Old Masters - New Visions from the Phillips Collection, Washington DC

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the United States was the home of many great private art collections.

Most of those who formed these collections, men like Andrew Mellon, Chester Dale and Samuel Kress, are now remembered for their bequests to larger public galleries. All were business moguls who purchased immortality of a sort through art.

Duncan Phillips belongs in a different category.

Initially with the support of his family, and later with the help of his wife Marjorie, Phillips established a collection that was, and still is, a personal statement of one man's interests and tastes