The story
When Santa Barbara's grand Italianate post office was put up for sale in the late 1930s, a local painter named Colin Campbell Cooper wrote to the newspaper suggesting the town turn it into an art museum instead. That is what happened. The Chicago architect David Adler stripped back the facade and carved out galleries, and the museum opened in June 1941, months before the United States entered the war.
The building still shapes the visit. You arrive into Ludington Court, a skylit hall lined with Greek and Roman antiquities, before the collection opens out across the centuries and the globe. There is 19th-century French painting, a strong holding of Asian art, and photography in newer galleries added in a renovation finished in 2020.
Its best-known strength is Impressionism, and the museum holds the largest group of Monet paintings on the West Coast of the United States.
