North side of the Mall, Constitution Ave between Third and
Seventh sts NW; closest Metro stop is Archives-Navy Memorial.
Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 11am-6pm. Admission free. tel
202/737-4215,
Though the visually stunning National Gallery of Art ,
the nearest of the Mall museums to the Capitol, is not in fact a
government institution, it fully deserves its name. It owes its
prominence to the efforts of the industrialist Andrew Mellon
, who bought the building and donated most of the paintings. Many
were purchased from the cash-poor post-revolutionary government of
the USSR, where they had previously hung in the Hermitage in St
Petersburg. Mellon's family has continued as benefactors, raising
countless millions to build I.M. Pei's modernistic East Building in
1978.
The original Neoclassical gallery, designed by John Russell Pope
in 1941, is now called the West Building and holds the bulk
of the permanent collection. Parts of the collection are rotated or
sent out on tour, and some rooms may be closed for renovation. To
find a particular work, visit the interactive Micro Gallery
in the West Building (main floor, Mall entrance).
From the domed central rotunda, where you can pick up a floor
plan and gallery guide, a vaulted corridor runs the length of the
building. If you only have limited time, latch onto one of the
informative daily free tours - ask for a schedule at the
information desk. Galleries to the west on the main floor display
major works by Renaissance masters, arranged by nationality: half a
dozen Rembrandts fill the Dutch gallery, Van Eyck and Rubens
dominate the Flemish , and El Greco and Velázquez face off
in the Spanish , near eight progressively darker Goyas.
There's also the only Leonardo in the US, the 1474 Ginevra de'
Benci , painted in oil on wood, plus works by Botticelli,
Crivelli and Raphael - including the latter's celebrated Alba
Madonna (1520), one of Mellon's purchases from the Hermitage.
The other half of the West Building holds an exceptional collection
of nineteenth-century French paintings - Gauguin from
Pont-Aven to Tahiti, a couple of Van Goghs, some Monet studies of
Rouen Cathedral and water lilies, Cézanne still lifes and the like.
At either end of the building, the skylit, fountain-filled
Garden Courts make an ideal place to rest weary feet, while
Salvador Dalí's The Last Supper overlooks the escalators
down to the café.
The triangular East Building houses
twentieth-century paintings and sculpture. As in the
Guggenheim in New York, the attention-grabbing spatial choreography
of the architecture all but overpowers the works of art. You emerge
from under the oppressively low entrance into a central atrium,
from where an escalator, literally carved out of a 40ft granite
wall, climbs to the main galleries - which, squeezed into the
corners, can seem like an afterthought. Exhibitions change and go
on tour throughout the year, so the bulk of the permanent
collection is rarely on display. Nonetheless, you may catch
Picasso's haunting Family of Saltimbanques and the very blue
The Tragedy , as well as Giacometti bronzes and paintings,
plenty of Alexander Calder (whose huge red-and-black mobile is
usually in place), early Mirós, some Warhol soup cans and Chuck
Close's Fanny - a finger painting par excellence .
The underground concourse that links the two buildings contains a
good bookstore, an espresso bar and a large cafeteria - topped by
pyramidal skylights and bordered by a glassed-in waterfall.