National Gallery of Art

The National Gallery of Art on the National Mall was a gift from one man that snowballed into a national collection. Andrew W. Mellon, banker and Treasury Secretary, began collecting old masters during the First World War; in 1930–31 his trust bought 21 paintings from the Hermitage during the Soviet sales, including Raphael's Alba Madonna, Titian's Venus with a Mirror and Jan van Eyck's Annunciation. In 1937 Congress accepted his collection and the money for a building, and the gallery opened in 1941. Unlike its neighbours on the Mall it is not part of the Smithsonian.

The campus has three parts, and each is a destination. The West Building by John Russell Pope, a neoclassical marble temple completed in 1941, holds European and American art from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. Its core is the Mellon purchases themselves, including the Alba Madonna and the van Eyck Annunciation, surrounded by the Kress, Widener and Chester Dale gifts of Italian, Dutch and French painting. I. M. Pei's modernist East Building, opened in 1978, holds modern and contemporary art; the collection includes the largest mobile Alexander Calder ever made. Between them runs an underground concourse lit by Leo Villareal's Multiverse, a tunnel of about 41,000 programmed LEDs.

The third part is the Sculpture Garden, opened in 1999, with works by artists including Roy Lichtenstein, Marc Chagall, David Smith and Sol LeWitt set around a fountain pool that becomes an ice rink in winter. The site has an older history too: the gallery stands where the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station once stood, the place where President James Garfield was shot in 1881.

Getting there

The gallery is on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets along Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C. The nearest Metro stations are Archives (Yellow and Green lines), Smithsonian (Blue, Orange and Silver) and Judiciary Square (Red). The nearest airport is Ronald Reagan Washington National (DCA), about 5 km away.