The Phillips Collection

Duncan Phillips opened this museum in his own Washington home in 1921, out of grief. He had lost his father and then his brother within a couple of years, and he turned to art as a way through it, resolving to build the first museum of modern art in the United States as a memorial to them both.

He hung it like a home, and it still feels like one, small rooms where a Bonnard sits near a Klee near a Rothko. Its most famous picture is Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party," a sunlit meal on a terrace above the Seine, crowded with the painter's own friends. In 1960 Phillips gave over a small room to four Mark Rothko canvases, dimly lit and meant for long, slow looking, one of the earliest spaces of its kind anywhere.