At 1600 21st Street NW, in Washington’s Dupont Circle neighborhood, The Phillips Collection feels less like a monumental national museum than a series of rooms opening into one another. That intimate scale is part of its identity. The museum began in the home of art collector Duncan Phillips and his wife, Marjorie Acker Phillips, and its galleries still bring visitors close to paintings rather than placing them in a distant parade of grand halls. The setting invites a slower kind of looking.
Duncan Phillips established the institution after the death of his father and brother, turning the family’s private collection into a public museum. It opened in 1921 as the Phillips Memorial Gallery, a name that reflected its origins as a memorial as well as an art institution. The museum describes itself as America’s first museum devoted to modern art. Its early purpose was not simply to gather famous pictures, but to make relationships between artists, periods and ways of seeing visible to the public.
