The Phillips Collection

This guide to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. traces the grief behind an 1897 townhouse turned museum, after Duncan Phillips lost his father and then his brother to the 1918 flu epidemic. It follows how he and his wife Marjorie filled the rooms with paintings hung across centuries with no rope lines between them, including one room built around Mark Rothko himself. Walk these rooms as their living-room arrangement, unrope canvas beside canvas, still intends.