Baltimore Museum of Art

Start at the bottom of the steps. Feel the broad stone under your shoes, and look up at the row of tall columns that frames the entrance. On a quiet morning you can hear birds in the trees of Wyman Park, and students crossing toward the university next door. The air smells of cut grass and warm stone. This is the Baltimore Museum of Art. Before we go inside, take a moment here, because the building itself is the first object in the collection.

The museum was founded in 1914, but for its first years it had no permanent home. Its collection moved through borrowed spaces. That changed when the city commissioned a grand building on this hilltop, beside the Homewood campus of Johns Hopkins University. The building opened in 1929. Its architect was John Russell Pope, an American designer who loved the forms of ancient Greece and Rome. Later he would design the Jefferson Memorial and the West Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Look again at the facade. The portico, the columned porch in front of you, is modelled on a classical temple. Pope wanted visitors to feel that they were entering a serious place, almost a sacred one. Notice how the columns are evenly spaced, and how the pale stone holds the light. In the early morning the surface looks cool and grey. By late afternoon it turns warm and honey-coloured. The same building can feel formal at noon and gentle at dusk.

Near the entrance you may see a familiar bronze figure. A man sits on a rock, his chin resting on his hand, deep in thought. This is a cast of The Thinker, by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Rodin's original idea was a figure of the poet Dante, looking down on the world he imagined. Many casts exist around the world, so this one connects Baltimore to Paris and to other cities. Walk around it slowly. The surface is rough and full of marks from the sculptor's hands.

Now, inside. The story most visitors come for begins with two sisters, Claribel and Etta Cone. They were from a wealthy Baltimore family, and they never married. Instead, they travelled. In the early twentieth century they spent long periods in Paris. There they became friends with the writer Gertrude Stein, and through her circle they met young painters who were still poor and unknown. One of those painters was Henri Matisse.

Here is the first surprise. The Cone sisters did not buy Matisse because he was famous. They bought him when many critics laughed at his bright, flat colours. They kept buying for decades. Etta, in particular, built a close friendship with the artist. When Etta died in 1949, the collection came to this museum. Today the Cone Collection holds one of the largest groups of Matisse works anywhere in the world. A Baltimore apartment, filled with paintings, became the heart of a public museum.

Inside the Cone Wing, look for Blue Nude, a painting Matisse made in 1907. A woman lies on her side among palm leaves, her body outlined in strong blue lines. When it was first shown, it shocked many viewers. Today it feels calm, almost tender. Around it you will find drawings, prints, sculptures and paintings by Matisse, and also works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and others. Notice how often the sisters chose small, intimate pieces. They were collecting for their home, not for a palace.

The second surprise is much older, and it lies under your eyes. In the 1930s, this museum joined an archaeological dig at the ancient city of Antioch, in what is now southern Turkey. Antioch was a major city of the Roman world. The excavators found floors covered in mosaics, pictures made from thousands of small stones. Some of those mosaics came back to Baltimore. Today they are set into the museum's walls and spaces, so you can stand close to floors that people walked on nearly two thousand years ago.

Take your time with a mosaic. Lean in until the picture breaks into separate pieces of stone. Then step back until the image returns: a face, a fish, a pattern of leaves. Each piece was cut and placed by hand. The colours come from natural stone, so they are soft greens, reds, creams and blacks. Notice the small cracks and repairs. They show the long journey these floors made, from a Roman house to an American museum.

The museum is not only about the past. Its galleries also cover African art, Asian art, American paintings and furniture, and a large collection of prints and drawings. The contemporary wing brings the story into living memory, with work by artists such as Andy Warhol. Moving from room to room, you cross centuries and continents in a few steps. It is worth choosing two or three areas, rather than trying to see everything in one visit.

When you need air, go outside to the sculpture gardens. There are two of them, set on the slope beside the building, with lawns, trees and paths. Large modern sculptures stand among the plants, in metal, stone and bronze. Children run across the grass. People sit on benches and read. Here the art feels less formal. You can see a sculpture against the sky, then see it again from a new angle as you walk around it.

The setting matters, too. To one side lies the university, with its red-brick buildings. Around you is Charles Village, a neighbourhood of row houses, many of them painted in bright colours by their owners. The museum sits between campus, park and street. Students treat it as a place to study. Families treat it as a place to spend a Sunday. That mix of uses gives the building a relaxed, local feeling, even with its grand columns.

Before you leave, return to the top of the steps and turn around. Look out over the trees toward the city. Think of the two sisters, buying paintings that others ignored, and of the Roman families who once walked across those mosaic floors. All of it now rests here, on one green hill in Baltimore. As you walk down the stone steps, listen for the birds again, and notice how the light has changed on the columns since you arrived.