger made his fortune in insurance and spent a good part of it on modern paintings, then commissioned a house that could hold both his family and his collection. The architect was Philip Johnson, and what he delivered in 1967, in a leafy part of Washington, is a run of travertine domes and glass, built to museum proportions but lived in as a home, with the art hung the way the Kreegers wanted it.
The collection stayed put when the house became a museum. It runs through Impressionism and after, with Monet, Renoir and Picasso, set beside African sculpture Kreeger collected in parallel.
Because it was designed as a private house, the scale is domestic and the rooms open onto a sculpture-dotted garden, so you see a Monet at the distance a collector once saw it from his own sofa.
