The Phillips Collection

Listen for a moment to the floorboards. In many rooms here, they creak softly underfoot, the way floors do in an old family house. That is exactly what this place was. You are not walking into a grand marble temple of art. You are walking into a home, with fireplaces, wood panelling, and windows that look out onto quiet Dupont Circle streets. The light falls in at a domestic angle, and the paintings hang at the height where a person would actually sit and look at them.

This is the Phillips Collection, and it is often described as America's first museum of modern art. It opened to the public in 1921, years before the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Its founder was Duncan Phillips, a collector from a wealthy Pittsburgh family who had settled in Washington. He did not set out to build an institution. He set out to share the paintings he loved, in the rooms where he lived, with anyone who wanted to come in.

The beginning of this museum comes from grief. Within a short span, at the end of the 1910s, Duncan Phillips lost both his father and his brother. His brother died during the influenza pandemic that swept the world after the First World War. Phillips decided to create a memorial gallery in their honour. Instead of a tomb or a statue, he chose a living thing — a collection of art that would keep growing and keep welcoming people.

It helps to know what the word modern meant to Phillips. He did not see a sharp wall between old masters and new painters. He liked to hang works from different centuries side by side, so that visitors could notice the conversations between them. A painting by El Greco might share a wall with something far more recent. His idea was simple. Great artists borrow from each other across time, and a good room lets you see that borrowing with your own eyes.

Phillips did not work alone. His wife, Marjorie Phillips, was a painter herself, and she shaped the collection beside him for decades. She later served as the museum's director. Her eye as a working artist mattered. She understood how paint sits on canvas, how colour behaves under changing light. As you walk, you may come across her own paintings in the galleries. They are a quiet reminder that this collection was built by people who painted, not only by people who bought.

The most famous painting here is Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party. Phillips bought it in the early 1920s, and it became the heart of the collection. It shows a group of friends on a restaurant balcony beside the Seine, outside Paris. There are straw hats, wine glasses, a striped awning, and a small dog held close by a young woman. Look at how loosely the fruit and glasses are painted. Up close, they are just quick touches of colour. Step back, and they become a meal.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. Phillips was deeply devoted to the French painter Pierre Bonnard, at a time when many critics did not take him seriously. The museum holds one of the largest groups of Bonnard paintings in the United States. Bonnard painted ordinary moments — a table, a window, a woman in a doorway — in warm, glowing colour. Phillips collected him with real loyalty, and those soft oranges and violets run like a thread through these rooms.

Now, find your way to the Rothko Room. It is small, almost a chapel, with a single bench and four large paintings by Mark Rothko. The light is kept low on purpose. Rothko himself cared a great deal about how his works were shown, and this room reflects that wish for closeness. Sit down if you can. Give it a few minutes. The blocks of colour seem to shift and soften as your eyes adjust. Many people describe feeling something they cannot quite name.

There is another small room that surprises almost everyone. It is the Wax Room by the German artist Wolfgang Laib. The walls are lined with beeswax, and a single bare bulb hangs from the ceiling. Before you see anything, you will probably smell it — warm, sweet, like honey and candles. The space is tiny, and only a few people can stand inside at once. It is less a room you look at than a room you breathe in.

The collection also holds part of Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series. Lawrence was an African American painter who told the story of the Great Migration, when millions of Black Americans moved from the rural South to cities in the North during the twentieth century. The series is shared between two museums. The Phillips holds the odd-numbered panels, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York holds the even-numbered ones. Look for the bold, flat shapes and the short captions Lawrence wrote himself.

Music has lived in this house too. The Music Room, with its dark wood panelling and tall ceiling, has hosted concerts for many decades. The tradition of Sunday concerts here goes back to the early 1940s. Even on a silent afternoon, the room feels made for sound. Notice the warmth of the wood, the way voices soften against it. Paintings hang here as well, so music and art share one space, just as Phillips intended for everything under this roof.

Over the years, the museum grew beyond the original family home. Newer wings were added beside the old house, with cleaner lines and more open galleries. Yet the feeling of intimacy has been protected. Rooms stay modest in size. You are rarely more than a few steps from a doorway or a window. Outside, the surrounding blocks of Dupont Circle keep that residential calm, with brick row houses, embassies, small cafés, and trees that shade the sidewalks.

Before you leave, stand still in whichever room you are in now. Notice the height of the ceiling, the grain of the floor, the window light on the frames. Think of a grieving son who decided that the best way to remember his family was to open his door to strangers. As you step back onto the street, listen to the quiet of these blocks. Somewhere behind you, someone is sitting on a bench, simply looking. That was always the point.