A história
Ralph Norton ran the Acme Steel Company in Chicago, and in the 1920s he started buying art. When he and his wife Elizabeth retired to Florida, they turned their collection into a public museum, opening the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach in 1941.
What they left is unusually broad for a small museum, strong in American and European painting but also in Chinese art, with carved jades and ancient bronze vessels that Norton loved. You can find French moderns and American works hung a few rooms from Buddhist sculpture.
In 2019 the museum reopened after a large expansion by the British architect Norman Foster, who added galleries and a sculpture garden, and kept a great banyan tree standing at the entrance, wrapping the new building around it.
