Located on the National Mall, the National Gallery of Art was established in 1937. With funds for construction and a substantial art collection donated by Andrew W. Mellon, the Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, metals and decorative arts traces the development of Western Art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile ever created by Alexander Calder.
The Gallery's campus includes the neoclassical West Building designed by John Russell Pope (who also designed the Jefferson Memorial), which is linked underground to the modern East Building designed by I. M. Pei and the 6.1 acre Sculpture Garden.
Designed in the form of an elongated H, the West Building is centered on a domed Rotunda modeled on the interior of the Pantheon in Rome. It has an extensive collection of paintings and sculptures by European masters from the medieval period through the late 19th century. Highlights of the collection include works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, James McNeill Whistler, Francisco de Goya, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin and Paul Gauguin.
On exhibit was the collection of Chester and Maud Dale. Mr. Dale was a successful businessman who made his fortune on Wall Street in the bond market. He and his wife, herself a trained artist and critic, amassed one of the finest collections of late nineteenth and early twentieth century French paintings in North America, much of it bequeathed to the National Gallery of Art. Their favorite artists included many of the great masters like their neighbor, George Bellows, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Amedeo Modigliani, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, Edouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Auguste Renoir.
