Founded by Duncan Philips in 1921 the Phillips Collection (art museum), is located in the Dupoint Circle neighborhood of Washington. Phillips was the grandson of James Laughlin, a banker, and co-founder of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. Some of the artists represented at the Phillips Collection, are Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gustave Courbet, El Greco, Georges Braque, Paul Klee, Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, Augustus Vincent Tack, and Mark Rothko.

Opening in 1921 the Phillips Collection, is the first museum in America, of modern art. Featuring a renowned permanent collection of nearly 3,000 works by American and European impressionist and modern artists, the Phillips is internationally recognized for both its incomparable art and its intimate atmosphere. It is housed in founder Duncan Phillips’ 1897 Georgian Revival home and two similarly scaled additions in Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle neighborhood.

Duncan Phillips (1886–1966) played a seminal role in introducing America to modern art. Born in Pittsburgh—the grandson of James Laughlin, a banker and co-founder of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company — Phillips and his family moved to Washington, D.C. in 1895. He, along with his mother, established The Phillips Memorial Gallery after the sudden, untimely deaths of his father, Duncan Clinch Phillips (1838 – 1917), a Pittsburgh window glass millionaire, and brother, James Laughlin Phillips (May 30, 1884 – 1918).

Beginning with a small family collection of paintings, Phillips, a published art critic, expanded the collection dramatically. A specially built room over the north wing of the family home provided a public gallery space. With the collection exceeding 600 works and facing public demand, the Phillips family moved to a new home in 1930, turning the entire 21st Street residence into an art museum. From the beginning Phillips conceived of his museum as “a memorial…a beneficent force in the community where I live a joy-giving, life-enhancing influence, assisting people to see beautifully as true artists see.”

Duncan Phillips married painter Marjorie Acker in 1921. With her assistance and advice, Phillips developed his collection “as a museum of modern art and its sources,” believing strongly in the continuum of artists influencing their successors through the centuries. His focus on the continuous tradition of art was revolutionary at a time when America was largely critical of modernism, which was seen as a break with the past. Phillips collected works by masters such as El Greco, calling him the “first impassioned expressionist”; Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin because he was “the first modern painter”; Francisco Goya because he was “the stepping stone between the Old Masters and the Great Moderns like Cézanne”; and Edouard Manet, a “significant link in a chain which began with Goya and which led to Gauguin and Matisse.