subject: Visiting The National Gallery Of Art [print this page] The National Gallery of Art has a prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution. The gallery was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the exhibit's original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The collection of the National Gallery of Art has constantly expanded and in 1978, the East Building was added to exhibit 20th century contemporary works by Alexander Calder, Henri Matisse, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. The East Building also houses the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, a large library, photographic archives, and administrative offices.
The National Gallery of Art offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts. A book store and children's shop offer a variety of gift items.
The exhibit holds approximately 2,100 works of Western sculpture. This selection includes many of the finest examples from the period 1300-1900.
It covers a wide range of materials and techniques and gives some idea of the variety of purposes that sculpture has traditionally served. The earliest works were devotional sculptures, made to stand on an altar or elsewhere in a church or chapel, to teach religious lessons, inspire faith, and invite divine favor for their donors.
Another major task for sculptors throughout history was the portrait bust, especially in demand during the Renaissance. The Gallery holds many fine examples of these busts as well as of Renaissance portrait medals, which were made as gifts for friends or political allies, often to commemorate important events.
Such medals might be worn or kept as desk or pocket objects. Statues of mythological subjects embellished the palaces and gardens of the powerful and now are displayed at the National Gallery.
Great civic monuments were produced by sculptors in the nineteenth century; a small bronze version of Rodin's Jean d'Aire is part of the museum's collection. The most revolutionary sculpture in the present group is the last, The Tub in wax by Degas, a highly personal and experimental study combining freely modeled naturalistic forms with geometric composition and incorporating everyday objects.
Other nineteenth-century British photographers represented in the Gallery's collection include Julia Margaret Cameron, David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, Roger Fenton, Francis Frith, and Peter Henry Emerson. The museum also has fine examples by nineteenth-century French photographers, including Gustave Le Gray, Charles Negre, Henri Le Secq, Edouard-Denis Baldus, and Charles Marville.
Many of these early photographers were trained as painters and brought highly refined aesthetic sensibilities to the new craft of photography. Among the greatest strengths of the collection are groups of photographs by several major twentieth-century American practitioners.
Modeled after the Stieglitz collection, each of these holdings includes works from throughout the photographer's career and illustrates all aspects of the artists' contributions. The National Gallery has an extensive collection of European furniture, tapestries, and ceramics from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as well as medieval church vessels.
In addition, the museum possesses a fine selection of eighteenth- century French furniture and a large group of Chinese porcelains, primarily from the Qing Dynasty of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Most of these objects were gifts of the Widener family of Philadelphia.
The Body exhibition features outstanding examples of anatomy-related material from the collection of rare books in the National Gallery of Art Library. On view are detailed treatises on human proportion and beauty by artists and scholars including Albrecht Durer and Juan de Arfe y Villafane.
There are also drawing and painting manuals by Leonardo, Jean Cousin, and others. These include chapters on proportion and anatomy; and adaptations of anatomical treatises tailored to the needs of working artists by Roger de Piles and Johann Daniel Preissler, among others.
