Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

The museum began in 1900 as the Public School Art League, five women led by Emma Richardson Cherry who hung reproductions of fine art in Houston classrooms. Renamed the Houston Art League in 1913, the group began to collect, and on April 12, 1924, the first unit of its neoclassical building by William Ward Watkin opened at South Main and Montrose. The Handbook of Texas calls it the oldest art museum in the state.

Gifts built the collection: twenty-five paintings from George and Belle Dickson in 1919, Annette Finnigan's lace and antiquities, the Straus Renaissance collection in 1944 and Kress Foundation works in 1961. In 1958 Cullinan Hall opened, a fan-shaped gallery of 10,000 square feet behind a glass curtain wall, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

The museum's second home is Bayou Bend, five miles away on Buffalo Bayou. Ima Hogg, daughter of Governor James Stephen Hogg, gave the museum her twenty-eight-room house, designed by John F. Staub in 1927, and her collection of American paintings and decorative arts in 1957. It opened to the public in 1966. Seeing both makes a long day.