The Nelson-Atkins Museum’s American art collection reads like the nation’s biography — and it ends, fittingly, with Kansas City’s own Thomas Hart Benton, whose sweeping murals of American life remain among the museum’s most popular works.
The galleries begin with the Hudson River School’s luminous landscapes, including Thomas Cole’s golden “The Mill, Sunset,” move through Winslow Homer and the portraiture of the young republic, and arrive at the regionalist energy of Benton and the modernists who remade American painting in the 20th century.
An unexpected treasure hides here too: one of America’s finest collections of medieval armor gleams nearby, a favorite of every visiting kid — and knight at heart.
Like everything at the Nelson-Atkins, the American galleries are free. Come trace how a nation learned to paint itself, in the city that Benton called home.
