The Phillips Collection is America's oldest private museum of modern art, founded by Duncan Phillips in 1921 in his family's Georgian Revival mansion in Dupont Circle. It is a small museum by Smithsonian standards — around 5,000 works — but the collection is exceptional and the intimate domestic setting gives it a character that the Mall museums lack.
The centrepiece is Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881), one of the great Impressionist paintings, hung in the music room where Phillips originally installed it. The collection also has outstanding works by El Greco, Cézanne, van Gogh, Bonnard, Klee, and Rothko. A purpose-built wing houses temporary exhibitions. Admission is charged ($16 in recent years), though Thursdays from 5pm are free. Highly recommended for anyone who has museum fatigue from the Mall's neoclassical scale.