Philbrook Museum of Art: Villa in the Oil Patch

Waite Phillips was one of the oil men. He came to Tulsa from Iowa in nineteen ten, bought leases, struck oil, and became very rich very fast in the way that was possible in the Tulsa of the early nineteen hundreds. He then did what a certain kind of very rich man sometimes does with his wealth: he built an Italian Renaissance villa on twenty-three acres of formal gardens in a residential neighborhood near downtown, moved his family into it, and called it Villa Philbrook.

The house was finished in nineteen twenty-seven. It had seventy-two rooms. Phillips hired the same architect who designed several of Tulsa's downtown landmarks to create a building that was simultaneously a private home and a public statement. The gardens were designed in the Italian and English manner, with terraced lawns, fountains, and reflecting pools that made the interior of Tulsa look, briefly, like the hills above Florence.

In nineteen thirty-eight, Waite Phillips gave the house and its grounds to the city of Tulsa as an art museum. He had already given the Boy Scouts of America a ranch in New Mexico called Philmont, a transaction that ranks among the most significant charitable gifts in outdoor education history. The Tulsa gift was on a different scale but in the same spirit: wealth used to build something that would outlast its builder.

Philbrook Museum of Art opened in nineteen thirty-nine. Its collection has grown to more than eleven thousand works. The gardens, which have been restored over the years, attract visitors year-round. The oil money that built the city produced, here, something unexpectedly quiet.