One thing you learn after meeting Johnny Windfield Thompson is that he owes his success as an artist to the women in his life. Now living and working in Chicago, he didn’t grow up intending to become a celebrated painter—but life nudged him there, and so did the women who believed in his talent from the start.

The Frick Collection—the World’s Favorite Museum—has reopened after a five-year renovation and expansion. Here visitors will see many of their favorite masterpieces lining the walls of the spectacular 5th Avenue Beaux-Arts mansion built by industrialist Henry Clay Frick during what Mark Twain would name The Gilded Age. They will also see new galleries in the family quarters on the mansion’s second floor, which is now open to the public for the first time in its more than 100-year history.