Norton Simon Museum

The industrialist Norton Simon made his money in canned food and packaging, and from the 1950s he poured it into one of the finest private art collections ever put together in America. When a struggling modern-art museum in Pasadena ran out of money in the early 1970s, Simon took over its debts and its building, and in 1975 it reopened under his name.

For a museum its size the quality is startling. There is Raphael's small early 'Madonna and Child with Book', a Rembrandt portrait of a boy, Zurbaran and Rubens, a room of Degas including bronze dancers cast from the wax figures found in his studio, and van Gogh's portrait of his mother.

Simon collected in a second direction too. Over 2,000 years of sculpture from India and Southeast Asia fills the lower floor and the garden, its masterpiece a bronze Shiva as Lord of the Dance, ringed by flames, from southern India around the year 1000. Outside, the sculpture garden was replanted after Monet's water garden at Giverny, with the museum's Rodins set among the ponds.