The story
In 1947 North Carolina did something no American state had done: its legislature voted public money, one million dollars, to buy old master paintings for a state art museum. The idea, pushed through in the years after the war, was that a mostly rural state should own great European art and show it to everyone for free.
That founding purchase, later joined by a major gift from the Kress Foundation, still anchors the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, with Botticelli, Rubens, a Raphael workshop panel and a strong run of American painting. The collection sits in a cool, light-filled building opened in 1983 and reworked since.
Around it spreads something newer, a museum park of more than 160 acres where large outdoor works and trails run right up to the galleries, so the art keeps going after you walk out the door.
