The Phillips is beloved in Washington, mostly because of its French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings by van Gogh, Bonnard, Cézanne, Picasso, Klee, and Renoir, whose Luncheon of the Boating Party is the most popular work on display. But as familiar and traditional as these paintings may seem now, the works and their artists were considered daring and avant-garde when Duncan Phillips opened his gallery in 1921. The Phillips Collection, indeed, was America’s first official museum of modern art.

Founder Phillips’s vision for “an intimate museum combined with an experiment station” is one that the museum continually renews, through programs like its Intersections series of contemporary art projects exploring links between old and new artistic traditions, and in exhibitions of provocative art, as well as new acquisitions from important voices in art today. The Wolfgang Laib Wax Room is a good example: It is the first beeswax chamber that artist Laib created for a specific museum. That’s right: beeswax. You smell it before you see it, kind of a musty, faintly honey-ish, cloying scent. The artwork is the size of a powder room, with a single light bulb dangling to illuminate walls and ceiling slathered thickly with wax that has the yellow hue flecked with bits of orangey brown. 

Today the museum’s nearly 6,000-work collection includes European masterpieces; treasures by American masters Dove, Homer, Hopper, Lawrence, and O’Keeffe; and works by living artists, such as Simone Leigh, Zilia Sánchez, Leonardo Drew, and Jennifer Wen Ma. The Phillips complex joins the original 1897 Georgian Revival mansion—initially both the Phillips family home and public art gallery—with a modern gallery annex that doubles the space. The elegant mansion’s graceful appointments—leaded- and stained-glass windows, elliptical stairway, oak-paneled Music Room, and tiled fireplaces—provide a lovely backdrop to the art and add to the reasons that locals love the Phillips.

Also consider gallery talks, the popular “Phillips after 5” socials every first Thursday, Sunday concerts in the Music Room (Oct–May), and other events. The museum also has a courtyard and a small gift shop.

Timed entry tickets are required to access the museum; you can reserve these online. Some features, like the museum shop, courtyard, and first-floor galleries of the Goh Annex and Sant Building may be free and open to the public without a ticket, but this depends on capacity that day.