Yale Center for British Art

"That sounds lovely. But do we really have to do this over the phone?" Patrick McCaughey, director of the Yale Center for British Art (BAC), says. So the next day, I veer past the lobby's modern sculpture, enter McCaughey's office, and encounter a bow-tied British man who's ecstatic over the chance to rave about his museum. "We're very concerned about how we can make undergraduates aware that the BAC is here," he says. "Students don't have to give up the whole of their life. Just 10 minutes."

McCaughey reiterates his love for the world's finest collection of British art outside London. "What happens at Yale is people tend to live very pressured lives. We're part of the less-driven part of Yale, from which students can derive a deeply pleasurable sense of intellectual and cultural discovery." He thinks this visceral experience should ideally complement more structured ones. "We would like to have residential college nights. Tour, go backstage, meet the people."

That said, McCaughey proceeds to give me a tour. First, the permanent collection's paintings, recently reorganized thematically. "It's far more communicable," McCaughey explains. "You don't need to know a huge amount about art history." He gesticulates wildly, pointing out the clouds' texture in a John Constable study, the perfect anatomy of George Stubbs' horses. The whole time, we're walking through Louis Kahn's airy modernist building, "his masterwork." No paint anywhere, just linen, skylights, concrete, and wood. Tourists visit from Japan and Europe for the BAC's architecture alone.

We move to the archives of drawings, prints, photos, and rare books, all open to the public."There's hardly a museum in the world where you can see everything which is hidden," he says, and shows me how easy it is to inspect a Thomas Gainsborough sketch, or any of 20,000 others. "Nobody starting now could afford this collect-ion, even if you rescued [Bill] Gates from a terrible disaster at sea."

"So," I ask him, "how does the BAC compare to other U.S. museums?"

"In British art? We kill 'em!"

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