Norton Simon Museum

Before you go inside, stop and look at the walls. They are not stone or concrete. They are covered in small, curved ceramic tiles, glazed a deep earthy brown. When the California sun hits them at an angle, the surface catches the light. Up close, each tile is slightly different, like the skin of a pinecone. Traffic hums along Colorado Boulevard behind you, and in front of you stands one of the finest private art collections in the United States.

Those tiles came from Heath Ceramics, the studio founded by the potter Edith Heath in Sausalito, north of San Francisco. Tens of thousands of them wrap the building. Heath was known for tableware that ordinary families used every day. Here, the same craft clothes an entire museum. It is a small detail most visitors walk past, but it tells you something. This building was designed to feel handmade and warm, not cold and monumental.

The story of this place begins before Norton Simon. The building opened in 1969 as the home of the Pasadena Art Museum, an institution with roots in the early twentieth century. It focused on modern and contemporary art and showed work that was new and sometimes challenging. Its ambitions were large. Its finances were not. Within a few years, the museum struggled with debt and could not support its new home.

That is where Norton Simon enters the story. Simon was a California businessman who built a food and consumer goods empire, beginning with a small orange juice company and growing it into a major corporation. In midlife, he began collecting art, and he collected with the same intensity he brought to business. In the 1970s, he reached an agreement to take over the struggling museum. In return, his collection gained a permanent public home, and the museum took his name.

Simon was famous among dealers for patience and hard bargaining. Stories tell of negotiations that stretched on for months, even years, over a single painting. He studied condition, provenance, and price with great care. The result is a collection without much filler. Room after room, you see works chosen one by one, by a single demanding eye. Compared with many large museums, the galleries here feel calm and personal.

Inside, the European collection runs roughly from the Renaissance into the twentieth century. Look for Raphael's Madonna with the Book, a small, tender panel of the Virgin and Child. There are portraits by Rembrandt, including a self-portrait of the artist as a younger man. And there is a quiet masterpiece that surprises many visitors. It is a still life by the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán, showing lemons, oranges, and a single rose on a dark table.

Stand in front of that Zurbarán for a moment. Nothing happens in it. There is no story, no figure, no drama. Yet the fruit seems to glow against the black background, and the arrangement feels almost like an altar. Spanish painters of the seventeenth century often gave ordinary objects a sense of devotion. Many people who come here for the famous names leave remembering this painting instead.

Another pair of paintings carries a modern story. Adam and Eve, two tall panels by the German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder, hang side by side. For years they were at the centre of a long legal case. The heir of a Dutch art dealer argued that the panels had been taken unjustly during the Nazi era. American courts eventually ruled in the museum's favour. The paintings remain here, but the case is a reminder that every artwork has a journey behind it.

Now move toward the nineteenth century, where the collection becomes especially strong. Norton Simon loved the French Impressionists and the artists around them. You will find Manet, Renoir, Cézanne, and Van Gogh, including a portrait of the artist's mother. But the real treasure for many visitors is the work of Edgar Degas. The museum holds paintings, pastels, and bronze sculptures by him, among them a cast of his famous Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.

Degas made his small wax figures for himself, as studies of movement. Most were cast in bronze only after his death. Walk around them slowly. You can see dancers stretching, horses in motion, women bathing. The surfaces still carry the pressure of the artist's fingers. It is one of the closest ways to watch a great painter thinking with his hands.

The museum's older roots are still visible too. The Pasadena Art Museum had built a strong collection of early modern art, including works by the group of painters known as the Blue Four. These were Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, and Alexej von Jawlensky, artists championed in America by the dealer Galka Scheyer. Downstairs, a different world opens. Here are sculptures from South and Southeast Asia, many of them bronze and stone figures of Hindu and Buddhist deities, collected over many years.

In the late 1990s, the architect Frank Gehry redesigned the interior galleries. You may expect his famous curving metal forms, but there are none here. His work in this building is restrained, with soft light and simple walls that let the art lead. Outside, the sculpture garden was reshaped around a large pond, inspired by Claude Monet's garden at Giverny in France. Bronze figures by Rodin, Henry Moore, and others stand among the plants and water.

One more surprise waits at the front of the building. Every New Year's Day, the Rose Parade passes along Colorado Boulevard, right in front of the museum. Television viewers around the world see this brown tiled facade and the bronze figures outside it. Look for Rodin's sculptures near the entrance, including his famous seated thinker. Millions of people have seen this museum on screen without ever knowing its name.

As you leave, walk out into the garden one last time. Listen for the water, the birds, and the distant traffic beyond the trees. Look back at those curved tiles, warm in the light, each one shaped by hand. Inside, centuries of painting and sculpture rest in quiet rooms, gathered by one stubborn collector. And out here, Pasadena carries on, just a few steps away.