Yale Center for British Art

An American who loved England built this. Paul Mellon, heir to a Pittsburgh banking fortune, spent decades buying British paintings, drawings, prints and rare books, and in 1966 he gave the whole collection to Yale, along with a building to hold it. The result is the largest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom.

It is strongest in the years Mellon loved, the 18th and early 19th centuries. Here are George Stubbs's cool, exact paintings of horses, the landscapes of Constable and Turner, and Gainsborough's portraits, tracing British life from Tudor times to the age of Queen Victoria.

The building matters as much as the pictures. It was the last work of the architect Louis Kahn, who died in 1974 before it opened in 1977, just across the street from an earlier Kahn building at the same university. Kahn lined the galleries with pale oak and steel and pulled daylight down through the roof, so the British skies in the paintings sit under a soft northern light indoors.