Visit the National Gallery This Weekend! Expand Your Horizons!

The National Gallery of Art was created in 1937  by a joint resolution of Congress, accepting the gift of financier and art collector Andrew W. Mellon. During the 1920s, Mr. Mellon began collecting with the intention of forming a public gallery of art in Washington. In 1937, the year of his death, he promised his collection to the United States.  On March 17, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted the museum, then housed in the newly built building (now the West Wing) and the collections on behalf of the people of the United States of America.

The paintings and works of sculpture given by Andrew Mellon have formed a nucleus of high quality around which the collections have grown. Mr. Mellon's gift to the country attracted gifts from other collectors  in the form of major donations of art from Samuel H. Kress, Rush H. Kress, Joseph Widener, Chester Dale, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, and Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch as well as individual gifts from hundreds of other donors.

The Gallery's East Building, designed by I.M.Pei and located on land set aside in the original Congressional resolution, was opened in 1978. It accommodates the Gallery's growing collections and expanded exhibition schedule and houses an advanced research center, administrative offices, library, and a collection of drawings and prints. That building was accepted for the nation on June 1, 1978, by President Jimmy Carter. Funds for construction were given by Paul Mellon and the late Ailsa Mellon Bruce, the son and daughter of the founder, and by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

On May 23, 1999 the Gallery opened an outdoor sculpture garden designed to offer year-round enjoyment to the public. Located in the 6.1-acre block adjacent to the West Building at 7th Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W., the garden provides an informal, yet elegant setting for works of modern and contemporary sculpture.

The National Gallery offers wonderful events in addition to its spectacular collections of art and temporary exhibitions.  It presents movies about art related topics, concerts, and lectures.  The restaurants and cafeterias at the National Gallery make a great place to grab lunch, a cup of coffee or brunch. 

This Sunday the National Gallery is hosting a lecture by Carl Brandon Strehlke, an expert on Italian art from 1300 to 1550 on Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), American art historian and connoisseur.  In 1895, Berenson published a long-awaited monograph on Renaissance painter Lorenzo Lotto; it was Berenson's first statement about the then relatively new science of connoisseurship. Later Berenson said that since writing that book, in which he had tried to regulate every knowable mood of an artist, he had almost never again "taken creative interest in the private, biological, and sociological lives of painters." This lecture explores why Berenson selected Lotto as an artist and as a subject for a study that he described as "an essay in constructive art criticism." 

Strehlke is currently overseeing a catalogue of the paintings collection of the Villa I Tatti, which was the Florentine residence of Bernard Berenson from 1900 to his death in 1959 and now is the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Explorations in its archives have yielded much new material about the early history of connoisseurship of Italian art from the 1890s to the first decades of the next century.

If you are moving to DC or want to know more about the city and surrounding areas, call Lise Howe, who knows Washington well, and loves sharing information with clients about the great things to do in her hometown!