Works by Renoir, Van Gogh, Klee : Paintings From Phillips Collection on European Tour

Growing up in Washington in the 1920s, Laughlin Phillips had the paintings of Pierre Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne and many more for company.

“My father so much wanted other people to enjoy them that already in 1921, three years before I was born, he opened two rooms to the public,” Phillips recalled.

“That was how our house became the first museum of modern art in America.”

The Phillips Collection is still on public display in the home his parents owned on 21st Street near Dupont Circle. The collection got so big that they had to leave their artwork and move.

The outstanding assembly of mostly late 19th- and 20th-Century paintings was acquired by Duncan Phillips, who inherited wealth from banking and steel, and his wife Marjorie, who was a well-known landscape and still-life painter.

Their son, Laughlin, 63, a tall, quiet-spoken retired diplomat, is director of the collection, which now belongs to a foundation.

Seventy-six of the 2,000 paintings are at London’s Hayward Gallery through Aug. 14, and then go to Frankfurt and Madrid in the collection’s first European show after having exhibitions in Australia and Japan.

The highlight is Renoir’s large, colorful “The Luncheon of the Boating Party,” painted in 1881 after a good lunch at a river restaurant, with convivial chatter and pretty women.

“It’s Renoir’s masterpiece, the finest thing he ever did,” said exhibition organizer Catherine Lampert, a Washingtonian who now lives in London. She was about 2 years old when her father first took her to see the Phillips Collection.

The dazzling London show starts with El Greco of the 16th Century and ends with modern abstracts by Sean Scully, Frank Stella and John Walker.

There are Van Goghs, a “Blue Period” Pablo Picasso and works by Pierre Bonnard, Edward Hopper, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Amedeo Modigliani, Piet Mondrian and Winslow Homer.

The trustees still acquire pictures but focus mainly on conservation, improving the museum buildings and education, helped by exhibition fees.

Phillips said his father became interested in art at college.

“He wrote about the history of art and tried to interpret what artists say on their canvases. He gave that up later, I think because of the difficulty of talking about abstract art,” Phillips said.

His father would bring new paintings home to “test” them and would send them back if they decided against them, Phillips recalled. Those that were rejected were sent back to the dealers.

“My parents had remarkable taste and discernment, and my father didn’t follow any fashion and often paid just a few hundred dollars for a painting.”

Artists visited the family. Phillips remembers meeting the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, “a fierce-looking man with hair growing from his ears and huge eyebrows and steel glasses. He expanded my father’s taste.”

Duncan Phillips’ taste shifted and evolved, but he was particularly fond of one painting now at the London show--Honore Daumier’s “The Uprising,” showing a young man, arm outflung in a crowd.

It may have been inspired by the 1848 revolution in Paris. Phillips said his father “saw (the painting) as a symbol of man’s aspirations and discontent.”

“My father didn’t have great wealth, but he felt he had inherited a lot and was going to give it back through his museum.”

His father also painted for a while.

“He went into rages when he couldn’t get the color mix he could see in his mind. He put oil paints on top of each other and they turned to mud,” he recalled.

“Dad would take mother to baseball, to the Washington Senators--he watched and she sketched. One of her famous paintings is of a baseball game.”

Phillips said he likes the way the Hayward has blended American and French pictures.

“My father loved that,” he said. “He said there should be no national boundaries in art. Art was independent of nationality. Artists were kindred spirits who spoke to each other, not only across national boundaries but from century to century.”