America's National Gallery was born from paintings the Soviets quietly sold
In 1930 and 1931, Andrew Mellon's trust bought 21 paintings from the Hermitage as the Soviet Union sold off treasures, including Raphael's Alba Madonna. Those works helped seed the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which Congress accepted on Mellon's birthday in 1937. Admission has always been free.
Mellon, a Pittsburgh banker and Treasury Secretary from 1921 to 1932, started buying old master paintings and sculpture during the First World War. By the late 1920s he aimed to give the country a national gallery. In 1930, partly for tax reasons, he set up the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust to own the works. Its first big purchase came from the Hermitage in St Petersburg and also brought home a Venus by Titian and an Annunciation painted by Jan van Eyck.
The plan did not run smoothly. Mellon courted the Smithsonian and became a commissioner of its gallery in 1931, but a tax evasion trial focused on the trust and the Soviet purchases forced a rethink. In 1935 he announced a separate gallery for old masters. He made the formal offer in January 1937, and on 24 March an Act of Congress took the collection and building funds and approved a site on the National Mall. The museum is legally a Smithsonian bureau yet runs itself, and it kept the name National Gallery of Art while the older Smithsonian collection was renamed.
The chosen ground had a grim past. It once held the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station, where Charles Guiteau shot President James Garfield in 1881. The station came down in 1908, wartime buildings followed, and a planned memorial to George Washington never rose beyond its foundations. John Russell Pope designed the neoclassical West Building, then the largest marble structure anywhere. Neither Pope nor Mellon saw it finished: both died in late August 1937, two months into excavation. Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted the building on 17 March 1941.
Gifts from the Kress brothers, the Wideners, Chester Dale, Lessing Rosenwald, Paul Mellon and Ailsa Mellon Bruce built the collection, which now runs from the Middle Ages to the present and includes Alexander Calder's largest mobile. I. M. Pei's modernist East Building connects underground to Pope's, beside a 6.1-acre sculpture garden. In 2024 nearly 4 million people visited, second among American museums and the only free one in the top three.
Source: National Gallery of Art
