Phillips Collection. The Phillips Collection is an art museum founded by Duncan Phillips and Marjorie Acker Phillips in 1921 as the Phillips Memorial Gallery located in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
Phillips was the grandson of James H. Laughlin, a banker and co-founder of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. Among the artists represented in the collection are Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gustave Courbet, El Greco, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Klee, Arthur Dove, Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, Jacob Lawrence, Augustus Vincent Tack, Georgia O'Keeffe, Karel Appel, Joan Miro, Mark Rothko and Berenice Abbott.
Duncan Phillips played a seminal role in introducing America to modern art. Born in Pittsburgh —the grandson of James H. 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 brother, James Laughlin Phillips, and of his father, Duncan Clinch Phillips, a Pittsburgh window glass millionaire and member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, owners of the dam whose failure resulted in the Johnstown Flood. Beginning with a small family collection of paintings, Phillips, a published art critic, expanded the collec